A village that carries on without you.
Zip Lands is a co-op creature collector and village builder, built around one idea. The game should keep running while you get on with your life, and coming back should be something you look forward to.
Games on a timer usually punish you for having a life.
The pattern is familiar enough to be invisible. An evening away costs you something. The best rewards go to whoever checks in most often. A board somewhere ranks you against strangers who check in even more. It works, in the sense that it keeps people opening the app, and it leaves most of them slightly worse off for having played.
Zip Lands is built the other way round, on purpose. A world is one shared save running on its own clock. Waves land whether or not anyone is watching. Wood, stone and silver accrue against elapsed time up to what the Warehouse holds. When you open it again, the record of what happened is waiting to be read rather than sat through. Ten minutes at lunch is a real turn.
The clearest place this shows up is what happens to a world nobody has opened for a fortnight.
The world sleeps. It does not save up a backlog.
After fourteen days with nobody showing up, a world goes dormant and stops running entirely. When a member comes back it wakes with its clocks rebased rather than replayed, so you never walk into a fortnight of missed waves landing at once and a flattened village for the crime of coming back. The world was not under attack while it slept. There was nobody there to attack.
The same instinct runs through everything else. There is no leaderboard, no ranking and no way for one player to attack another. The daily streak credits a day when every member of a world has been active inside the same twenty four hours, so it never demands that two people be online together, and its bonus is deliberately small next to research and prestige. Showing up together should feel good. It should not be the only way to get anywhere.
What it will not do.
A short list, and every line of it is something you can check for yourself.
No ads.
None in the game, none on this site, and no ad code sitting in the build waiting to be switched on. The site's content security policy would refuse a third party ad script outright.
The only outside host the site may contact is the sign-up captcha.
Analytics only if you agree.
Nothing measuring you runs until you have said yes. Refusing is one click, given the same weight as accepting, because a refusal that is harder to reach than an acceptance is not freely given. You can change the answer from the footer whenever you like.
Say no and the analytics tools are never released.
No hidden odds.
Before a squad leaves the village you are told the real chance of being ambushed on the road, and that number comes from the same code that rolls it. Anywhere the server would refuse an action, the button knows before you press it.
A button that fires and fails is treated as a bug, not a surprise.
No punishment for a break.
Take a week off. Nothing decays, nothing falls down, and the village does not hand you a bill of missed waves when you get back. A world you leave alone is waiting, not owed.
A dormant world wakes with its clocks rebased.
Early, and honest about it.
Zip Lands is in active development. What is in is real and playable: thirteen buildings, fifteen Zip types with a full effectiveness chart, six gods to worship at the Temple, research, marches, ambushes, poacher camps, wild Zips, spy missions, the Zipdeck and prestige. It is a game rather than a demo.
Some of it is held back deliberately. A world currently takes a small number of members, and that ceiling is a tuning decision rather than the shape of the game: it goes up once waves, ambush odds and the economy still hold together with more people spending from one warehouse. The species catalog is being added to. Numbers move while the balance settles.
There is no dated roadmap on this page, because a date written today would be a guess wearing the clothes of a promise. What is true is that this is being worked on, and that the things above are the things being worked on.
If something is wrong with it, say so.
A bug, a rule that reads as unfair, a word doing the wrong job, a translation that is off. The contact page reaches whoever can change it, and feedback this early shapes the game far more than feedback later will.
The village is quiet right now. That will not last.
Claim a world of your own, or join one with a code. It costs nothing to find out whether it fits the way you actually play.
Free to play. No download, it runs in your browser.