Cindervale Idle

Cindervale Idle is a fantasy idle RPG. You pick something to train, it runs, and it keeps running after you close the game. Come back an hour later or a week later and there is more in your satchel than when you left.

That is the whole loop. What sits on top of it is thirteen skills, twelve combat zones, ten guilds, a sea with twenty-six islands on it, four raids, and 735 items that all feed into each other.

It is one game made by one person. No ads, no energy timers, no shop.

Thirteen skills, and every one has its own materials, its own tools and its own pace.

[list]

[*][b]Gathering:[/b] Woodcutting, Mining, Fishing, Foraging, Farming

[*][b]Making:[/b] Smithing, Cooking, Alchemy, Firemaking, Jeweler, Crafting

[*][b]Neither:[/b] Agility, and Thieving

[/list]

Behind every skill is a [b]98-point passive tree[/b].

Tools go up in tiers, and better tools mean faster actions and more from each one. The top tiers need drops you can only get by fighting for them, which is the point where the two halves of the game stop being separate.

Twelve zones. The main line runs from the Rat Warrens down to the Demon Sanctum, with Thornwood Thicket, Frostfang Tundra and the Ashen Steppe off to the side. Each one has its own monsters, a boss at the end of it, and one rare spawn worth waiting for.

• Six combat stats, weapon tiers, shields and two-handers

• Auto-eat, so a long fight does not need watching

• A 37-node Combat Mastery tree on top of the skill trees

• Gems you drill into your gear, and 52 enchants to put on it

• Four raid gauntlets with no retreat. Clear every stage or leave with nothing

• Slayer bounties from three masters, and points to spend on perks or on skipping a task you do not want

Fifty-seven monsters, every one of them logged in the Monster Log with what it drops and how often.

Ten guilds. One for every skill. Join one and its board hands you work every day: kill these, gather that, bring back this many. Three jobs at a time, small to long, rerolled every morning, and one skip for the day the board asks for something absurd.

• Reputation earns titles. Six ranks per guild, and every one of them is a real bonus in that guild's own skill: speed, yield, gold, a chance at double output.

• Every guild has a shop. Tokens come off the board and buy things you cannot get any other way.

• They are not a side activity. A guild you have ranked up changes how the skill it belongs to plays, permanently.

The Nightmarket is the odd one out: it buys rather than sells. An honest shop pays about a third for something it can plainly see is not yours. The Nightmarket pays properly, and the further you climb its ranks the closer to full price it gets.

Build a ship, sign a crew, pick a heading and send it out. Voyages run on a real clock and finish whether the game is open or not.

Twenty-six islands across four seas. Seven hulls, from a raft up to a leviathan, with cannons and rudders and figureheads to bolt onto them. The chart fills in as you go, and there is a consort who will sail with you once you are far enough out.

Whatever you set running keeps running with the game closed. Skills bank XP and materials. Voyages come home. Fights carry on without you.

There is no energy bar and nothing to sit and wait for. Play for ten minutes or for three hours. The game is the same either way.

• One purchase. No microtransactions, no battle pass, no ads, nothing to buy twice.

• Every update free. Buy it once and that is the end of it.

• Windows, with Steam achievements and cloud saves. Three save slots.

• A free browser demo if you would rather try it before paying for it.

Cindervale is in Early Access and gets updated constantly. Still to come: magic and ranged combat, more zones, and more of everything already here. Feedback goes straight to me, and most of what ships each update started as something somebody said in the Discord.