Taskbar Colony

Taskbar Colony is an idle space colony game that sits in a slim, transparent, always-on-top strip just above the Windows taskbar. The strip is click-through everywhere except the colony itself, so the rest of the desktop remains usable. It can be stretched across the full width of the screen, kept compact, or minimised to a small stat badge. The game hides and goes silent automatically when any application runs in fullscreen.

The economy is built around nine building types, ranging from Solar Arrays to a Terraformer. Supply pods drop in to be collected, cargo ships return for pickup, and colonists wander the strip. Named milestones increase the income rate as the colony grows, and offline earnings continue for up to eight hours. Colonists each arrive with a name and a trade, gravitate towards the work they do, sleep at night, react to the cursor, and can be checked on individually. Beyond the base economy there are four further systems: Research projects that alter how the colony functions, Directives chosen from a board and swapped freely without timers, the Charter for spending prestige, and Landing Sites that change the value of the ground at a new colony.

Once a colony is wealthy enough, all colonists can be loaded onto a colony ship and evacuated. Each evacuation banks prestige to spend permanently on the Charter, and every colony receives a generated name and an entry in the Colony Log, which also records the colonists aboard at liftoff. Players can fly a built-in flag over each settlement or create their own via the Steam Workshop. The endgame is the Orbital Ring, assembled from eight spans, each carried up by an evacuation, followed by a single ignition that permanently changes the sky over all future colonies. The game includes 24 achievements, stats, Steam Cloud saves, Steam rich presence, a reduced-motion option for ambient effects, and mouse-only controls, with a capped frame rate to limit resource use.