Homestead is a browser idle game about the least glamorous part of every online world: the grind. You arrive in town with nothing, rent floor space in a tavern common room, and work your way up fifty dwellings until you own a private island above the clouds.
Play HomesteadMost games with houses treat them as a reward for doing something else — you go and fight, and eventually the game gives you somewhere to put your trophies. Homestead inverts that. The house is the goal, and every other system exists to get you into a better one.
You start with no combat at all. There's a quarry, a woodpile, a river and a hedgerow, and you work them by hand because that's all you can do. Your dwelling multiplies everything you gather, so each move up the ladder makes the next one reachable. Around the fourth dwelling you have an address good enough to get into the coliseum, and combat opens up — badly at first. The first cellar rat is a real fight. You win it with about a third of your health left, and only because you spent your mining and woodcutting levels on strength and dexterity without realising that's what you were doing.
| Six labours | Mining, woodcutting, fishing, foraging, sparring at the coliseum and shelving at the library. Each one trains a combat stat: strength, dexterity, speed, vitality, defence and focus. A seventh, the gem seam, unlocks later and trains luck. |
| Fifty dwellings | From a borrowed bedroll to a floating palace. Each multiplies your output, and the later ones are gated behind materials that only drop from fighting. |
| Combat | Eight areas, each needing the gear tier built to beat it. Abilities cost focus. Optional elite monsters hit far harder and pay eight times as much. |
| Seasons | Thirty market days to a season. Each favours one resource and sends its own marked beasts into the field, carrying elemental stock you can't get any other way. |
| The garden | Plant seeds, come back later. Plots keep growing while the game is closed, and the rarest blooms pay out stat points. |
| The bank | Deposits run on real-world time. A twenty-four hour bond pays 260%, and the clock runs whether the page is open or not. |
| Dragons | Three pens beside the house, each its own small clicker with its own fuel, each feeding a different bonus back into the main game. |
| Dungeons | Time investments where you go in person. While you're down there, everything needing your hands stops. Your staff carry on without you. |
| Ascension | From the tenth dwelling you can start over on a fresh server, keeping a permanent skill tree and your standing with the gods. Going later pays much more. |
There are no accounts. Your progress lives in this browser's local storage, on this device. Clearing site data will wipe it. The Settings tab has an export box — copy that text somewhere safe and you can paste it back in later, or carry it to another machine.
Hired staff keep working when the page is closed, at a rate that starts low and improves with an ascension skill. Bank bonds, garden plots and party timers all use real-world time, so coming back after a night away is meant to feel good.
Some of the game isn't signposted. If a trader in the market says something odd, pay attention.
Designed by a lazy programmer. Programmed by Claude, Anthropic's AI assistant, across a long series of conversations — the design direction, the balance targets and every "no, do it this way" came from a human; the implementation, the simulation harnesses used to tune the numbers, and most of the bugs came from the machine.