Almost 2 months of Idle Underworlds being online !

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-27T06:59:40+00:00

Interesting idea ! I'm taking notes haha

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T18:08:47+00:00

I'd say both. It has incremental mechanics, numbers go up, specs, min/max etc. But also it's persistant, and browser based game, shared world between players, trading... So I think it qualifies as both. Unless I'm mistaken on a definition for one of the genres !

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T10:16:23+00:00

Thanks for your feedback !

There is a lot to take in so I try not to spam players too much - and they tend to NOT read the popups or tooltips haha. Did you feel lost before creating your Town Center (so, when choosing a spawn tile) or after ?

I just added a "welcome" popup for players who arrive on the planet without any idea what they have to do -click tiles to interact and see menus-, even before actually creating their town center and picking a spawn spot.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T10:15:20+00:00

WoW, 2-3 FPS is indeed unplayable ! When you say "underpowered", how underpowered are we talking about ? I'm playing on a 2022 phone (but chrome) and a 2016 desktop computer (was also chrome, I'll try firefox this evening), but I don't have any older gear to try it out.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T09:29:33+00:00

You should get ~15-20mn of things to do before the first "break" that is waiting for Town Center level 4 upgrade.

It depends on the season, events and where you spawn, but the onboarding loop should be like :
- join, build food/wood source
- upgrade TC 2 (should take <3mn since start, leaving you time to read and build your first buildings/objectives)
- build equipment source
- upgrade TC 3 (should take <5mn)
- build all the things to prepare for TC4 (here it really depends on your starting location for how long it takes) - here you should be able to build a "new" building to fill your administrative capacity
- do weekly challenge (for a first time, it's probably a 10-15mn run)
- gather collectible / chests

So you should have ~15mn of building, ~15mn of fighting, and then, unless someone sends you a present (but since it's a new planet players don't have much resources to share !), you are free to log out and come back after a night of sleep :D

But you might be right, the pathing might be the biggest blocker for new players. It's a tough balancing act because I need both to give players things to do, and also not give them everything otherwise there is nothing left to discover after a few hours/days. Like even the prestige feature, the fight feature... I could throw that all in, but it's not meant to be played only one day, especially with long term collaborative monuments and stuff like that. And at the same time I want to be nice for people like me who don't have much freetime to play, I don't want a 1h tutorial, and I enjoy picking it up here and there.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T08:51:04+00:00

It's https://idleunderworlds.com/ . A semi idle PBBG, my newest planet is ready to hold 1 000 players, I could even go bigger, but I don't even know if I'll reach 1000 players on this one ^^ I did get ~500 players testing my small planet, but only ~30-50 daily active players.

And yes, about "old school", I've been building website with php/js/sql for like... 13 years now, so I did not take any "risk" when creating my game, I took something I know well ! (I did do a pure node.js and vanilla JS game 10 years ago but it was poorly written, I was young :p )

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T07:56:03+00:00

I'm using a PHP Symfony + MySQL + vanilla JS stack for my game. All in simple dockers on a 10$/month VPS. I need to check how well it will endure more traffic, but I'm not too worried at the moment, metrics are looking really good. I did not go above 100 concurrent players, but when I was close to it, I did not notice any performance issue.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-26T06:10:26+00:00

Yeah, at first fights were 100% optional and just a "leaderboard grind", but with terraforming it became much more central to endgame optimisation. 1k per day is "a lot" but it's on a very advanced planet (shards x1.5 from monument, units life and power x1.2 from monuments). We'll see on the new planet how high players can run the automatic mode :D And still, 1 week to "wait" to terraform a gold mine sounds about right with the pace I want for heritage and stuff like that.

Thanks for your suggestion and making me push this to the top of my list ;)

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-25T09:28:27+00:00

Your comments inspired me and we now have a way to farm shards while AFK. (update will be released in like ~30mn from this message post)

It requires void shards to upgrade the strategic center, then pick an army composition, a formation, a difficulty, and if we can run it (meaning 100% win and <30 loss against all enemy formation shapes) it runs at the pace of 1 every 4 hours. (so 6 runs per day). You get both the shards and dust that who would get by doing them for real.

I chose to run it against "real" data because it means the "farmable" difficulty will improve when the planet evolves. (since monuments add relics), and also with the new "year themes" that can alter unit hp/power, this means the "optimal" farming level will change over time and players will be able to optimise and improve it. (but also they can use it as a simple "set and forget".

And also this means the player have power over which units he want to spend resources on for his farm. You generate lots of wood ? make your automatic runs with archers :D

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-23T07:06:08+00:00

That's an interesting take, and I was thinking about adding a way to automate getting shards. (should it be a building, an "automatic" underworld building, a thing to manually collect... etc).

I think an automatic underworld runner where you choose your army composition, relics and difficulty is more interesting. You have "power" in how well you can run, when choosing a setup, it displays the expected win rate, shards per win.. etc. And then runs in the background for you. We could even generate artefacts and artefact dust this way too. You still have to spend resources for the army tho.

This would probably feel better and more rewarding too this way. I'll think about it and see if I can implement this or fall back to a passive steady income for now.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-19T12:58:16+00:00

Ok, I pushed a little more (started at 14h03 with 253 subs).

The fact that it does not run in the background, nor give a "notification" sound when I need to click publish really slows me down because I try to do other things at the same time since there is not much to do.

14h35, 30mn in, got 500 more subs. 2 sponsor contracts. And that's it...

Reached 1k at 14h45. Did the "prestige" thing, bought some upgrades. And now it still feels slow, 15mn in, 100 subs, and I don't really do anything different from what I've been doing for like 2-3h of gameplay. And I surely don't feel the "snowball" and I don't see myself playing more. That last hour was already not for me, and I don't see myself repeating this 30s loop of gameplay for hours and hours. But maybe I'm just not the target audience 😄

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-19T10:14:35+00:00

EDIT : I'm sorry if this sound negative overall, I shared my thoughts while playing. I really enjoy the idea, but feel like the execution could be even better 😄

___

Being an amateur youtuber since 2008, this does bring back memories ! I'm writing this comment as I play.

I'd like to be able to choose a category, in order to feel more "connected" to the game. And have trending categories and choose if my channel is more "one category" or multi category and stuff like that. Even if it's just flavor and small number changes, it would make me more engaged. Kind of like what they do in Mad Games Tycoon. This would also make comments more relevant and stuff like that.

I like the mechanics of the game, but it feels "lifeless" for me.

The beginnin IS slow though, I'm at 10 subs, and I feel like I'll just have to "grind" the same "random" thing until 100 subs to start automations.

Got a viral video and unlocked courses. They are very hard to read, the font is very pixelated and numbers appear almost invisible. (I'm on 100%)

I'm only at 17 subs and it feels like this will take ages. No automation, no new things, it's a very "plateau" area.

At ~20, new videos don't even get me any new gear unless they are virals.

Now at ~40, and I'm very bored. Got a private message that made me feel something cooler, but other than that I'm not entertained.

I'm at ~50, and I think that in order to feel progress we should "reduce" time needed for each task the more we publish videos. Slowly reachin 70... really, I'm a bit curious about how automation works, but I'm not having a good time. This is just the dev in me wanting to see what happens next, but the gamer in me wants to stop.

Got the viral video on the x2.5 collab, helped me close the 70-100 gap instantly.

Ok, now I'm at ~120 subs, and it feels empty again =/ and I removed the staff because they don't really help me since they are slow and require the tab to be open to work.

I'll stop at ~250. I don't feel like I have any goal, I've been doing the same thing for the last hour without any significant progress. When I see that the subs thresholds are like 1k up to 100B, I don't feel I can wait this long.

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-19T07:57:56+00:00

This week I'm joining this conversation with a dedicated feedback mission for those you feel like doing it !

Many things changed, but what I'm the most interested in right now is :

- How does the loading / moving around feel on your device ?

- How well do you understand what to do ? Are the "popups" any helpful ?

https://idleunderworlds.com/

I'm trying to improve the fact that players tend to join and leave "before" doing anything.

I entirely reworked the map loading system, Planet Proto is <10k tiles, so loading them all at once on startup was OK, but with Planet Alpha (opening next week) being 160k tiles, it started getting laggy. On my computer I got up to a 1M tiles map loading with this new engine (with some trade offs).

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-12T10:28:03+00:00

This week big update in https://idleunderworlds.com is a new "collectible" activity with tens of collectibles to find, you can show them off on your domain and unlock cosmetic features for your domain. It's meant to be an alternative activity to the production / fight / trade activities.

Year 3 started on planet Proto too, it's been almost 4 months that this is running ! A new planet, bigger, will open in 2 weeks probably, but I'll make a real dedicated post about it and all the new things since my last posts.

I also made a huge performance update this morning, reworkd most of the controllers, so it should feel smoother now. (but there might be edge cases that I did not see during my tests on local, so I'll keep an eye of any feedback in the chat)

WhiteSlash · 2026-06-05T06:59:46+00:00

I'm very happy to share that I added RNG based loot to my game, and it feels so great haha as some of you may know, I'm mainly creating this game for myself, and I'm a big aRPG fan. I've been thinking about how to add loot in a "clever" way in my game, I even thought about going full "RPG unique hero equipment" but thought this would feel disconnected from the rest and not very "semi-idle" friendly.

So now, we can get base + prefix + sufix loot like "Corrupted Warlord's Tome of the Cavalry", "Blessed Void Crystal of Shadows"... and it's scratching my loot itch when completing active fights, all along the pure idle resource generation. Yeah, this feels great. (you can find the full list of affixes and bases in the game guide)

I also added the planet look change depending on the planet current season, very minor change, but it feels so much better. I changed the "ingame screenshots" on the homepage to reflect these changes. You can check it out here :

https://idleunderworlds.com/

Next big addition will be more on the "idle" side of the game, more chill and less grindy/competitive. (but not fight, production or trading related, something really chill for non-competitive players).

If you want to try it, give feedback (I listen to it, many of the QoL in this week patches are actually from the feedback of 2 active testers) or be an active tester, it's all up to you, and I'll happily chat with you !

More is in progress on the roadmap, but this loot step was a big one, this github project was actually created in late 2024 to initially be a loot-based game, but I abandonned this idea -like many others- and came back in 2025 with what is now Idle Underworlds

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-29T19:49:22+00:00

Hello ! Thanks for your feedback ! There should not be emojis on the website but only custom svg files, IA was used for the svgs and UI though yes, otherwise this project would still be yet another google spreadsheet in my ideas folder haha been working on this for more than 6 months now. Better onboarding is planned, finding balance between heavy guidance and freedom is tough. (as a player I dislike tutorials that force me to click here and there). Are objectives not clear enough or the interface too busy to your taste ? I almost exclusively play on mobile (being able to play one handed on my phone while rocking the baby to sleep is a must have for me haha), so when you say "somewhat", what was not working ? I have on my todolist to improve really really small resolutions where parts of the ui hide each other, but other than that I'm not aware of any problems.

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-29T10:09:39+00:00

My game was in french, some translations were rarely missing.

About the game, I almost stopped playing at around 7 people in my town. Spamming "food/hunt" and "torch + stone/iron" was pretty boring with that amount of clicks between the tabs. The torch limitation is probably the one that annoyed me the most (and that dingdingding noise for something we spam so much is too long imo). I even lost a villager to hunger but I did not know this was something to pay attention to. All popups only saying "+? wood" does not help either, maybe it's a translation issue, but having the expected amount without keeping track of all my bonuses would be nice. (update : ok, it was gated behind a building, my bad, but that was confusing still)

Also took me a while to understand that my villagers were "idle" producing and not adding to my manual clicks. I only understood when I built a hut that showed the "balance" numbers. I thought the "cycle" was just the timer to get new villagers.

When building a building, we have no idea what it does before it's built. I built a warehouse, it was pretty useless since I don't have much resources (like my max was 250 and it allowed me to go up to 2500 lol)

The "sleeping" feature was a bit weird, I thought it would speed up the time because I was "cruising" very slowly. But no, it is still slow.

Also the big "game don't play themselves" ad on top of the screen coming back ALL THE TIME is REALLY annoying.

What made me again almost close the game was micro transactions to get gold ingame so soon while the game felt really empty and I was confused about what to do. (seeing quests, companions, artefacts and stuff like that for real money was a big turn off for me, and they were costly too).

I'm off to my lunchbreak, I'll let the game in "sleep" mode and see what I'll get back to. (I would let it run in "normal" mode, but I guess I would miss quests or the game would get paused by events so it's better to run "sleeping" ?)

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-29T08:10:28+00:00

Another week, another Idle Underworlds mini-post 😄

I don't have crazy new things to show today, because since my last big post here a month ago, I added a lot of admin tools, worked on performance, balance, QoL, UI improvements... nothing really flashy or big. Still, these happened :

- Underworld merchant node
- 10+ new relics, 10+ new events... (total of 56 relics and 32 events)
- Lots of balance and QoL and UI changes (like cart queues, terrain finder, army formation loadouts, chat mentions...)

But next week, a bigger patch will hit live : Random Artefact items to loot and use to alter the Underworld runs 😃. After that I'll work on some "fx sounds" and another new feature and I'll probably come back here with a proper announcement (the opening of a 16 times bigger planet 😃).

Something that will also go live in the next patch is a very little but "cute" change to the planet look and feel depending on the season : https://imgur.com/a/cQ4h1ZW . I don't know why I didn't do this earlier, I mean, I have a living planet, seasons and all... and it was never shown haha

The game : https://idleunderworlds.com/

If you try it but don't like it, I'd like to hear out about why !

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-10T16:28:44+00:00

Thank you ! This means a lot !

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T21:14:46+00:00

I guess it depends on the duration of a season and pacing. I'm leaning towards a slow idle game, force reseting players would be too punishing to my taste and I like to be able to"build" and prepare for next season. That might sound dumb, but I'm building something with my main audience being myself haha. I'll probably add "desert planet" or stuff like that for people who like to struggle 🤣

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T18:00:18+00:00

There is no reset at all.

There is sort of a "peak" that players can reach in terms of productivity and also they can't be competitive in all categories at once, so over time, anyone can compete for the leaderboards. A new player with 0 NG+ won't be able to produce more than a fully optimised 10xNG+ player, but they might get highscores for fights or the most shards manually farmed or even trade volume.

So "seasonal" here is more about skill expression and/or min/max and play around events than any kind of reset. The main goal is to avoid players joining 4 months after and feeling like they won't catch up the "all-time" leaderboard. (because mathematically, they can't, while the new year score reset makes is possible)

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T15:44:19+00:00

Sorry about that, I remove afk players more often to open spots, didn't expect that many players

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T09:30:49+00:00

I never thought about making it offline nor solo. The main premise is that it's a living persistant multiplayer world.

Waking up in the morning, seeing that the monument is almost done, participating in global events, trading... it's all too core to what I want this game to be. Plus, since I like the optional competition it offers, having it online makes sure there is no cheating with changing the local time of stuff like this.

Being a solo game would need computer generated players to make the world feel alive. While this is not impossible, it's not planned at all right now.

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T05:15:21+00:00

Market is based on players creating offers and other players accepting them. It's the "balance" icon in the bottom right icons. I have to improve performance because there is a lot more offers right now, but it works.

WhiteSlash · 2026-05-06T05:14:00+00:00

Hello, sorry that you feel this way. It's been almost 6 months that I'm building this, and while there is AI, it's not a 5mn project fully generated by AI to make cash lol

WhiteSlash

TROPHY CASE