Taskbar Colony

There is a thin slice of empty space above your taskbar. Someone should colonize it.

Taskbar Colony is an idle space colony that lives in a transparent strip along the bottom of your screen. Tiny colonists scavenge, build, and haul cargo while you work, browse, or play. Glance down now and then, catch a supply pod, buy a building, and get back to your day.

A colony above your taskbar

• Lives in a slim, transparent, always-on-top strip that sits just above the Windows taskbar

• Click-through everywhere except the colony itself, so your desktop stays 100% usable

• Stretch it across the whole screen, keep it compact, or minimize it to a tiny stat badge

An idle economy that respects your day

• Nine building types, from Solar Arrays to a horizon-bending Terraformer

• Supply pods drop in, cargo ships return for pickup, and colonists wander around

• Named milestones raise your rate as the colony grows into a city

• Offline earnings keep the lights on for up to 8 hours while you are away

Crew who are actually somebody

• Colonists arrive with a name and a trade, and drift toward the work they do

• They doze at night, notice your cursor, and can be checked on for a moment of their time

• The ones aboard at liftoff are remembered by name in the Colony Log

Four systems, not one long curve

• Research projects that change how the colony works, not just how fast it goes

• Directives you choose from a board and swap whenever you like, never on a timer

• The Charter, where prestige stops being a number that goes up and becomes something you spend

• Landing Sites that change what the ground under a new colony is worth

Evacuate. Prestige. Refound.

• When a colony is rich enough, load everyone onto the colony ship and lift off

• Every evacuation banks prestige to spend on the Charter, permanently

• Each colony gets its own generated name and a place in your Colony Log

• Fly a flag over every settlement: pick a built-in, or make your own in the Steam Workshop

An endgame you build in the sky

• The Orbital Ring is assembled one span at a time, each carried up by an evacuation

• Eight spans, then a single ignition you only ever get to watch once

• After that the sky over every new colony is different, forever

It behaves itself

• Automatically hides (and goes silent) when any app runs fullscreen

• 24 achievements, stats, Steam Cloud saves, and Steam rich presence built in

• A reduced-motion option for the ambient effects, and the keyboard is never required

• Built to sip resources: capped frame rate, no giant overlay, no input lag

A very small frontier, right above the Start button.