My First Ant Farm

A cozy, casual ant farm. One queen and her small colony of black garden ants live on your desk.

My First Ant Farm key art — the name beside a red plastic ant farm tank, a young nest branching through pale sand under a heap of excavated grains
Coming to Steam Early Access

My First Ant Farm

A red plastic tank, a few centimetres of sand, and one queen with her first few workers, just breaking out to the surface. You give them sugar, protein and a little water. They do everything else. There is nothing to win and nothing to lose, and no clock but the ants' own.

It is the ant farm you had as a kid, except for one important difference: this colony has a queen, so you get to see the full life cycle of this wonderful creature. Windows and macOS.

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Screenshots

From the build as it is, on the fourth day of a colony.

The whole tank on day four: a red plastic ant farm, a young nest branching through the sand, and the heap of grains the ants have carried out beside the door The nest at working zoom: rooms and corridors cut through the sand, sugar stored in the larder, and the spoil heaped above the door The queen on her chamber floor with a line of pale eggs, workers gathered around her The nursery: curled larvae in a pile, workers carrying grains of sand past, and a stack of sugar below The door and the heap: a worker on top of the mound of excavated sand, a crumb of sugar and a drop of protein beside it

The Game

🐜 Watch a nest grow

The colony starts sealed in a single chamber. The first workers cut their way up to the light, carry the sand out grain by grain, and heap it beside the door. Then they dig: a staging room under the entrance, nurseries for the eggs, the larvae and the cocoons, a larder for the food you bring, a royal chamber for the queen, and a midden for what is left over. Every tank's nest is its own, and when the rooms are full the ants keep digging. Keep playing long enough and the whole tank is honeycombed.

🔬 Real ants, doing real things

These are black garden ants, Lasius niger, the ant of every pavement and garden wall. The colony follows the real life cycle: a founding queen feeding her first brood from her own body, the small pale first generation, eggs and larvae carried to the damp end of the nursery, cocoons stacked where it is dry. Workers walk on whatever they are standing on, slip, fall, and stop to touch antennae when they meet. The care booklet in the corner of the tank tells you what you are looking at.

🍬 Three tools

Sugar keeps the workers running. Protein grows the colony. Water goes where you put it, and the ants nest where the water is. That is the whole toolbar. You shape the world; the colony decides what to make of it.

🖥️ It lives on your desk

The tank keeps going while you work, and it keeps going while you are away. Come back after a weekend and the colony has been busy. Leave it for a fortnight and the nest goes quiet, not dead.