Bloodrizer's Kittens Game (hosted here with kind permission) is a surprisingly deep incremental idle simulation with a deceptively adorable premise... you are a kitten in a catnip forest, and as you harvest and plant catnip, you slowly begin to build a village around yourself using other resources that become available. In the beginning, going is very, very slow... as more kittens come to your village you can assign them to various jobs that gain you more resources, but without upgrades they're not very efficient, and you'll still need to focus on making sure they have enough catnip. It's what they eat, after all, and as the seasons change, so does the rate at which catnip is generated, to the point where the winter days (each season takes 100 days) will need much more kittenpower to keep your crops from declining. As a result, Kittens Game initially moves significantly more slowly without careful prioritization of upgrades, and requires a lot more babysitting to make sure things are running smoothly... though eventually you'll soon find your kittens quite capable of thriving on their own. What's impressive is how much content there is once you get the ball rolling, with your civlization growing in some pretty neat ways, and more updates adding on to it as well. It's much closer to A Dark Room than, say, Candy Box! Though the game runs by itself in another tab, it will do so much more slowly, while putting it in its own window seems to work much better. Not everyone will have the patience or time for it to really start evolving and opening up, but Kittens Game is more complex than it initially seems, and more rewarding.
Thanks to Adam for sending this one in!
kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death kittens starved to death
omg what have I done
Nothing ruins your day quite like the phrase "kittens starved to death."
I narrowly managed to avoid that bit. It was close though.
Just after "swamsim" that was technically executed first class, we get this, that is blotchy all over the place. Albeit contentwise it seems to be more interesting instead.
For my taste the pace is somewhat too slow, I played a few hours and got 10 cats...
Also it needs an offline feature to recalculate stuff when going on again based on time. My green-IT heart kinda cries when I read people having the game running over night just because. If we're spending our energy ressources at least to have fun, but for having a game play with itself... meh.
Yeah, selling catnip fields shouldn't increase a negative amount of collection.
Also, it'd be nice to SEE what season it actually is.
Hi! The season is displayed in the upper right corner at all times... year, season, and day, with Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter 100 days each. :)
One thing to keep in mind is that this game doesn't progress so much in "omg so much of this resource", but "I now have steady income of a dozen different resources". While volumes do increase, its much shallower than in most games of this type. There is still a ton of progression; I feel like I have accomplished more than I have in idle games with 10 nonillion resources.
With a bit of thought, the "negative" catnip collection can be glitched, in winter I was suddenly losing nothing even with -90%
Speed of wood collection even with ALL kitties doing it, FAR TOO SLOW.
Sounds like you should probably invest in research and upgrades... you wouldn't expect a bunch of kittens to be able to chop down trees very efficiently with just their paws, would you? :)
Also, I'm not sure what you mean by glitching catnip. The negative percentages are indicative of how well your field produces catnip based on the season, so of course applying more kittens or upgrades to task can change that. You can even start accumulating more catnip during the cold season eventually. After all, if it weren't possible to halt the reduction of catnip, you'd never get anything done because everyone would constantly be starving when you ran out!
I just barely researched Agriculture in time to save everyone from starving. Once you have that, so long as you remember to flip everyone to Farmers in the winter, you'll survive.
Agree about wood collection being painfully slow. The price of Huts increases much faster than the rate of collection you get from having extra kittens. And it's quite a while before you unlock anything to help with that.
I'll throw in my agreement about the slow rate of development, as well as the disproportionately high demand hit from each extra kitten.
On a side note, it appears that selling huts does not remove the kittens you attracted by building them. This is probably a bug.
my main problem isn't nessecarily how slow it is, but more how much micromanagement it take to accomplish things. It doesn't want to just be left running in the background, many resources will barely have any gains if you don't manually transfer them occasionally. When those same resources require high volumes, it becomes a bit of a grind.
I, for one, like that the civilization has to be hand-held more than usual. Wood collection is certainly slow, but with a bit of perseverance - namely, to acquire a workshop - it need not fall behind the other resources. As previously noted, the satisfaction is not to be gained from exponentially skyrocketing numbers, but from the gradual improvements and the myriad research and development options.
Anyone's game not saving? even thought I click save and it says autosave, when I load the game back it starts back at the beginning. I have to export and import my save data if I want to continue...
Is it suppose to work like that or should it load where you left off at?
(Safari user)
@chaotick
wood hasn't been an issue, its manuscripts and compendiums that are very tedious right now, and the things to make them un-tedious are within sight but very far off, requiring lots of those resources.
Hmm. I'm not experiencing any problems right now, but I could see myself ending up in that situation pretty soon. If you need a lot of manuscripts later on, I see there's a printing press for that, but for that you need gears, for which you need a buttload of steel, for which you need a buttload of coal, for which you need some other upgrades, for which you need a buttload of iron, which even if I tried wouldn't fit in the warehouses at present...
Concern noted. Though for now I remain optimistic.
I liked the concept of the game
but I have two major problems which forced me to quit playing it for now:
1- You have to scroll right and left very often because of the size of the window.
2- When idle, the game doesn't change
Is there a reason the window size of the game has increased since yesterday? I could actually SEE the time of yr without scrolling.
Rethink the 3 column layout please?
Also, if a hut holds two kittens, WHY does a house only hold 1?
Surely it should hold at least DOUBLE the amount of a hut, considering the amount of resources it needs?
was going to ask about the house/hut combo, was confusing me.
And double on that 'ninja' size patch, the text seems bigger... and is too big for the window size now. Can't resize because it just makes the 'game' bigger.
Why do kittens disappear from the village menu? I had bought the
Upgrade that allows you to see the names of the individual kittens, but their names change... are they dying and being replaced? I was trying to train them to be good at their given occupations, but now Plato Claw is being the council leader... An impressive feat for a dead kitten. Not sure if glitch, or evil sadistic cruel twist to game. I just wanted kitties and cookie clicker. Not kitties and death...
@chaotick
the steamworks can get them, but it requires a blueprint, which requires 10 compendiums, which require 50 manuscripts, which require 25 parchment, which requires 175 furs. Without upgrades, that is 2187500 furs. Furs which can only be aquired through hunting trips, manually dispatched. Granted, workshops drastically improve that, but you still have to send out all of the hunting trips individually. You can't even stockpile furs for when you can craft them more effectivel since you burn through them constantly.
Oooh, that's the issue! Then I think you are missing something: you have a decent chance at getting free blueprints when you make trades. I've gotten five so far, very little effort required.
oh! thats good to know. I haven't been making many trades since the resource tradeoffs didn't seem that useful.
I found I can open the game in a new tab so I can see basically everything at once. Just right click on the game and click open frame in new tab.
Also You will need to have the game in a window by itself if you want it to run in the background.
Overall fun, but when you start needing xxK supplies, it gets almost too time consuming to get enough resources to buy the buildings to allow you to get that many supplies.
Thanks so much for the tip on opening the frame in a new tab/window! The three-way scrolling was really getting to me, and now I can see everrrrything.
Gave the game a revisit.
And I must admit I hacked it to speed it up. With Chrome open the javascript console, see the message "starting js timer ..." Make a breakpoint there, reload the page, and before it executes the line "var timer = setInterval(..." write in console "this.rate=99999999999999999;" step over the line, and set the rate back to normal with "this.rate=5".
This doesn't change any game mechanics itself, but speed to game up to the maximum the CPU can handle. Its aprox 50-100 times as fast for me. The game hasn't any flexible tick calculation over time, so this as far it can get. For the game a tick is a tick no matter how much time passed. And this is the reason why it fails when it goes in a background tab, would they do ticks based on getTime() it wouldn't matter.
Anyway, with this setting the game turns out to be quite fun! Yes there is a lot of content to discover what lies beyond the first simple looking game. However, in the end there doesn't seem to be any goal either but the usual growth wihtout end, had enough of it already? At least it took me now 2 days to get there. Yes it is micromanagemend, and with speeding it up it feel like a normal game that keeps you controlling things rather than an idle game.
Eventually the space program was a let down, I made missions to planet after planet, without gaining anything ever for it?
Other than that one thing that really needs to change are automating some of the very stubborn repeatable tasks, sending hunters when catpaw limit is at max, converting faith when at max. And the worst thing is steel that is not generated by steamworks, which often out of no real reason dont autocreate stuff the time is needed and thus lose a lot of resources.
I played till the end of the space program. But didn't feel like doing this several times to get some alicorns or whatever they do.
You've got to appreciate a game that gives you a valid reason to say "I need more sciences!"
How do you make iron? I am in year 50 and still haven't found out how to make it.
Please please fix the layout/on off buttons. The smelter and steamworks buttons stack on top of each other. You can easily sell an object accidentally when trying to turn on or off them.
That would be great!
Well, I'm at wit's end.
I need a Calciner in order to produce titanium. But I need titanium to make a Calciner.
My only source of titanium is trade with the Zebras, but they're incredibly stingy with it-- they offer it, iron, and plates in exchange for slabs. I trade with them at every opportunity, but I only get titanium from them about one time out of fifty.
I'm not sure that ratio would be much better if my relationship with the Zebras wasn't hostile.
I am in year 204
I have problem getting titanium through trade.
Who else is playing this game?
I'm starting to get nervous now.
I just got a notification that black rain is falling over my village and now there's a tiny percentage up in the top that reads "black liquid sorrow". That isn't ominous at all. It's currently at 1% and I can't tell if anything's happened because of it. Let's hope it doesn't go up!
To avoid the columnar layout problem, I would recommend playing this game on the developer's website (bloodrizer.ru/games/kittens). I don't think it was intended to be played within another website.
We received special permission to host it on our site via an iframe as mentioned in the review. :) Unfortunately, a change in our site dimensions has changed the way it displayed. We are looking into an alternative.
A few people here have complained that the game is too high-maintenance in its resource production, and that you cannot let it run in the background without clicking through production manually.
In order to obviate in-game automation there are some excellent user-made scripts available on the reddit page, which is linked at the bottom of the game. It will allow you to do make a resource from another resource when you are nearing your capacity, or add faith to the total faith pool, or send cats off to hunt when catpower is nearing maximum, etc.
For those who "get the idea, already!" about resource production it helps speed things up until you get a printing press and other upgrades.
That would be your
happiness, which you can also see on the second menu, and the breakdown of the happiness
Update