Taskbar Colony

Taskbar Colony is an idle colony management game that occupies a slim, transparent, always-on-top strip just above the Windows taskbar. Small colonists scavenge, construct buildings and haul cargo while the player works, browses or plays other games. The strip is click-through everywhere except the colony itself, and it can be stretched across the full width of the screen, kept compact, or minimised to a small stat badge. It automatically hides and mutes itself when any application runs fullscreen. The game is now released on Steam.

The economy is built around nine building types, ranging from Solar Arrays to a Terraformer, with supply pods dropping in and cargo ships returning for pickup. Named milestones increase the income rate as the colony expands, and offline earnings continue for up to eight hours while the player is away. Colonists arrive with a name and a trade, gravitate towards their relevant work, sleep at night and react to the cursor. Progression is spread across four systems: research projects that alter how the colony functions, directives chosen from a board that can be swapped at any time without a timer, a Charter for spending prestige, and Landing Sites that affect the value of the ground under a new colony.

Once a colony has accumulated enough wealth, the player can load the colonists onto a colony ship and lift off. Each evacuation banks permanent prestige for the Charter and records the colony, with a generated name and the names of those aboard, in the Colony Log. Flags can be flown over settlements using built-in designs or custom ones shared through the Steam Workshop. The endgame involves assembling an Orbital Ring one span at a time, with each span carried up by an evacuation; after eight spans, a single ignition permanently changes the sky over every subsequent colony. The game includes 24 achievements, stats, Steam Cloud saves and Steam rich presence, offers a reduced-motion option, requires no keyboard input, and is designed to use minimal system resources with a capped frame rate.