How to play

Welcome to the game! Great to see you here in this little corner of the intertubes. How are you? Good? Awful? Just a bit under the weather? Don't fret - we hope to entertain you, and if we can't we'll at least have given it a damn good try.

The Interface

When you first started the game, you should have come across a screen something like what you see below...

Your world probably won't be exactly the same as the one seen here, since they are randomly generated upon launch. Sometimes you'll have an overabundance of objects all over the place, and other times you'll not have as many. It's luck-of-the-draw for the most part, but you can still progress just as effectively with whatever you get.

Now, let's go through this in the order highlighted;

1. This is the entrance to your underground base. It's where the worker Humans will come from, and where they will all come back to when they have collected resources that need dropping off.
2. This is a Human. To those familiar with strategy games, these are your "units", and are manipulated by first selecting them with the Left Mouse Button then telling them where to move to with the Right Mouse Button.
3. This is the Heads-Up Display, or HUD. This shows you how many resources you have collected so far, and how many Humans you currently have populating the underground base.
4. These are all different material sources. They vary in size and shape slightly, and the bigger the source, the more of a given product they will provide. The sources for each available kind are shown and labelled below...

You can control the position of the game view using the W and S keys to move forward and backward, and the A and D keys to move left and right. An alternative way to control the view position is to move the cursor toward the edge of the screen in whichever direction you want to track; but this can be turned off within the options menu if desired. The view can also be rotated using the Arrow keys. You can fly the view upwards away from the world with the Space bar or by scrolling downward with the Mouse Wheel, and fly down toward the world using the X key or by scrolling upward.

Other things to note are that you can, if you choose to, put the game into full-screen mode by pressing the F4 key. The options menu is toggled open/closed by pressing either Enter key, which - while open - will temporarily bring in-game time to a standstill; from here you can turn the music on or off, as well as toggle "Cursor Tracking" as mentioned earlier. The "Back" button in the menu will simply close the menu, but again, you can also do this by pressing either Enter key.

From the options menu you can also Restart the game, which refreshes the page, so you could always do that the normal way instead, or you can "Give Up", which cleans out your population and leaves the world barren of Humans. Clicking the "?" button in the options menu will bring you to this help page - some browsers are clever enough to remember where you left off if you press their back button to return to the game, but that will depend upon the browser.

The Objectives

Your objectives are simple; collect as many of each resource as you can, so the humans can build a rocket and fly off to infest another world. You have to do so quickly though, as your population will eventually begin to decline, either due to environmental pollution - hey, that's what you get when you use up an entire world's natural resources - or lack of exercise. Plus, cutting down all the trees will give you a massive carbon footprint. Trees breathe, didn't you know?

Each part of the rocket that you must build will take a certain number of different resources; there are three separate parts to the rocket, and each must exist for the next to be buildable. In order, the parts require;

1. 400 units of Wood, 200 of Iron and 150 of Water
2. 500 units of Wood, 300 of Iron and 200 of Oil
3. 300 units of Wood, 450 of Iron, 500 of Oil and 200 of Water

Therefore, to build the entire rocket you will need to gather 1200 units of Wood, 950 of Iron, 350 of Water and 700 of Oil.

For every 100 humans in your population, you will have one worker/gatherer Human - the rest spend all day in the underground base, being either lazy little tykes or busy increasing your population, if you know what I mean. Each worker Human can carry 5 units of any given resource at a time.

The Gameplay

So, now that we've covered all of that, let's actually play the game.

Let's tell the first worker to go collect some of any resource; I'm telling this one to go get some oil, since they're nearest to it. The best tactic would really be to collect all of the resources needed for the first part of the rocket, but it's always good to be prepared. As explained earlier, first we need to select them with the Left Mouse Button - once they are selected, they'll turn from blue to red, clicking anywhere else with the Left Mouse Button that is not a Human will deselect the currently-selected Human - then tell them where to go to, by clicking somewhere in the world with the Right Mouse Button.

When a Human moves close enough to a resource, they'll walk into it and collect some of it. Once they have something collected, they'll automatically make their way back to the base entrance. Upon reaching it, they deposit the resources they have on them, and head back to the source they were last at to collect some more. They will repeat this cycle until they deplete the source, or until they are instructed to move elsewhere.

As the game progresses and population increases, more worker Humans will emerge from the base entrance, and you can send them on errands too. I've sent a couple of mine to get wood from the surrounding trees, and some to get iron from the deposits of it nearby.

You should make sure that as many of your workers as you can manage are given something to do, so that you're getting the maximum income possible and have the best chance of completing the rocket before the population growth stops. It's not particularly easy to do once you reach a population of several thousand and have a lot more workers, but try to leave as few as you can sitting around with nothing to do.

Now I need to find some water, since that's what I need for the first part of the rocket, and have none of; there's none of it near the base or within my view, so I'll need to look around with the W/A/S/D and Arrow Keys to see if I can spot some anywhere - I'll fly up a bit with the scroll wheel for a better view of the world, too.

I can see some water off in the distance, so I'll send some Humans to go and collect it - I'll send a couple, since it's a long way away and they'll take some time getting it back to the base. Since some of the others have finished gathering the resources they were tasked with collecting earlier, they're now free to do this instead, and if I don't give them something to do they might wander away, so off they go.

Now that I've got into the swing of things, I just need to make sure that the Humans are bringing in as many resources as possible, so as I said before, making sure that they're all doing something at any one time is key. Unlike real Humans, these ones don't need to rest - see how even when they're completely still before being given any tasks they're all bobbing up and down waiting for something to do? Exactly.

If I take another look back at the base, and when I have enough resources collected, I can see that now I have a piece of the rocket ready and built. Like I said at the start, the best tactic once you start progressing is to get as many of the Humans gathering the resources you need for the rocket part you have to build next, so now I need to focus on finding more Wood, more Iron and now also Oil. Once I do, and the other rocket parts are built, the Humans will all gather into the rocket and leave for the next planet.

That's all there is to it! Have fun, and we'll see you on another world. Actually scratch that line, it's way too cheesy...