A Kardashev Type-1 factory game. Plant a flag on a wild world. Carve your first ore out of the rock with a hand-held mining laser. By the end of the run, you're wrapping a star in a Dyson swarm — one tile, one belt, one breakthrough at a time.
No demo. No early access. No false claims. What is real: an itch.io page accepting follows so you'll be the first notified when the gates open, a public roadmap, and a weekly devlog tracking exactly what's been built. Every follow goes onto the Patron Wall the day the game ships.
Cosmic Scale is built on seven layered systems. Each one stands alone — and each one feeds the next as your factory grows from a mining laser to a planetary civilization.
You land with a hand-held mining laser and an empty crafting bench. Point the laser at any node and hold to harvest — no fuel, no charge. Carve out your first ore. Smelt your first ingot. Connect a Mk.1 belt — and watch the whole world change. By Tier 4 you're routing Mk.4 belts at 600 items/min through Manufacturers running four-input recipes, and the laser stays on your hip as a backup for when the factory stalls.
Cosmic Scale runs a real flood-fill power grid. Drop a generator, lay connected poles, attach your machines. The simulation balances production and consumption every tick. Overload a grid and your machines slow down proportionally — they don't pop, they just throttle. Catching power bottlenecks is a load-bearing part of the puzzle.
Belts get you the first ten hours. Around Tier 5 you'll unlock the Drone Port — paint a route on the map, drop a second port at the destination, and autonomous drones haul resources between them while you focus on the next problem. Drones don't replace belts; they shortcut them across distances belts can't cover. By endgame you'll have drones threading freight between continents AND between planets.
Every world is procedurally generated from a seed. Twelve hand-tuned biomes blend by moisture and temperature, each carrying its own primary terrain, mountain rules, danger budget, and resource economy. Mountains are built with multi-octave Perlin and ridge noise — so you get natural ridges, canyons, gorges, and snowcapped peaks instead of the perfect concentric diamond stacks of a naive heightmap.
Research is granular — each of the 29 nodes unlocks specific recipes, specific machines, specific power sources. Milestones are bigger: story-gated checkpoints that crack open whole tiers. ARIA narrates your way through both, with different lines for first-time vs. repeat discoveries so the dialogue never repeats. Hit Type-1 Ascension and the Stellar tier opens.
This is the system that makes Cosmic Scale a Kardashev game — and as of v0.9, it's actually functional in-engine, not just a roadmap promise. Seven weather buildings burn input items, generate power, drive the planetary weather state, and produce byproducts that downstream machines depend on. The Type-1 Catalyst recipe — the literal capstone of the game — now requires a Cyclone Core as input, meaning you cannot reach Kardashev Type-1 ascension without orchestrating hurricanes on purpose. That's the marketing pitch as a real production gate.
The chain (Tier-4 → Tier-6):
Endgame gate: Type-1 Catalyst requires 4 × Cyclone Core. The only way to make cyclone cores is to run the Hurricane Core. The only way to run the Hurricane Core is to be producing storm essence. The only way to do that is the Tornado Spire chain. Player-driven weather is the spine of the endgame.
▸ Read the Kardashev visionBuilt fresh in v0.9: Steam multiplayer that behaves like Satisfactory's. Host opens a lobby with an optional password, friends see your game in the Steam overlay and join with a click. No port-forwarding. No IP-pasting. Just up to 8 players in a shared factory.
What makes this version load-bearing rather than a co-op patch on top of single-player: a NetworkedSimulationBridge runs on the host every 200ms, walks the grid, and replicates the state of every machine, belt, and weather building to every client. The factory you see on your screen is the factory the host is actually simulating — not a stale snapshot from when you joined.
Built on Unity Netcode for GameObjects + Facepunch.Steamworks + the community NGO Facepunch transport. Internet matchmaking via Steam Datagram Relay — no NAT-punching, no third-party servers.
Build to Tier 6 and the Dyson Frame Constructor unlocks. Manufacture orbital sails, charged energy cells, and dyson lenses; coordinate launches through the Orbital Launcher; assemble the swarm in five stages of 5,000 MW each. Complete the sphere, achieve Kardashev Type-1, and the Stellar tier opens — Pocket Black Hole Container, Star Lifter, Planet Power Stabilizer, the lot.
"You'll know you're ready when the sun starts giving you more than it's taking. That's when the real engineering begins."
— ARIAEach ring is 5,000 MW of stellar capture, launched in waves from the Orbital Launcher and assembled in orbit by drone swarms. Hover a ring to inspect its build manifest.
240× orbital sail · 60× charged energy cell · 12× dyson lens. The first ring teaches the chain.
Double the sails, add a second Orbital Launcher. Storm essence demand spikes — Tornado Spires go online.
Equatorial belt. Half the swarm is in orbit. The Stellar Foundry comes online for the dense alloys ring 4 needs.
Polar coverage. 4× Cyclone Cores feed the Hurricane Forges. The Type-1 Catalyst recipe is now unlocked.
The sphere closes. Type-1 Catalyst consumed. The Stellar tier unlocks — Star Lifter, Black Hole Container, the lot.
In 1964, Soviet astronomer Nikolai Kardashev classified civilizations by how much of their star's energy they can actually harness. Type-1 captures every watt that hits a planet — every wave, every wind current, every storm. Type-2 captures the full output of the star. Type-3 captures an entire galaxy. Each rung is roughly ten billion times more powerful than the one below it. Cosmic Scale is built around this idea: most factory games stop at a rocket, this one keeps going.
Mountain-cap superstructures that convert managed cyclonic storms into raw electricity. Yields scale with biome wind profile.
Ocean-stationed pressure-differential plants that pull energy from controlled hurricanes. Output is enormous.
Atmospheric collectors that harvest charged-particle bursts during solar maxima. Bursty; pairs with Charged Energy Cells.
Pulls Pressurized Air from ambient atmosphere. Bridge from chemistry to weather control.
Containment field that locks the engineered atmosphere in place. The Type-1 capstone building.
Captured ionized atmosphere from controlled storms. Intermediate material — without it, no Type-1 transition.
I love Factorio. I love Satisfactory. I love Dyson Sphere Program. But once you've launched the rocket, the game tells you you've won. Roll credits. Cosmic Scale rejects that ending. The Space Elevator isn't the win — it's the halfway point. The real climb is when your factory stops competing with the planet and starts commanding it. That climb is what the Kardashev scale describes.
Cosmic Scale is a hand-crafted isometric factory game built solo in Unity by OakTree Games. You land on a wild world with a hand-held mining laser and grow a civilization all the way to wrapping a star in a Dyson swarm. It spans twelve hand-tuned biomes, 121 items, 129 buildings, 29 research nodes, and eight tiers of technology.
Cosmic Scale is made by Kyle, the solo developer behind OakTree Games. Every line of code, every pixel of every sprite, every recipe, and every weekly devlog is written and built by one person — typically on Saturdays and late evenings after his first child is down for the night.
Cosmic Scale is in active pre-launch development. The full release will land on itch.io and Steam. Follow the project on itch.io to be notified the moment the first public build is available, or read the public roadmap to track upcoming features.
Cosmic Scale targets PC (Windows) on launch via itch.io and Steam, with a WebGL build for the browser. Console ports (Switch, PlayStation, Xbox) are on the long-term roadmap once the desktop release stabilizes.
Cosmic Scale shares the same DNA — conveyor belts, recipes, automation, fluid logistics — but the world is isometric pixel art, the worldgen is biome-driven and procedurally generated, and the endgame is a five-stage Dyson sphere that proportionally distributes power across every connected grid in the world. There's also an AI companion (ARIA) that narrates the entire run with deadpan personality.
Yes. As of v0.9 it's a real shared-factory mode, not a co-op patch — the host opens a Steam lobby (optional password), friends join from the Steam overlay with one click, no IP-pasting or port-forwarding. Up to 8 players, and the host streams the live simulation of every machine, belt, and weather building to each client. Solo play is the untouched single-player path with zero networking overhead, and the itch.io WebGL build stays single-player by design.
The most direct way is becoming a patron at any of the three tiers (Sapling, Sprout, Oak) or dropping a one-time tip on the support page. Patrons get early builds, vote priority on the roadmap, and a name on the in-game Patron Wall on launch day. Following on itch.io and sharing the project also genuinely helps.
Cosmic Scale is built in Unity URP using C# and HLSL shaders. It uses a custom 2D isometric pipeline with row-mesh batching, a deterministic 10 TPS GameTick, a zero-allocation EventBus, and ScriptableObject-driven data for every item, building, recipe, and biome. The save system uses an `ISaveable` interface with `saveId` string references so saves survive refactors.
OakTree Games is a one-person indie game studio founded by Kyle. The studio name comes from the idea that good games grow slowly, like oak trees — one ring at a time. Cosmic Scale is the studio's debut project and current sole focus.
Cosmic Scale is in active solo development. The fastest way to be ready for the launch is to follow on itch.io now — and support the build so I can keep shipping every weekend.
