---
title: "Idle economy progression"
package: "@phaser-ae/incremental"
tier: Pro
version: 3.0.0-4
released: 2026-10-14
updated: 2026-10-19
description: "The rules of an idle tycoon game: business ladders and mine pipelines with enormous costs, timed cycles, managers, upgrades, prestige and capped catch-up."
url: https://phaser.io/packs/incremental
site: Phaser - https://phaser.io
---

# Idle economy progression

The economy behind an idle tycoon game: businesses that pay on a timer, a mine that is only as fast as its slowest
stage, managers who keep things running, and prestige that trades a run for a bonus on the next. The rules are pure data
and commands, so you choose how it all looks.

## What it does

There are two kinds of economy on one contract. In a business ladder, each business has its own unit price, payout and
cycle time and pays every cycle it completes, so the interesting choice is which one to buy next. In a mine, stages such
as a shaft, an elevator and a warehouse pass material along in series and only the final delivery is sold, so a slow
stage holds everything back; `bottleneck()` names it. Run manually, a business completes one cycle and stops, and a
manager keeps it restarting.

You drive it with commands: `buy` (one, a count or `'max'`), `start`, `manager`, `upgrade`, `advance` and `prestige`.
Each returns whether it worked and why not, and a refused command changes nothing. Buying ten costs the sum of ten
individually priced units on a geometric curve, ownership milestones double a producer's payout, an equipment upgrade
triples it, and each prestige point adds 25 per cent production in the next run.

Every money value is an enormous decimal, held as a JSON-safe string, so costs can climb past any floating-point limit
and saves stay readable. The economy never reads a clock: your game passes the seconds to advance, catch-up after a long
absence is capped and computed directly rather than frame by frame, and anything over the cap is reported and earns
nothing.

## Features

- **Business ladders** — one to sixteen timed businesses with prices, cycles, milestones and ownership gates.
- **Mine pipelines** — two to sixteen serial stages, with the bottleneck named and hints that target it.
- **Bulk buying** — geometric bulk prices, rounded up, and the most you can afford, found by binary search.
- **Managers, upgrades and milestones** — automation, a threefold equipment upgrade and twofold milestone bonuses.
- **Prestige** — investor points from the run's earnings, with `prestigeGain` to preview the reward before a reset.
- **Huge numbers** — forty significant digits far beyond ordinary number limits, with costs rounded up and earnings
  rounded down.
- **Capped catch-up** — one second to eight hours per advance, reported, never paid beyond the cap.
- **Seeded scenarios** — `generateIncremental` from a seed, a kind, a difficulty, a business count and a currency scale.
- **Hints, undo and saves** — a constructive `hint` with an explanation, undo and redo, snapshots and validated restore.
- **A solver** — `solveIncremental` replays legal commands to the objective, so a generated scenario is shown to be
  finishable.

## Good for

- **Idle business tycoons** in the style of AdVenture Capitalist, with a ladder of businesses and managers.
- **Idle mining games** in the style of Idle Miner Tycoon, where the shaft, elevator and warehouse must keep pace.
- **Short-session idle games** with a target that finishes a run while investment can go on.
- **A tycoon layer inside another game**, driven by your own clock and drawn by your own interface.
- **Balancing and testing**, with seeded scenarios, a solver and deterministic replays.

## Make it yours

Write your own `IncrementalDefinition`, with any producers, prices, growth rates, cycle times from a tenth of a second
to ten minutes, up to twenty milestones each, ownership gates, a target, a prestige base and a catch-up cap. Or generate
one: difficulty raises cost growth, ownership thresholds and run targets; the seed changes payback choices, cycle mixes,
milestone spacing and, in a mine, which stage starts as the bottleneck; and `magnitude` scales every amount by up to ten
to the power of a million.

Two different uses: a six-business ladder on hard difficulty with prices in the trillions and a prestige loop for
long-term play; and a three-stage mine on easy, where the whole game is spotting the slow stage and upgrading it.

## A quick look

A generated mine, started and advanced five seconds:

```ts
const definition = game.incremental.generateIncremental({ seed: 29, kind: 'mine', difficulty: 'medium', magnitude: 400 });
const economy = game.incremental.createIncremental(definition);
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'shaft' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'elevator' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'start', id: 'warehouse' });
economy.apply({ kind: 'advance', seconds: 5 });
const weakStage = economy.bottleneck();
```

## Works with

- `large-number` — required; the enormous decimal arithmetic under every price and balance.
- `save` — to keep a run's snapshot between visits.
- `ui` and `bars` — buttons, panels and progress bars for the producers.
- `jobs` — for workers who are assigned to jobs, which this pack does not model.

## Good to know

- Precision is forty significant digits, not every digit of the currency exact.
- A mine is a fluid pipeline: there is no worker travel, conveyor routing or crafting recipe.
- There are no worker needs, customers, general transport networks, ads or premium currencies.
- The hint is a sensible heuristic, not an optimal strategy, and a solved scenario is not a difficulty rating.
- A save is game state, not proof that a score was honestly earned.

---

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