ANT CLASH

Build your underground colony during downtime, then raid rivals when you're ready to play actively. Your defenders protect you while offline. A well-designed nest is its own reward.

The rhythm: excavate and upgrade rooms, earn resources from missions, place defenders strategically, then pick a target on the world map and send in your raiding party. Resources fuel everything.

• 🌾 Carbs: common currency. Used for excavating tunnels (8/cell) and most build costs. Earned passively from workers and surface foraging missions.
• 🍖 Protein: premium resource. Required for all room upgrades, defenders, and research. Comes mainly from dispatch missions and longer expeditions.
• 💨 Pheromones: your raid budget. Base 60, +40 per barracks level. Regens 1/sec during a raid, capped at your barracks ceiling.
• 🍯 Royal Jelly: skip timers and speed up recovery. Bought in the Shop.

Tap any soil cell to excavate a tunnel (costs 8 Carbs). Long-press an empty tunnel cell to open the room palette and place a chamber. Room placement is permanent, so plan your layout before you build deep.

• Queen Chamber: required. Defines your colony's heart. Upgrade it to raise your worker cap.
• Nursery: speeds up passive worker hatching.
• Food Store: increases resource storage caps.
• Barracks: raises your pheromone raid budget.
• Excavation Den: boosts mission yields.
• Research Lab: unlock colony-wide passives (see Research Lab section).

Place defenders from the rooms bar. They auto-fight any raiders that enter their range while you're offline. Placement matters. Chokepoints slow raiders down before they reach your queen.

• Soldier Ant: fast melee, moderate HP. Best in tunnel intersections.
• Acid Spitter: ranged, slows units it hits. Great in long tunnels.
• Trap Jaw: high burst damage, long reload. One-hit threat at doorways.
• Silk Wall: low HP but blocks a cell, forcing raiders to spend time destroying it.
• Weaver Silk: roots raiders in place briefly. Combo with Acid Spitters.
• Queen: auto-spawned at your queen chamber center. 60 HP, 25 damage per hit. Dormant until raiders enter her room.

Pick a target on the world map, then deploy units at the surface entrance using your pheromone budget. You have 5 minutes, so use them well.

• Workers (5🧪): smash chambers, the primary looting unit.
• Scouts (3🧪): explore fog-of-war first, then join combat. Never loot until the whole nest is mapped.
• Majors (15🧪): heavy combat, high HP. Send them into defended rooms.

Loot is capped at 30% of the defender's current stockpile. Breach the queen chamber for maximum haul. You can retreat early to cut losses.

Upgrade your Research Lab to unlock colony-wide passives that stack with room upgrades. Each lab level also raises the maximum level of all rooms in your colony.

• Pheromone Mapping: +20% dispatch mission yield
• Tunnel Network: +25% idle foraging income
• Royal Hormones: +30% passive hatch rate

Choose your species on first login. Each unlocks unique raid units and a colony-wide passive. Higher species unlock as you gain XP.

• Lasius niger (T1): Worker Rush. First 10 deployed units cost 1🧪 less.
• Messor barbarus (T2): Major Anchor. Majors ignore the narrow-tunnel speed penalty.
• Camponotus (T3): Desert Endurance. All units regen 1 HP/sec during raids.
• Atta cephalotes (T4): Fungus Bomber. Slow area-denial unit, drops toxin clouds.
• Myrmecocystus (T5): Replete Support. Heals adjacent raiders mid-raid.
• Oecophylla smaragdina (T6): Silk Trapper. Roots defenders on every hit.

Royal Jelly lets you play at full pace. Available in the Shop tab.

• Instant Shield: lock your colony immediately after a heavy raid
• End Shield Early: free anytime from the recovery banner - no Royal Jelly needed
• Skip Build Timers: upgrade chambers on your schedule
• Research Boosts: accelerate Research Lab progress

Your colony runs passively when you're offline. Three things can happen:

• Starvation: workers eat 0.4 Carbs/min each. If the larder empties, up to 40% of your workforce can starve.
• Hazards: random events (floods, fungus, anteater attacks) cull 6-20% of workers every ~2 hours.
• Scout raids: rival scouts strip your surface stores of resources. Your nest layout is not touched and defenders don't engage surface theft.

A raid shield (from the Shop or after a real PvP raid) blocks scout raids for its duration.