COMMANDER'S GUIDE

🚀 YOUR FIRST HOUR

1. Tap the foundry. Every tap forges a burst of Alloy 🔩 — rapid taps chain into a combo worth up to ×5. Alloy builds ships.
2. Build Probe Drones on the FLEET tab. Ships give your empire fleet power, and fleet power is the key to everything.
3. Colonize Kepler Prime on the GALAXY tab. A planet joins your empire when your fleet power covers its garrison and you pay the energy cost. Colonies produce resources every second — even while the app is closed.
4. Collect the Imperial Levy. Once you hold a world, a 🏛️ IMPERIAL LEVY card sits at the top of the GALAXY tab. It taxes your empire for a block of Energy ⚡ and Research 🔬 every 15 minutes. Tapping only makes Alloy — the levy is how you actively push the other two.
5. Keep expanding. More colonies → more Alloy, Energy ⚡ and Research 🔬 → bigger ships → tougher planets. Develop each colony up to level 5 (+40% output per level) to squeeze the most from a sector.
6. Listen to NOVA. Your shipboard AI on the NOVA tab always knows the single best next move — her suggestion cards jump you straight to the right screen. New tabs unlock as your empire grows, so don't worry about the quiet menu early on.

◈ ASCENSION — THE BIG LOOP

Once you hold 3 colonies, the ASCEND tab unlocks. Ascending collapses your galaxy — colonies, ships, techs, and wonders all reset — and crystallizes your empire into Dark Matter ◈, the permanent currency.

• Every colony pays ◈ at collapse; higher development levels and deeper sectors pay much more.
• Spend ◈ on permanent upgrades: production multipliers, offline caps, head-start ship classes, the Singularity Beacon (×2 all production for the first hour of every run), and the Cabinet.
• Each run should reach farther than the last. Ascend when progress slows — clinging to a stalled galaxy is the classic idle-game mistake.
• Weekend Surge: ascensions pay double ◈ on Saturday and Sunday.
• Veterans can attempt Challenge ascensions — handicapped runs (no trade, half research, double ship costs…). Reach 20 colonies and ascend to earn a permanent +10% ◈ yield each.

🏛️ THE CABINET — AUTOMATION

Ministers are permanent ◈ hires who run entire tabs for you: the Minister of Industry buys the best-value ships, the Minister of Expansion colonizes and develops worlds, the Minister of War breaks blockades and invades rivals, and six more cover science, trade, state, treasury, espionage, and wonders — nine in all. A tenth, the Minister of the Census, collects the Imperial Levy for you. Once appointed, toggle them ON/OFF from the pill at the top of their tab. Appoint Industry and Science first — they carry every run's early game.

Each post is modelled on a Roman office, shown under its name: the Spymaster is Princeps Peregrinorum, who really did command Rome's intelligence service, and the Minister of the Census is the Censor — the magistrate who counted the empire and assessed its taxes.

⚔️ WAR, RIVALS & POLITICS

PIRATES

The WAR tab's arcade: fight pirate fleets for salvage bounties on a short cooldown, and break their blockades — a blockaded colony stops producing until the fleet clears it.

RIVAL EMPIRES

Three NPC empires — the Vex Hegemony, Krillix Swarm, and Hollow Court — hold half the planets in the outer sectors. Invading their worlds needs extra fleet power (about 1.6× the normal garrison), and they besiege your border colonies in return. Buy a truce when you need breathing room — but a truce blocks your invasions too, and invading leaves a grudge.

POLITICS

Court five alien species with gifts on the POLITICS tab. Favor tiers unlock production buffs, and Sworn allies pay regular tribute. Enact one Senate edict at a time (e.g. War Economy: +25% alloy, −15% research), and choose your empire's doctrine — Federation, Empire, or Alliance — once per run. Doctrines shape everything from truce prices to bank interest, and each rival empire follows one creed: kindred creeds keep quieter borders.

🗼 EVERYTHING ELSE

• Wonders — six mega-projects per run, built one at a time over 1–3 hours. Huge run-wide effects; you get a notification when one completes. Every wonder pays double — the Dyson Ring is +100% energy, the Warp Nexus halves colonization cost, and the Monument adds +50% to your ascension ◈. They are what turn the outer sectors from a wall into a climb.
• Trade — assign a freighter escort to a colony to open a trade lane worth +25% of its alloy/energy output.
• Bank — the First Bank of your empire pays compounding interest on deposits, and four charter-company stocks trade around the clock. Buy dips, sell spikes.
• Spies — build a network of up to 10 spy cells; each cell's operative headcount grows with your empire. Deploy the whole network on timed missions — riskier jobs pay better, and a botched one burns a cell. The cell can also be pointed at the three rival empires. Steal their next hull's schematics, or burn a blockade off one of your colonies without risking a single ship. Each government unlocks one signature operation of its own — the Empire authorises assassinations, the Federation foments defections, the Alliance runs economic warfare. Rivals run operations against you as well, and your only defence is the agents you keep at home — so every mission you launch leaves the door unwatched.
• Daily Supply Drop — claim roughly once a day; a 7-day streak escalates to ◈20.
• Weekly Anomaly — a galaxy-wide modifier that rotates every week, for every commander at once.
• Offline earnings — colonies keep producing while you're away (at a reduced rate, up to a cap you can extend with ◈). Away more than a day? Your return pays double.
• Achievements — 26 of them, awarded automatically, each paying ◈. Two are for breaking rival empires: one for your first, one for all three.
• Low Power mode — SETTINGS throttles the game's tick and silences animations and sound. Useful on a low battery; progress is unaffected.

⏩ TIME WARPS

A warp instantly pays out banked production — the alloy, energy and research your colonies, trade lanes and bank would have earned over that many hours. You can earn warp hours from the day-5 Daily Supply Drop, or buy them in the SHOP.

🌐 PLAYING IN A BROWSER

Novafall also runs free in a browser at itch.io — the full game, no account and no install. Two differences from the iOS app worth knowing before you sink hours into it:

• Your save lives in that browser. It does not follow you to another browser or device on its own, and clearing your browsing data for the site erases it. The iOS app backs up to your own iCloud instead. SETTINGS → SAVE DATA → TRANSFER CODE turns your whole empire into a block of text. Keep it somewhere safe — a note to yourself, an email — and paste it into LOAD TRANSFER CODE in any Novafall to pick that empire back up. It is the only backup the browser edition has, so take one before you clear anything.
• Purchases are iOS-only. Nothing in the web shop can be bought. Most of what it sells you can earn anyway — Dark Matter comes from ascending, warp hours from the daily supply drop — so those packs only skip the wait. The exception is the six Precursor Relics (and the Eternity Bundle that contains them): they are permanent boosts with no in-game source, so the browser edition cannot obtain them at all.

There are no ads and no crash reporting in the web edition. It does record anonymous gameplay analytics so we can see where new players get stuck — details in the Privacy Policy.