AgeForge

Forge a civilization from nothing, all within your terminal.

         

AgeForge is an idle civilization game for the terminal: you forge an empire from nothing and take it through 22 ages of history, from a campfire to the Transcendent Age, one typed command at a time.

Version note: this README and the Compendium describe the game on master, version 4.0, which is coming soon. The latest release is 3.6, which still has some older systems (the speed command, the old city map).

Overview

A new game starts in the Primitive Age with 25 food and 50 wood. Gather, build, let workers staff your buildings, research technologies, send expeditions and campaigns, trade and make deals with other civilizations, and advance through the ages. The first run is slow on purpose: about a week of real time to the Modern Age and a full run's prestige. The game keeps playing while you are away (up to 24 hours, at half rate), and the build plan spends your income for you.

Features

• Resource Management: 24 resources across 22 ages with storage limits and production chains
• Building System: 302 buildings (251 lineage buildings + 21 storage + 22 Wonders + 4 cultural monuments + 4 standalone: the Nano Foundry and 3 diplomatic buildings) with scaling costs and construction queues
• Worker System: 11 domains (food, faith, military, trade, engineering, hacker, astronaut, lumber, masonry, metallurgy, energy); workers arrive on their own and follow your worker shares (workers share faith 40), with auto-recruit as housing and food allow
• Tech Tree: 203 technologies with prerequisites and permanent bonuses
• Military: 13 campaigns that cost soldiers and 3 scouting expeditions that cost resources; your garrison's Defense Rating blunts raids, war raids and catastrophe losses
• Epochs and Catastrophes: 7 epochs; from the Iron Era on a doom may be fated to strike at any moment of an era, and a harbinger comes first (Appease, Brace or Invite). When it strikes you Endure or Succumb, and Succumb's legacy bonuses carry across runs. In the Cosmic Era prestige itself is the Last Passage
• Build Plan: queue builds, techs, trades and an advance (up to 60 items); the game starts each one as the resources come in, and stock has no limit, so a price is the only thing that holds a build back
• The Map: your town drawn from your real buildings as a glyph world, changing with every age, with a mini map on the dashboard
• Random Events: 61 events (26 base + 35 epoch-exclusive) with streak balancing
• Milestones: 77 milestones across 6 chains with civilization titles and temporary speed boosts
• Age Progression: 22 ages from Primitive to Transcendent with exponential requirements; on each advance, buildings with a next rung in their line (a line never switches resource) can be upgraded to it (upgrade)
• Trade System: 21 trade routes, harbors and a black market
• Diplomacy: 11 civilizations with opinion tracking, gifts, alliances, rotating faction trade deals, boons and setbacks
• Prestige: Reset-and-grow system from the Medieval Age on. Every point ever earned is a lasting production bonus in every age. Plan Template, Roster and Old Friends carry over automatically after the first prestige. Era Mastery: every age a run completes runs faster on later runs, up to 4.2x
• Command-driven interface: everything is typed at one prompt, with completion as you type; panels (research, plan, workers, army, trade, factions, stats, wonders, logs, epoch, harbinger, map and more) open by name, and help lists every command
• Themes and accounts: 16 themes, dark and light, including colorblind-safe and high-contrast palettes; local accounts with backups and a recovery code
• Badges: 554 badges to earn on your account, kept in a badge case (badges): one for every age, wonder, lineage, civilization and harbinger, ladders that climb across all your runs, and one-off feats. Badges give points, titles and ten of the themes, and never change a run
• Compendium: full player documentation at ageforge.io/docs
• Save/Load: JSON save system with auto-save every 60s and offline progress; saves live in data/ next to the binary

Build & Run

go build -o ageforge .
./ageforge

# Check version
./ageforge --version

Or use make:

Command	What it does
make build	Compile the binary
make run	Build and launch
make test	Run all tests
make commit	Interactive commit helper (conventional commits)

How to Play

Getting Started

1. gather wood and gather food: top up by hand while production is small
2. build gathering_camp and build wood_camp: your first food and wood producers
3. build hut: a hut costs 14 wood and gives +10 housing; workers arrive on their own to staff your buildings, as housing and food allow
4. workers: see them, and steer the split with workers share faith 40
5. Bank the Sacred Grove, the Primitive Age's wonder, then advance

The first-age walkthrough goes step by step.

Commands

Everything is typed at the prompt. The full reference is the in-game help panel and the Commands page of the Compendium; the ones you will use most:

• build <building> [count|max], research <tech>, advance
• plan: the build plan (plan build, plan research, plan advance)
• workers share <domain> [percent|auto]: steer where your workers go
• wonder collect <resource|all> [amount|max]: bank resources into the current wonder
• trade, factions, army, map, stats: open a panel
• prestige: view prestige status, its lasting production bonus and carry-overs; it opens in the Medieval Age, and a run to the Modern Age pays far more
• save [name] / load [name], and quit to save and quit

Keys

• Tab or →: take the completion shown in dim text after the cursor; Tab again cycles through the others
• ↑ / ↓: step through command history
• PgUp / PgDn: scroll the main view (Option+↑ / Option+↓ on a Mac, which has no Page keys; Option+← / Option+→ are Home / End, and - and = zoom the Map)
• Esc: close the open panel; with no panel open, save, stop the game and return to the main menu

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full dev guide: commit workflow, release process, test patterns, project structure, adding content, and how the math works.

Active work is tracked on the Project Board. Bugs, features, balance and refactor work each have their own lane.

Commit style

Use make commit. It prompts you interactively and formats the message correctly:

What kind of change?
  1  feat      - new feature or content
  2  fix       - bug fix
  3  balance   - tuning costs, rates, numbers
  4  refactor  - cleanup, no behavior change
  5  chore     - build/tooling/deps
  6  docs      - docs/comments only

Short summary (≤72 chars): add iron smeltery building
Optional details (bullet then Enter, empty Enter when done):
  · costs 50 stone and 20 coal
  · produces iron at 0.5/s
  ·

Produces: feat: add iron smeltery building with the bullets as body. These subjects feed the release notes.