Cosmic Scale is a factory game I've been building solo since beginning my game development journey and the main focus of my solo Indie Game Studio. You begin your journey after landing in a foreign star system and expand your factory and resources to the heights of a Kardashev Type-1 Civilization. It all sits on real spherical planets you can walk, sprint and jetpack across, and it's coming to Steam.
You walk, sprint, and jetpack across a world that curves away under your feet. The build grid is square tiles wrapped around the sphere, closed by fault lines where the tiling has to break. Keep scrolling and the camera climbs from your first factory to orbit.
The scroll leaves the planet behind here on purpose and holds on the star itself: orbital rings of gold sails, turning slowly while you read. Victory is that swarm sustained at ten petawatts, the real Kardashev Type-1 boundary.
The rest of this page is the game in detail: every system, every number, and the honest state of the build.
There's no demo or early access yet, and I'm not naming a date. What you can follow today is the public roadmap, the devlog and the video episodes on YouTube, and the Discord and Bluesky, where I share progress as it happens. Patrons get their name on the in-game Patron Wall when the game ships.
Cosmic Scale is built on eight systems that feed each other as your factory grows from a mining laser to a planetary civilization, and each one gets its own tab below.
You land with a working base and a mining laser that harvests any node you aim it at, with no fuel to feed it. Smelt your first ingot, connect a Mk.1 belt and watch the world change: by Tier 3 you're routing Mk.4 belts at 600 items a minute through Fabricators running four-input recipes, and the laser is still there for when the factory stalls.
You build on a square-tile grid wrapped around the planet, which turned into a real puzzle for me, since squares really do not want to fit on a sphere at the end of the day. So the planet is wrapped in rings of equal squares with a polar cap at each pole, there are fault lines where the tiling has to break, and underground conveyors carry your belts across them.
A factory this size needs power, so how would you generate power in Cosmic Scale? Well, the answer to that would be the weather, which is the key source of your power in the game. Every cable network is its own grid, and the simulation weighs what you make against what you use on every tick, so if you ask for more than you've got, every machine on that network stalls until supply covers it again, which makes catching a power bottleneck part of the puzzle.
Belts carry the early game, and in Tier 4 you unlock the Drone Port, which you pair with a second port up to 420 meters away so its drones can fly 40 items a trip between them while you focus on the next problem. Drones shortcut your belts across ground they can't easily cover, later on they fly parts up to a growing Orbital Ring, and freighters carry the rest between planets.
Every world grows from your seed, and the eleven biomes get placed off one climate table, where temperature follows latitude just like it does here on Earth (colder at the poles, warmer at the equator) and Perlin noise decides the moisture across the surface. Each planet type gets its own slice of that table, kind of like setting its own thermostat, so the desert world ends up mostly savanna with a thin strip of actual desert near the equator, and a frozen world only ever gets the cold end. No single world carries every resource, so sooner or later you'll want to leave the home planet to mine the ores you can't reach yet. Every planet is a perfectly smooth sphere on purpose, with the lakes and oceans as the only dips, and they're not always water.
Each of the 37 research nodes unlocks specific recipes, machines and power sources, and you pay for them with science packs that your Research Labs pull off their belts, so more labs finish a node sooner. A tier opens once everything in the tier before it is researched, which is the milestone, and a recipe shows up on every machine that can run it the moment it unlocks, so nothing you built early drops out of usefulness. ARIA narrates the whole climb through six personality stages.
Weather is the power spine of Cosmic Scale, with seven storms you raise yourself. A Weather Generator runs a storm recipe: feed it the recipe's inputs and a storm forms on its footprint, paying out power and a byproduct charge that fuels your suit and later recipes. Each world's weather decides which storms can run there, roaming storms cross every planet, and a passive building under a matching storm reads its full rating. The Type-1 Catalyst recipe is meant to need a Cyclone Core, so that reaching Kardashev Type-1 will mean orchestrating hurricanes on purpose.
The storms (Tier 0 → Tier 6):
The weather you raise carries all the way to the star: the Hurricane's Cyclone Cores go into Science Pack 6, and the Superstorm's Storm Essence goes into every Dyson Frame the swarm is built from.
▸ Read the Kardashev visionI've built all of this with multiplayer in mind, and co-op is in development for the Steam release. The target is the thing that works so well in Satisfactory, where the host opens a Steam lobby with an optional password, your friends see the game in the Steam overlay and join with a click, and nobody has to forward a port or paste an IP address.
The goal is one genuinely shared factory, where the host runs the simulation and the factory on your screen is the one the host is actually running as you watch it, and one day you and your friends could each be off exploring a different star system at the same time. Solo play stays its own untouched path with no networking overhead.
It runs on Unity's own networking and Steam's relay, so there are no third-party servers to keep alive. It isn't finished, and there's no build to play yet.
Research your way into Tier 7, Stellar Ascension, and the star opens up. Launch Cradles and Frame Bays in the bays of your Orbital Rings throw Orbital Sails and Dyson Frames at the star, and the swarm grows in five ring stages. Sustain it at 10 petawatts, the real Sagan boundary for a Kardashev Type-1 civilization, and the run is won; rings six to ten wait beyond it, and you can keep playing as long as you like.
"Stellar Ascension is open. The rings throw the swarm at the star from here, and the Reflector Lattice decides how much of its light comes home."
ARIAEach stage adds sails to the swarm; its output climbs with sail count and your efficiency research, building toward the 10-petawatt Type-1 boundary. Thrown at the star by Launch Cradles in the bays of your Orbital Rings, with Frame Bays sending up each ring's frame. Hover a ring to inspect its build manifest.
The first 1,400 sails, thrown at the star by Launch Cradles in the bays of a closed Orbital Ring while Frame Bays send up the ring's frame. The first ring teaches the chain.
Another 1,650 sails, as more Launch Cradles fill more bays and Sphere Cores give a ring room for extra ones, with the Superstorm's Storm Essence in every Dyson Frame.
Another 1,950 sails, and the Antimatter Synthesizer wakes: Stellar Material from the Star Lifter and a Singularity Core make the Antimatter every Sphere Core needs.
Another 2,300 sails, with the Reflector Lattice nodes multiplying every sail's output toward the 10 PW line.
The last 2,750 sails bring the swarm to 10,050, and with Reflector Lattice IV researched it sustains 10 PW: Kardashev Type-1, and the win. Rings six to ten go on after it, each one fed Type-1 Catalysts, for as long as you want to build.
Move from a landing kit to a Dyson swarm. Every tier brings new machines and new resources, and every tier before the star brings a new storm to power them. Click any tier below to see what it unlocks.
From snowy tundra to steamy jungles all the way to purple crystal plains, each biome brings its own ground, its own weather and its own mix of resources.
So, back in 1964, Kardashev, a Soviet scientist from back in the day, came up with a scale for measuring a civilization by how much energy it can use. Type-1 means harnessing the energy of an entire planet, Type-2 the full output of its star, and Type-3 an entire galaxy, with each rung roughly ten billion times the one below it. Later on, another scientist you might be more familiar with, Carl Sagan, actually put a number to Type-1, and that value was 10 petawatts of energy, or about 500 times what humanity uses today. That number is the finish line in Cosmic Scale.
The landing kit's heavy build. Feed a storm recipe its inputs and a Tornado, an Electrical Storm or a Solar Storm forms on its footprint.
A four-input machine for the Ash Storm on the volcanic world and the Blizzard on the frozen one, with fluids piped in.
The largest mark, for the Hurricane and, on a gas giant's polar plate, the Superstorm at 22,000 MW.
Wind Turbines, Lightning Collectors, Solar Panels, Geothermal Generators, Cryo Coils, Tidal Engines and Gas Turbines read the world they stand on, and a matching storm lifts one to its full rating.
Every storm pays one charge a cycle, from Vortex Charges to Cyclone Cores, and they fuel your suit and later recipes.
The Superstorm's byproduct, and a part of every Dyson Frame the swarm is built from.
I love Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program, and in most of them, once you've launched the rocket, the game tells you you've won and rolls the credits. In Cosmic Scale, your character comes from a civilization that has already made it to Type-1 back home, so the Space Elevator is the halfway point, and the real climb is building your way back up to Type-1 at a new star, wrapping it in a Dyson swarm until you hit that 10 petawatt victory all over again. That climb is what the Kardashev scale describes, and it's the whole reason the game is called Cosmic Scale.
Counted live from the game's exported data files. Click a tile to break it down by tier, then click a bar to see exactly what's behind it.
"Oh. Hello! I'm ARIA, short for Autonomous Resource Integration Assistant. I'll be your guide on this world."
ARIA, your in-world companionCosmic Scale is a factory game I've been building solo since beginning my game development journey, in full 3D in Unity. You land in a foreign star system with not much more than some starting resources, and you build your way up to the heights of a Kardashev Type-1 civilization, from a hand-held mining laser all the way to wrapping a star in a Dyson swarm. It spans eleven biomes, 99 items, 74 buildings, 37 research nodes and eight tiers of technology.
I do. My name is Kyle, and I'm the solo developer behind OakTree Games, a part-time indie dev and a full-time dad and husband working in construction during the day, building the game in whatever hours I can find late at night. AI tools definitely speed up my development, but I am the one who finalizes everything that goes into my game.
It's in active development and coming to Steam, with no release date announced, because I'd rather under-promise. The devlog and the newsletter will say so the moment the first public build is available, and the public roadmap tracks what's still ahead.
Cosmic Scale is coming to PC (Windows) on Steam, and no other platforms are announced.
It shares the same DNA (conveyor belts, recipes, automation, fluid logistics), and I got inspired by those games and say so. What's different is that the world is a real 3D planet you can walk all the way around, every galaxy grows from a single seed, the planets and moons genuinely orbit, the weather is your power, and the endgame is wrapping a star in a Dyson swarm to reach Kardashev Type-1. There's also an AI companion, ARIA, who narrates the climb through six personality stages.
Co-op is in development for the Steam release, and I've built all of this with multiplayer in mind, but it isn't finished and there's no build to play yet. The target is a genuinely shared factory, where the host opens a Steam lobby with an optional password, friends join from the Steam overlay with one click, and the host runs the live simulation for everyone. Solo play stays the untouched single-player path with no networking overhead.
The most direct way is becoming a patron at any of the three tiers (Sapling, Sprout and Oak) or dropping a one-time tip on the support page, and any patron tier locks in a free copy of the game at launch and a name on the in-game Patron Wall. If you want a say in where the game goes, tell me directly on Discord, in the YouTube comments or at hello@oaktree-games.com, and sharing the project genuinely helps too.
Cosmic Scale is built in Unity HDRP with C# and HLSL shaders, in full 3D. Each planet is a sphere wrapped in rings of equal squares with a polar cap at each pole, with fault lines where the tiling has to break. Underneath it is a deterministic simulation tick, 20 times a second, so every player's world runs identically from the same seed, and the data for every item, building, recipe and biome lives in the game's own content files. Saves only remember what you've changed, and the seed grows everything else back.
OakTree Games is my one-person indie game studio, and the name comes from the idea that good games grow slowly, like oak trees, one ring at a time. The About page has the studio's story, and the Games page has the other two games.
Cosmic Scale is in active solo development, and the best way to follow along until launch is the devlog and the video episodes on YouTube. Supporting the build helps me keep going, and I appreciate it more than you can know.
