The basics
What Red Planet Tycoon is, what it costs, and where you can play it.
Red Planet Tycoon is a free Mars colony-building, factory automation and idle tycoon game for web browsers and Android. You land at the centre of a 256×256 hex map covered in fog, spend Gold to survey outward, and turn a single landing site into an industrial colony that eventually seeds a living biosphere.
You discover finite resource deposits, place extractors on them, feed processors that refine raw material into higher tiers, keep a global power grid ahead of demand, sell surplus into a market that saturates, and defend your frontier against dust storms. Progression runs across 30 colony levels and then loops through a prestige system called the Terraform Campaign.
It sits at the intersection of four genres: idle/incremental, tycoon, factory automation, and colony simulation, played on a hex-grid strategy map.
The closest single label is idle factory tycoon. Production runs on a fixed 10-second tick whether or not you are watching, so the game plays like an incremental. But the decisions - which tile to survey, what to build where, which ratio to run - are strategy decisions, not upgrade-button clicks.
Yes. The browser version and the Android version are both free, and there is no paid tier, no premium edition and no subscription.
As things stand today there are also no real-money purchases and no third-party advertising networks. The "video ads" you can watch inside the game for Gold, Cores or Boosters are parody Martian commercials written and made for the game - they are a joke and a reward button, not an ad network.
That is the current state, not a permanent vow. If anything about it ever changes it will be announced in the devlog before it ships.
No. There is nothing to buy. Cores, the premium currency, are earned by levelling up, hitting milestones, completing contracts and watching the in-game parody ads.
Cores are also deliberately designed so they could never become a power spike: they buy permanent, global quality-of-life upgrade ranks and map rerolls, never narrow per-building damage-style buffs.
Three official places: in any modern browser at redplanettycoon.com/play with no install and no account, on Android via Google Play, and on itch.io.
A CrazyGames build is in development. On iPhone and iPad the browser version works, and you can add it to your home screen from Safari to run it fullscreen like an app.
The ways to play page compares all three side by side and has step-by-step install instructions for iPhone, Android and desktop.
You can play right now. The game is live and has been publicly playable since June 2026, with updates shipping every week or two. This is not a trailer, a wishlist page or a demo.
The 30-level campaign is tuned for roughly three days of normal play - meaning a handful of short check-ins per day plus offline progress, not three days of continuous play.
After level 30 the game does not end. The Terraform Campaign lets you restart on a harder, faster, differently-shaped map while keeping permanent progress, and most of the long-term play happens there.
It is built for 1-5 minute check-ins, several times a day. A typical session is: read the offline report, clear whatever bottleneck it exposed, sell some surplus, survey a few tiles, place a building or two, and leave.
Longer sessions are rewarding when you are planning a new production district or racing a contract, but nothing punishes you for closing the tab.
It is made by one independent developer, working solo on the simulation, the interface, the art pipeline, the server and the website. Development is documented publicly in the devlog, which has covered every significant change since the first week of the project.
No. Your colony is entirely single-player and nobody can attack, visit or interfere with it.
There are optional competitive and cooperative layers on top: global leaderboards ranked by Terraform Index, then level, then buildings; server-generated contracts; and weekly community events where every player's progress pools into a shared goal, such as a co-operative contract rally or a speedrun sprint from a fresh colony.
Is this game for me?
Honest comparisons, including the players it is not built for.
The closest single comparison is Post Apo Tycoon. Both are idle builders where you rebuild from a ruined starting point one tile at a time, keep earning while the game is closed, and compete on a leaderboard. The difference is depth of industry: where Post Apo Tycoon is mostly about upgrading a settlement, Red Planet Tycoon puts a real factory game in the middle - 19 recipes across four resource tiers, a global power budget, shared storage caps and adjacency bonuses that reward how you lay a district out.
On the automation side it draws on Factorio, Satisfactory, Mindustry and shapez - the pleasure of watching a production chain balance itself and then scaling it until it breaks again.
On the idle and incremental side it shares DNA with Melvor Idle, Idle Planet Miner, Kittens Game and Universal Paperclips: offline progress, a prestige loop, and permanent upgrade tracks.
On the setting and colony side the obvious relatives are Surviving Mars and Per Aspera - building industry on a hostile planet and slowly making it habitable.
What it is not is a city builder in the Cities: Skylines sense. There are no citizens, no happiness meters and no traffic.
It shares the goal and skips the logistics. Like Factorio you are building a self-expanding industrial base, chaining raw materials through refineries into complex goods, and constantly chasing the bottleneck you just created.
Unlike Factorio there are no conveyor belts, no inserters, no pathfinding and no per-building inventories. Buildings draw from and deposit into global resource pools by tier. That deliberately removes the spaghetti-routing layer, which is what makes it work on a phone in ninety seconds.
So the puzzle is ratios, power budget, storage caps and placement adjacency - not throughput per belt lane. If belt design is the part of Factorio you love most, this will feel thin. If planning the chain is the part you love, it will feel familiar.
Both, on purpose. Production runs on a fixed 10-second tick and continues while the game is closed, so you always come back to something. But offline progress is capped and tapering rather than unlimited, so returning is rewarded without punishing you for skipping a day.
The design goal is "idle-friendly, not idle-only": you cannot win by leaving it running, and you cannot fall irrecoverably behind by not.
No. There is no cookie to click and no single exponential counter. Every meaningful decision is spatial or economic: which fogged tile to spend Gold revealing, whether a deposit is worth an outpost, whether to build outside the safe zone before the next storm, whether to dump a warehouse into the market or drip-sell it across price bands.
Players who like factory and automation games but want something that fits into short mobile sessions. Players who like incremental and idle games but are bored of games with no spatial decisions. Players who like tycoon and resource-management games and want a hostile environment pushing back. And anyone who enjoys Mars, terraforming and near-future colonisation settings.
It also suits people who want a browser game they can open at a desk without installing anything, and who want their progress to follow them to their phone.
If you want real-time combat, PvP, or any kind of direct conflict, this is the wrong game - there is none.
If the appeal of factory games for you is belt and train logistics, the global-pool model will feel like it removed the best part. If you want a deep city-management sim with individual colonists and their needs, this is an industrial economy game, not a people game. And if you dislike any form of offline or idle progression, the pacing will feel slow in the early levels.
Red Planet Tycoon is built for exactly that case: it runs as a progressive web app in any modern browser on desktop, tablet and phone, with no installation, no launcher and no account required to start. Open it and you are playing.
Because it is a PWA it can also be installed to your desktop or home screen and then run fullscreen and offline like a native app.
Red Planet Tycoon is available on Google Play and was designed mobile-first rather than ported down from desktop: the interface is a drawer-based touch UI, hit targets are sized for thumbs, and the whole loop is built around short check-ins.
It is free, has no forced ads, no energy timers and no paywalls, and the same save can follow you to a browser on any other device once you sign in.
Yes, in the industrial sense. You are building the machinery of a colony - mining, smelting, power, water purification, storage, logistics and eventually atmosphere and biology - on a procedurally varied Martian surface with real terrain constraints.
You are not managing individual colonists, morale or life support for people. The arc the game tells is "dead rock to living planet", ending with an Atmospheric Processor at level 20 and a Biosphere Relay at level 30.
It has a finale rather than a stop. Level 30 asks you to build the Biosphere Relay, which completes the campaign and awards 100 Cores. From there you can keep playing the same colony, or trigger a Terraform Replay to start again with permanent bonuses on a harder or freshly generated map.
How the game works
The systems, with the actual numbers behind them. The full breakdown lives on the gameplay page.
You begin with 250 Gold, a Command Base at the centre of the map, and a build zone with a radius of three tiles. You tap fogged tiles to survey them, find the starter regolith deposit that generation always places within two to four tiles of you, and put a Regolith Drill on it.
Regolith feeds a Smelter, which produces Iron, which builds Solar Arrays and Storage Yards. The game reserves 50 Gold specifically so a new player can never survey themselves into being unable to afford that first drill.
Only tiles adjacent to territory you already control can be surveyed. Each tap spends Gold and adds survey progress; the cost grows with distance from the Command Base and is multiplied by terrain, so Mountain Ridge costs double and Meltwater Channels cost slightly less.
Surveying is the game's main dopamine engine because it is not just fog removal. A tile can reveal a rich deposit, a scrap wreck, an ancient alien ruin that pays out Gold forever, or a gift chest worth double the reveal cost - five times on a rare roll.
The map is also learnable rather than pure noise: biomes are biased by bearing, so ice flats sit to the south-west, silica dunes to the north-east, the mountain spine to the east and the wreckage trail to the west.
Yes, and that is the engine of the whole game. A rich regolith tile yields 2,000 Regolith in total and then the overlay is exhausted. Ice and silica deposits hold 2,000, scrap wreckage 1,000, copper traces 500.
Because deposits deplete, a colony cannot sit still - it has to keep surveying outward, which pushes it toward the storm-exposed frontier. Upgrades such as Deposit Assessment and prestige perks such as Deep Deposits and Rich Reserves increase how much a deposit holds, but nothing makes them infinite. The one exception is the Regolith Deepbore, which produces slowly and never depletes.
A lot. Two separate adjacency systems reward planning.
Neighbor gives +10% output and input per stack for each completed adjacent copy of the exact same building, so clustering identical smelters pays. Chain gives +20% output for every distinct input your building actually receives from a connected supplier, directly or relayed through same-tier storage - so a factory fed by three different connected inputs runs far hotter than one fed by warehouse stock alone.
On top of that, Boost Towers add two Neighbor stacks to everything within two tiles, ancient ruins grant a stack to their neighbours, and outposts can be upgraded to boost everything inside their radius.
Power is a single global pool, and production scales in steps rather than smoothly. At 100% coverage or better everything runs at full rate. Between 75% and 99% coverage everything runs at 50%. Between 50% and 74% it drops to 25%. Below 50% coverage production stops entirely.
That cliff is deliberate: being slightly short of power is nearly as bad as being badly short, so the grid has to be kept genuinely ahead of demand. Paused buildings still draw power - only demolishing a building releases its load.
From level 7 onward, a dust storm hits at the top of every real-time hour. For 20 seconds it knocks out all normal generators - solar and wind - and it permanently destroys any building standing outside a Command Base or Outpost zone, with no refund.
That turns the map into a risk calculation. From level 7 you can build extractors and outposts outside any zone at five times the normal cost to reach valuable ground early, and every one of those is a bet against the clock. Battery Banks are the counter: each supplies 100 MW during a storm.
Storms are processed once per real hour even while you are away, and any losses appear in your offline report. On the Tempest Barrens map they run five minutes every thirty, from level one.
Yes, and avoiding that is a real skill. Every resource has its own demand meter measured in Gold value sold, not units. There are four price bands paying 100%, 75%, 50% and 25% of the resource's base value, and the base band holds 3,000 Gold of value plus 100 more per colony level.
Dumping an entire warehouse in one go pushes you straight through the good bands into the 25% tier. Demand recovers at 12,000 Gold of value per hour, so drip-selling across sessions earns dramatically more than one big sale. Market Exchange buildings, the Export Brokerage upgrade and the Market Magnate prestige perk all raise capacity or recovery.
Mission Control unlocks at level 8 and offers five contracts at a time, of which you can hold three active. They ask you to deliver resources, survey a number of tiles, reach a power surplus, or construct a number of a given building type, and they pay Gold plus reward boxes.
Sizes run small, medium, large and Legendary - Legendary contracts are 30 times the normal amounts for triple the resource payout. Offers refresh every hour after a dust storm, or immediately with a Contract Reroll booster. Contracts are generated and signed server-side where the connection allows it, which is also what makes leaderboard standings meaningful.
Yes. When you return, the first 10 production ticks run at full speed, and every tick after that represents 100 seconds of real time, up to a cap of 100 ticks - roughly two and a half hours of covered production by default.
That cap is extendable: the Remote Operations upgrade adds 10 ticks per rank, Shift Handoff Protocols adds full-speed ticks, and the Extended Operations prestige perk doubles the whole capacity. Offline simulation uses the same recipe order, storage limits, depletion and power rules as live play, so the away report is an honest account of what actually happened - including buildings you lost to storms.
Almost always full storage. Capacity is shared per tier rather than per resource: 1,250 for tier one, 1,000 for tier two, 750 for tier three and 500 for tier four, before storage buildings and compression upgrades.
When a tier fills up, every producer of that tier stalls. That is the central idle-optimisation pressure in the game - it is what makes you sell surplus, build warehouses, or use the Finder's per-building-type slider to throttle producers you do not currently need.
It is the prestige system, unlocked by completing level 30. A Terraform Replay resets your colony but keeps your Terraform Index, up to 1,000 Cores, up to 200 Boosters, and your equipped perks.
Each completed run grants +10 Terraform Index, capped at 100. Index makes numeric level requirements, contract sizes and contract payouts 1% harder and richer per point, cuts survey costs and raises market value in 10-point steps, and grants one perk slot for every 10 points - up to all nine perks at maximum Index.
Nine, and you equip one per 10 Terraform Index. Market Magnate doubles market capacity. Supply Chain makes connected buildings run 25% faster. Deep Deposits doubles deposit size in connected zones. Master Surveyor adds two tiles of vision and halves survey cost. Master Builder lets you fill build-zone gaps with Gold. Rapid Deployment builds 75% faster. Outpost Mastery lets every outpost take both improvements. Extended Operations doubles offline capacity. Rich Reserves adds 50% to rich deposit yields.
There are four hand-designed maps, unlocked by Terraform Index. Old Channels is the balanced classic. Tempest Barrens (Index 10) runs brutal five-minute storms every half hour and makes batteries a lifeline. Deep Frontier (Index 10) has scarce flatland but rare massive clusters, halved survey costs and doubled storage. Shattered Highlands (Index 20) is mountain-locked canyons with stronger wind power and richer chain bonuses.
Every map except Old Channels can also be rolled from a six-digit seed for a freshly generated world. The first roll of a new run is free; rerolls cost 200 Cores. Seeds are deterministic, so the same number always produces the same map and can be shared.
Ancient ruins are artifact tiles you can uncover while surveying. They cannot be built on, but they pay a large one-time Gold discovery scaled to your level, then keep paying passive Gold forever, and they grant an adjacency stack to every building placed next to them.
Finding one is usually worth redirecting your expansion toward it.
Partly. A surveyed Mountain Ridge can be permanently flattened for 10,000 Gold, with a 70% chance of clean buildable ground and otherwise a rolled resource outcome - wreckage, regolith, rough ground, volcanic carbon, ice or silica. Rough Ground blockers can be blasted clear for 2,000 Gold, unless a Regolith Deepbore is currently sitting on them.
Platforms and technical
Devices, installation and performance.
Any current version of Chrome, Edge, Firefox or Safari, on Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, iPhone or iPad. The client renders with PixiJS using WebGL, with viewport culling and baked level-of-detail chunks when you zoom out, so a fully built 256×256 colony stays smooth on mid-range phones.
Not on the App Store yet. On iPhone and iPad the browser version works fully, and you can install it properly: open redplanettycoon.com/play in Safari, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It then launches fullscreen without browser chrome, like a native app.
Yes. The web version is a progressive web app with a service worker, so Chrome and Edge will offer an install button in the address bar on desktop and an "Add to home screen" prompt on Android. Installed, it runs fullscreen and keeps working when your connection drops.
Mostly. Once loaded, the simulation is entirely local, so the core game keeps running offline. Features that need the server - cloud save sync, server-signed contracts, leaderboards and community events - resume when you reconnect.
No. The official releases are the browser version, Google Play, and itch.io. Anything claiming to be a Steam release is not from this project.
Roughly every one to two weeks, and every update is written up in the devlog with screenshots - including balance changes, new systems, and the reasoning behind them. Recent work has covered random map generation, the Shattered Highlands map, production analytics charts, market selling improvements and adjacency reworks.
The fastest routes are Discord and r/redplanettycoon, or email [email protected]. Player reports have driven a large share of the balance changes documented in the devlog.
