Getting Started

Your first session, step by step. The Ark reveals itself gradually — you don't need to understand everything at once.

1. Tap the core. Every tap generates Energy, your first and most important resource.
2. Buy your first system. Spend Energy in the Build menu on a producer — now Energy flows in on its own.
3. Keep buying & upgrading. Each new system and level compounds your output. Watch the per-second number climb.
4. Unlock automation. Grab an auto-tap upgrade so the core keeps firing hands-free — the game truly becomes idle.
5. Spend on upgrade tracks. As they unlock, pour resources into Optimize and the other tracks to multiply everything.
6. Do your first reset. When growth slows, trigger a Time Anomaly. You'll lose the run but gain Time Shards that make the next one far faster.
7. Come back later. Close the app and return — your Ark kept working. Collect your offline earnings and keep climbing.

Should I sign in?

Signing in enables optional cloud save so your Ark syncs across devices and survives a reinstall — and it unlocks the Ark Relay Network (friends & invite codes). You can also play entirely as a guest on one device. Either way, your captain's name and identity are locked to your account and are never reset by any in-game reset.

Unlock Guide

Every phase, tab, page and system — and exactly what opens it. The Ark reveals itself in order; this is the whole progression map, from your first tap to the end-game meta layer.

Base layer — your first run

Prestige 1 — the Time Anomaly

Prestige 2 — the Awakening

The Expansion — surface & research

End-game & meta

Always available & live systems

Story & Recovered Records

Beneath every number runs a slow-burn mystery. You assemble it yourself — the game never forces it on you.

Recovered Records

There are no interrupting story pop-ups. Instead, meaningful unlocks quietly add a Recovered Record to your Story Archive — short in-world fragments: salvage logs, crew testimony, corrupted AI data. They're curated by V.O., the group's young archivist. When unread records are waiting, the Settings button glows gold.

The archive always presents fragments in canon order — the order the story is meant to be read — no matter what order you unlocked them in.

The tone

This is deliberately a story of effects without tidy explanations. Time behaves wrong aboard the Ark and nobody can say why. Something may be watching from beyond the hull. The AI is fragmented and withholding — never a narrator that explains the plot. Every Awakening the ship remembers a little more, and the answers rarely get more comfortable.

Resources & Currencies

The Ark runs on many currencies, each earned a different way and spent on a different layer. Here's every one and what it's for.

Primary · per-run

Energy

Your core resource. Earned by tapping and by every automated system. Spent on buildings, systems, and most run-level upgrades. Reset by prestige.

Prestige 1 · permanent

Time Shards

Earned by collapsing a run into a Time Anomaly. Spent on permanent upgrades that supercharge every future run.

Prestige 2 · permanent

Memory Cores

Earned by Awakening the Ark. The deeper prestige currency — fuels the most powerful permanent upgrades and recovers the story.

Premium · permanent

ARK Cores

The premium currency — but you earn it free: a +20 daily claim, achievement rewards, Global Goals, crew milestones and referrals. Buyable optionally, never required — see Fair Play.

Live & activity currencies

The six materials are Survey Data, Ark Alloy, Bio Samples, Thermal Cores, Signal Relics, and Deep Crystal — one per crew. See Materials.

Every resource in detail

Where each one comes from, how you open it up, how to earn more, and what it buys.

⚡ Energy

PRIMARY · RESETS ON PRESTIGE

• Comes from: tapping the core, and every building & automated system you own.
• Unlock: available from your very first tap — it's where the game begins.
• Get more: buy more buildings/systems, pour into the Optimize / System / ARK / Echo tracks, hold Time Shards (~+10% Energy per order of magnitude banked), charge the Energy Surge, and cash out offline time.
• Spend on: buildings, systems, most run-level upgrades — and as ×1 fuel for the Ark Accelerator.

🔷 Time Shards

PRESTIGE 1 · PERMANENT

• Comes from: collapsing a run into a Time Anomaly (your first prestige).
• Unlock: produce 10,000,000 lifetime Energy to reveal the Anomaly.
• Get more: push each run further before you collapse it; unlock Auto Anomaly for a steady stream; charge the Time-Shard Surge; hold Memory Cores (~+12% Shard production per order of magnitude).
• Spend on: the Echoes track, the Core Matrix, the Legacy layer — and as ×5 fuel for the Ark Accelerator.

🟡 Memory Cores

PRESTIGE 2 · PERMANENT

• Comes from: Awakening the Ark (your second, deeper prestige).
• Unlock: climb the Anomaly's Fracture Milestones, own the Stabilize the Fracture echo, and complete The Last Transfer; you'll also need at least 1 Memory Core on hand to perform an Awakening.
• Get more: deeper, better-prepared Awakenings; charge the Memory Surge.
• Spend on: the Memories track, the Core Matrix, story recovery — and as ×10 fuel (the best value) for the Ark Accelerator.

◈ ARK Cores

PREMIUM · PERMANENT · EARNED FREE

• Comes from: a +20 daily claim, achievement rewards, Global Ark Goals, crew milestones, and Ark Relay referrals (+25/+50). Optionally buyable — never required.
• Unlock: available from the start; you begin earning them free early on.
• Get more: log in daily, complete achievements (each grants 1 ARK Core + a resource), hit Global Goals and crew milestones, and invite friends.
• Spend on: ARK upgrades, cosmetic frames, the Store — and as +25%-per-core fuel for the Ark Accelerator. See Fair Play.

🧭 The Six Materials

EXPLORATION · PERMANENT

• Come from: Exploration crews — each of the six crews gathers one material (Survey Data, Ark Alloy, Bio Samples, Thermal Cores, Signal Relics, Deep Crystal).
• Unlock: buy the Awakened Continuity Memory upgrade to open Exploration and the Expansion.
• Get more: deploy crews deeper and level their stats to break zone walls; boost a material's output with the Ark Accelerator; or gather a trickle by hand with TAP: EXPLORE tap mode.
• Spend on: the Archive's six research branches — each material feeds its matching branch. Full breakdown under Materials.

🪨 Remnants

LEGACY · PERMANENT

• Come from: your total Exploration production — Remnants cascade automatically from how much your crews gather.
• Unlock: reach the Core Matrix / Legacy panel; Remnants live on the Legacy Remnants page.
• Get more: raise total Exploration output, build Remnant Assemblies, boost the 7th Ark Accelerator (Remnants) — and, rarely, from TAP: EXPLORE.
• Spend on: recovering the Ark's divided Sections and driving the Legacy layer forward.

Event Tokens, Challenge Coins, Compiled Insight and Names Remembered are covered in the table above and in their own sections (Events, Challenges, Archive, Legacy). The deeper Legacy currencies (Strain, Lessons, Time-Scar Data, Weight, Trust, Signal) are explained under Legacy & Names.

The Core Loop

Everything begins at the Ark's core. Tap it, and the ship stirs.

Tapping for Energy

Each tap on the core generates a burst of Energy. A tap is worth about 0.2% of your current Energy-per-second (never less than 1), then multiplied by every tap-power bonus you own and any active Surge Boost. So the more your Ark produces, the more each manual tap is worth — tapping never becomes pointless, it just changes role.

There are even bonuses that reward rhythm: extra power every 50th or 100th tap, a bonus for sustained tapping, and one for tapping while the Crew tab is open.

Tap Focus — tap for the material you want

Once you've unlocked the Legacy panel, a TAP button appears beside the core. Flip it to TAP: EXPLORE and your taps stop making Energy and instead gather a small trickle of the Exploration material you choose — and, rarely, Remnants — by hand. The reactor turns amber so you always know which mode you're in, and your Exploration Surge boosts how much each tap yields.

The loop that never ends

1. Produce Energy (tap + systems).
2. Spend it on new systems and upgrades.
3. Compound — each purchase makes the next income faster.
4. Automate so it runs without you.
5. Reset for permanent multipliers, and repeat — faster.

Buildings & Systems

Rebuild the Ark one system at a time. Each is a producer that compounds your Energy income.

Buildings come in Salvage → Equipment pairs. You buy a Salvage building with Energy; once you own enough of it, you can convert some into its stronger Equipment upgrade (paid in units of the Salvage building itself). Both keep producing Energy for you.

Each purchase raises output and the next cost ramps up (Salvage costs grow ~1.31× per unit). A separate Battery building produces no Energy — it exists purely to bank more offline time (see Storage).

Systems, Optimize & beyond

Beyond raw buildings, dedicated System and Optimize upgrade tracks tune the whole machine — global multipliers, automation speed, and storage. See Upgrade Tracks for the full breakdown.

Automation

The moment that turns a tapping game into an idle game: hands-free production.

Auto-tap

Auto-tap upgrades make the core fire on its own, at a rate you keep improving. Once unlocked, you never have to tap again — though active tapping (especially during a Surge Boost) still helps.

Auto-buying — three channels

Beyond tapping, the Ark can buy for you. Three separate automation channels each fire on their own timer (you speed them up via the Optimize and Echo tracks):

• Drones — auto-buy your Salvage buildings.
• Fabricator — auto-buys your Equipment upgrades.
• System upgrades — auto-buy Crew upgrades.

These unlock through Echo and Memory upgrades. Combined with offline progress, the game genuinely runs itself between sessions — you come back to decide the big moves (what to upgrade, when to reset).

Upgrade Tracks

Legacy of the Ark layers many upgrade tracks on top of each other. Each unlocks as you progress and multiplies a different part of the machine.

Buildings themselves level directly (see Buildings) — the tracks above sit on top of them. For truly endless upgrades, the Archive and Core Matrix take over in the late game. Global cost reduction is capped at 90%.

How Resets Work

In idle games you grow by resetting. Legacy of the Ark has two nested prestige layers and a permanent end-game track that never resets.

PRESTIGE 01

Time Anomaly

Collapse a run → Time Shards.

PRESTIGE 02

Awakening

Awaken the Ark → Memory Cores.

END GAME

Core Matrix

Permanent research, never resets.

META

Legacy & Names

Remembers who you were.

The nesting

Think of it as circles inside circles. Many Time Anomalies build toward one Awakening; many Awakenings feed the permanent Core Matrix and Legacy meta-layers. Each outer layer resets the inner ones but keeps its own permanent gains.

Time Anomaly

The first prestige layer — collapse a run for Time Shards.

Triggering a Time Anomaly collapses your current run: Energy, buildings, and run-level upgrades are wiped. In exchange you earn Time Shards, a permanent currency scaled to how far you got — roughly the square root of your best Energy this run, so every order of magnitude further you push adds meaningfully to the payout.

The game starts prompting you to collapse once you've reached about 1,000,000 max Energy in a run (below that you'd earn nothing). There's no penalty for going further — bigger runs mean more shards.

What carries over

• Time Shards and everything bought with them (the Echoes track).
• All deeper permanent progress — Memory Cores, ARK Cores, Core Matrix, Archive, Legacy, cosmetics, and your identity.

Why it makes you faster

Time Shard upgrades boost your income, tap power, and multipliers from the very start of the next run — so you blow past your previous wall in a fraction of the time. That compounding is the heart of idle progression.

Awakening

The deeper prestige — Awaken the Ark for Memory Cores.

An Awakening is the larger reset. It resets your Time-Anomaly-layer progress (Time Shards and Echoes included, unless you've bought the persistence capstones) but grants Memory Cores — the deep permanent currency — and recovers another fragment of the Ark's lost story. Memory Cores earned scale with the shards you gathered this Awakening (about the square root of shards ÷ 100).

Memory Cores & the Memories track

Memory Cores fund the Memories upgrade track — the most powerful permanent multipliers in the game. Because each Awakening also boosts how fast you earn Time Shards, the two prestige layers feed each other.

The Core Matrix

A permanent end-game track that never resets.

The Core Matrix is the Ark's deepest research layer — unlocked once you've mastered every Memory upgrade. Unlike everything before it, the Core Matrix is truly permanent: it survives the Time Anomaly, Awakening, and even a Hard Reset. It's the long-haul goal that outlives every reset.

Five tracks, one bonus pool

The Matrix runs five parallel, infinite tracks — one fed by each major currency: Energy, Time Shards, Memory Cores, Exploration materials, and ARK Cores. Crucially, all five pour into the same shared bonus pool, so a free player can advance the whole Matrix using only earnable currencies — the ARK Core track is a convenience, never a requirement.

Each node you buy grants a procedurally-generated, stacking effect — production percentages, whole auto-taps per second, crew stats, exploration yield, Archive cost reduction, and global multipliers — at one of five rarities (Common → Legendary), with rarer nodes hitting far harder.

Legacy & Names

The meta-progression that remembers who you were — across every cycle of the Ark.

The Legacy overlay unlocks once the Core Matrix is online. It's the game's third and highest prestige — an eight-page loop, each page with its own currency and unlock gate, that feeds toward one grand reset:

REMNANTS → STRAIN → LESSONS → SCARS → WEIGHT → TRUST → SIGNAL → NAMES

Along the way you recover the Ark's lost Sections, weigh Time-Scar decisions, climb a five-tier Trust ladder, rebuild a Signal transmitter, and slowly uncover the ten-stage Buried Truth. A Legacy Index averages your progress into a single Cycle Readiness.

The four doctrines

Late in Legacy the survivors split into four factions, each with its own seven-chapter Chronicle told in its own voice: Shepherds, Founders, Pathfinders, and Wildborn. Whichever is dominant advances its story; finishing a Chronicle grants a permanent Doctrine Keepsake. None of the four is "the right answer" — each is honest, and each costs something the others won't pay.

The Legacy Cycle & Names Remembered

When your readiness is essentially complete, you can perform a Legacy Cycle — the biggest reset of all. It wipes your Legacy progress and normal gameplay (refunding any ARK Cores you'd spent) and pays out Names Remembered, the top-tier permanent currency. Later cycles pay far more Names than early ones.

Names are spent two ways:

• 12 repeatable lanes — permanent boosts (tap %, energy/shard/memory %, exploration, storage, cost reduction, and more) you can keep buying forever.
• 33 one-time Permanent Inheritances (10 → 15,000 Names) — each either unlocks a system from the start of every run, or preserves a whole system through every future Legacy Cycle. Completing the tree takes dozens of cycles by design.

The Archive

Endless, procedurally-generated research — "Recovered Ark Knowledge."

The Archive is the game's infinite-research engine. It has six branches, each aligned to one crew discipline and funded by that discipline's material. Every branch generates an endless stream of upgrade nodes — there's always a next one.

The six branches

Navigation

Routing & speed research.

Engineering

Production & construction.

Biology

Adaptation & scaling.

Survival

Endurance & reserves.

Signal Relay

Discovery & events.

Intelligence

Knowledge & deep archives.

How research works

Start by buying the Recovered Core Index with Memory Cores — it opens all six branches. From there, each branch is an endless list: every node is generated on the fly, so there's always a next upgrade. The first few nodes in a branch cost only Memory Cores; deeper nodes cost that branch's material (and, further in, a mix of resources).

Rarities

Procedural nodes roll at one of five rising rarities — the rarer the node, the bigger its stacking bonus (and the higher its cost):

Common 50%Uncommon 28%Rare 15% Epic 5.5%Legendary 1.5%

Effects include Energy / Time-Shard / Memory / Offline percentages, whole auto-taps per second, exploration yield and speed, crew stats, and Archive cost reduction — each branch favouring a themed pool. Because the bonuses are real and stacking, the Archive quietly becomes one of your biggest sources of power.

Archive 2.0 — Synergy & Recompile

A Synergy Web links every pair of branches (15 links) for extra bonuses, and per-branch Set Tiers reward going deep. Once you've researched enough across all six branches, you can opt into Recompile the Archive — a research-prestige that resets the branches for Compiled Insight, spent on six endless "Insight" lanes that persist even through a Legacy Cycle.

Exploration

Deploy crews into the dark to gather what the Ark needs.

As the Ark recovers, you unlock Exploration: send specialized crews to survey escalating regions of space. Each crew gathers a distinct material that fuels its matching Archive branch.

The six crews

Navigation

Survey Team Alpha

Charts the void and maps safe routes.

Engineering

Recovery Unit Bravo

Salvages alloy and hardware.

Biology

Biology Team Charlie

Studies living samples to adapt.

Survival

Thermal Operations Delta

Endures the harshest zones.

Signal Relay

Signal Corps Echo

Chases the signal and events.

Intelligence

Deep Dive Foxtrot

Descends for lost knowledge.

Crews unlock in a chain — pushing one crew deep enough opens the next — and they explore automatically and concurrently, even while you're away.

The six regions

Each crew works its own region of 1,000 escalating zones. Deeper zones yield more material but demand a stronger, higher-level crew:

Zones & walls

Each interval, a crew attempts the next zone against its eight stats (Survey, Hazard Control, Extraction, Analysis, Endurance, Signal Detection, Efficiency, Carry Capacity). Pass and it advances and deposits its haul; fail and it makes a return trip and resets some depth. Every 25th zone is a hard wall with doubled requirements — and clearing zone 25 drops a unit of the next crew's material, opening the chain.

Level crew stats (each has endless upgrade paths that reach a named Ultimate at level 121 and keep going) to break the walls. Exploration also feeds auto-taps and other bonuses back into the main game. A deeper Missions layer adds chartable Deep Regions, craftable Ship Modules, and rotating Away-Missions.

The Six Materials

Every crew brings back one discipline of salvage. Each material powers its matching Archive branch.

NavigationRouting & speed

EngineeringProduction

BiologyAdaptation

SurvivalEndurance

Signal RelayDiscovery

IntelligenceKnowledge

The Ark Accelerator

A late-game pressure valve: pour the surplus you can't spend into temporary boosts to your Exploration output.

By the time your material income starts to crawl, you're usually sitting on far more Energy, Time Shards and Memory Cores than you can spend. The Accelerator turns that surplus into speed — feed a resource into an accelerator to multiply what it produces.

The seven accelerators

One accelerator for each of the six Exploration materials, plus a seventh for Remnants. Each unlocks independently — the material ones as their crew/resource comes online, the Remnants one once the Remnants page is open — and each is boosted separately, so you can pour everything into the one thing that's holding you up.

Fuel — what you feed in

You can pour four things into an accelerator. The boost scales with the amount you feed (per order of magnitude), and rarer fuel is worth far more:

Boosts decay — stay active

Accelerator boosts affect online production only. While the game is closed, decay pauses and your rates simply return to normal — nothing drains while you're away, and nothing boosts while you're away either. It rewards active sessions: top up before a push, then spend what you've banked. Fuel boosts cap at +1000% and ARK Cores at another +1000% — up to +2000% (×21) on a single accelerator.

Crew Deck

Your crew is more than exploration muscle — they're a management layer of their own.

Crew Rank

All your crew training feeds one shared Crew Rank ladder (a high-water mark that survives prestige). There are 11 ranks, each adding +1% crew tap power (up to +10%):

Recruit → Cadet → Crewman → Specialist → Petty Officer → Ensign → Lieutenant → Commander → Captain → Fleet Commander → Ark Vanguard

Crew Incidents

On the long voyage, procedural incidents surface every so often — a service corridor collapses, a bio-growth blooms, a signal repeats. Each offers a payout, and here's the good part: incidents are strictly positive. You can Resolve for a safe reward, or Push Harder to gamble for more — but even a failed push still pays out. Ignoring one never hurts you. A rising Readiness meter improves both the payouts and your push odds over time.

Storage & Offline Progress

The Ark keeps working while you're gone — and holds what it earns for your return.

Offline earnings & time-banking

When the app is closed, the Ark keeps working — but instead of auto-dumping resources on you, Advanced Storage banks the offline time (up to 24 hours per session) and lets you choose when to cash it out. A "Welcome Back" screen shows what accrued. Cashing out converts banked time into resources at a share of your live production rate (which your upgrades raise).

Five battery banks

Each major resource has its own bank: the Cryo-Time Bank (Energy), Temporal Storage System (Time Shards), Archival Time Capsule (Memory Cores), Expedition Reserve Cell (materials), and Legacy Continuum Vault. Each bank has its own upgrade slots to raise capacity and cash-out yield.

An optional Reserve Lock lets you protect a set amount of banked time from both cash-out and upgrade spending — an emergency reserve you can't accidentally burn.

Cloud save

Sign in to enable optional cloud save: your Ark syncs across devices and survives a reinstall. Premium purchases are tied to your account and restore automatically. Prefer to stay local? Play as a guest — everything still saves on your device.

Surge Boosts & Boost Overload

Charge a boost bar for a massive temporary surge in output — then upgrade the boosts themselves.

Surge Boosts

Boosts are temporary multipliers you charge by tapping and unleash for a burst of huge production. There are three bars — one each for Energy, Time Shards, and Memory Cores. A full bar reads 1000% (a ×11 multiplier to that resource) and drains over about five minutes. Press-and-hold to auto-charge, or let a store auto-booster pin the first bar at full for you.

Boost Overload

Once all three Surge bars are unlocked, a Boost Upgrades sub-tab appears. For each resource you can invest in three tracks, 100 levels each, paid in that resource:

Costs scale as baseline × 1.26^level. Auto-boosts still pin the first bar at 1000%, and your Daily Max Boost fills to the upgraded cap. All levels are saved and cloud-synced.

Challenge Modes

Optional runs with special rules — for players who want to test the machine under pressure.

Challenge Modes are self-contained runs governed by unusual restrictions — no automation, tap-only, half rations, skeleton crew, brutal inflation, and more. There are 20 archetypes across 7 difficulty tiers (Easy up to God) for 140 challenges in total, each of which levels up independently every time you clear it.

Every clear pays Challenge Coins, spent in the Challenge Store on boosts that apply only inside challenges. Clearing also builds permanent progress on the Challenge page, which tracks your Coins and total clears in their own panels.

Global Ark Goals

Community objectives that every player contributes to — together.

Global Ark Goals are shared, community-wide targets — always six active at once, one per category: Energy Generated, Time Shards, Memory Cores, ARK Cores Spent, Exploration, and Legacy. Every player's progress feeds a common pool.

Each goal's target is set by measuring the whole community's contribution over a 24-hour analysis window, then multiplying it — so goals stay challenging but achievable. There are five milestones (10 / 25 / 50 / 75 / 100%), and rewards are snapshotted when a goal starts so they can't be inflated. You must have personally contributed to claim your share.

Seasons & Live Events

Limited-time events with a shared token economy and a store full of boosts.

Four events at once

Events run on four layers simultaneously — a quarterly Season, a Monthly, a Weekly, and a Daily — each with its own theme and a pool of daily goals tailored to how you actually play. The four seasonal themes are tied to real holidays (Winter Starfall, Renewal Bloom, Founders' Signal, and the Hollow Fracture event).

Event Tokens

Every event pays into a single shared currency: Event Tokens. One wallet works across all four layers, so nothing you earn goes to waste when an event ends. Hit an event's milestones (20 / 40 / 60 / 80 / 100%) to claim its share of the token pool.

The Event Token Store

Spend Event Tokens in a unified store of 24 items — a mix of temporary (wall-clock timed) and permanent, stacking boosts wired into every real earning path in the game. An active-boost countdown strip shows what's currently running.

The Ark Relay Network

The optional social layer — friends, invite codes, and friendly competition across the fleet.

Sign in to join the Ark Relay Network. It's entirely opt-in; the game is a complete single-player experience without it. When you do join, you get:

• Friends & leaderboards — add other players and compare across eight categories (Player Level, Highest Energy, Time Shards, Memory Cores, Exploration, Archive, Core Matrix, and Challenge Wins).
• Invite / referral codes — share your code. Redeem a friend's code once to be permanently "Recruited by" them; the inviter earns +25 ARK Cores when a new recruit joins and +50 more when they reach level 30.
• Friend challenges — race friends on real challenge templates for resource rewards (never anything pay-to-win).
• Relay assists — send and receive small daily resource gifts.
• Privacy controls — granular toggles, mostly friends-only by default. You decide what's shared.

Cosmetics

Make your Ark and your captain your own.

Cosmetics are purely visual — they never affect gameplay balance. You can personalize:

• UI Frames — 20 styles. Two are free (Standard, Black), ten are colour frames, and eight are narrative "Legacy" frames named after the Legacy pages (Lessons, Names, Remnants, Scars, Signal, Strain, Trust, Weight). Bought with ARK Cores.
• Four equip slots. Wear a different frame on each of the Bridge, Nav Rail, Top Panel, and Player Card — mix and match to recolour the whole UI.
• Character & portrait. Choose your captain's gender and one of six hairstyles per gender.
• Cosmetic Spark. An optional particle burst on every manual tap.

ARK Recovery Orders

An authored campaign that always shows your next meaningful goal — from the first tap of the core to your first Legacy Cycle and beyond.

Recovery Orders replaces the free-form map with a guided path. 214 primary orders across seven phases teach the whole game in order, so you always know the single most useful thing to do next — no guesswork, no wiki required.

One order at a time

Each active order has two or three clear objectives drawn from what you're already doing — build a system, reach a resource threshold, complete an expedition. Finish them and the reward lands, a Recovered Record unlocks, and the next order activates instantly.

Side orders & the Cycle track

23 auxiliary orders appear contextually and never block the campaign. After your first Legacy Cycle, the campaign archives and a condensed 16-step Cycle Orders track begins — a tighter checklist for every run that follows.

Surface Settlements

The super-late-game payoff: turn completed Legacy Cycles into a permanent civilization that outlasts the Ark itself.

Every Legacy Cycle now grants a Continuity Charter — a permanent token of authority. (Veterans are granted every Charter they've already earned, retroactively.) Spend a Charter to found or advance one of six settlements by one rank.

Six settlements, five ranks each

River Settlement, Ridge Observatory, Forest Recovery Camp, Thermal Works, Deep-Mine Enclave and the Ark-Side Capital — each grows from an Unfounded Site through Landing Camp, Secured Outpost, Permanent Settlement and Regional Hub to a final Continuity Beacon. Every rank is permanent and pays a real, capped bonus to production, exploration, offline earnings, Strain relief or Names.

Preparing a rank

Before a Charter advances a settlement, prepare it across four readiness categories:

Links, doctrine & the Horizon Council

At rank 3 a settlement can link a charted Deep Region for a specialization bonus, and your Dominant Doctrine discounts its costs. Once all six settlements are founded, the Horizon Council convenes — every later cycle grants a Council Resolution to spend across six endless civic tracks, plus a temporary Council Agenda you set each cycle.

Deep Surge & Tap Focus

A deeper layer of surge boosts for the outer economy — and precise control over what your taps gather.

Three surge bars

Charge each bar by tapping (hold-to-charge works too). Each caps at +400% (×5) and — crucially — folds additively into the Ark Accelerator's bucket rather than multiplying it: a maxed +2000% Accelerator plus a maxed +400% surge is +2400%, not ×105. Bars drain over a few minutes, so they reward active play, and they never touch Advanced Storage estimates.

Tap Focus

The Bridge tap mode is now Tap Focus: instead of a random material, you pick exactly which Exploration resource your manual taps gather (Remnants still drop rarely from any tap). The reactor glows amber to show you're in gather mode, and your Exploration Surge boosts the amount each tap yields.

Fair Play & the Store

Free to play, honestly. No pay-to-win, no ads — ever.

The entire game — every system, every prestige layer, the Archive, the Core Matrix, and the story — is playable for free from start to finish. Optional purchases exist for players who want to support development, but they are never gates.

ARK Cores are the premium currency, but you earn them free constantly: a +20 daily claim, one core from every achievement (there are over a thousand), Global Goal milestones, crew milestones, and referrals. Optional ARK Core packs and permanent support packs exist for players who want to get there sooner or back the studio — but anything they buy is reachable for free.

Glossary

Quick definitions for the Ark's key terms.

Frequently Asked Questions