What Is Simple Idle Forge?
Simple Idle Forge is a complete toolkit for building idle and incremental games in Unity. It gives you five interconnected wizard tools that handle everything — resources, generators, upgrades, prestige systems, and achievements — without writing a single line of code.
You design your game through guided, step-by-step wizards inside the Unity Editor. Pick a genre template that matches your game (Cookie Clicker, Factory Tycoon, Survival, RPG, Gacha, or Prestige-heavy), customize your entries, click Generate, and your game database is ready to use. The toolkit handles cost scaling formulas, offline progress calculations, number formatting, bonus stacking, prestige resets, and every other system that makes idle games tick.
Simple Idle Forge also ships with four complete, playable demo games that you can study, modify, or use as a starting point for your own project. Each demo was built entirely with the toolkit — the same wizards and JSON pipeline that you get access to.
No Code Required
Every feature in Simple Idle Forge is designed to work without writing C#. The five forge wizards walk you through building your game's data from start to finish:
Name and Configure
Give your database a name and pick one of six genre templates. The template pre-fills your property definitions with industry-standard fields for your chosen genre — resource types, display settings, production tiers, prestige flags, and more. Or start from scratch and define everything yourself.
Define Your Properties
Set up the categories, flags, numbers, and text fields that describe your entries. For example, a resource might have a "Resource Type" category (Currency, Premium, Prestige, Material), an "Is Premium" flag, a "Display Order" number, and a "Short Name" text field. These properties appear on every entry you create and let you filter, sort, and query your data at runtime.
Build Your Entries
Create and edit entries in a split-panel interface with search, filtering, sorting, pagination, and bulk operations. Each entry has its own editor panel where you configure everything — production rates, costs with live scaling previews, prerequisites, milestones, effects, rewards, and all your custom properties. You can manage hundreds of entries comfortably.
Choose Output Paths
Pick where your generated files go. The wizard previews every file it will create so there are no surprises.
Generate
Click the Generate button. The toolkit creates your game database, a type-safe enum for every entry, and a custom editor with search, filtering, and pagination. Your data is ready to drop into your game.
If you do want to write code, every generated database comes with a clean runtime API. But the entire point is that you don't have to. The wizards, the JSON pipeline, and the demo games give you everything you need to ship an idle game.
The Five Forges
Each forge handles one pillar of your idle game. They link together automatically — your generator forge knows about your resources, your upgrade forge knows about your generators and resources, and so on up the chain.
Resource Forge
Define every currency, material, and resource in your game. Gold, gems, wood, iron, prestige points, energy — whatever your game needs. Each resource gets a starting amount, an optional cap (with five cap modes: None, Hard, Flat, Curve, or Step), a display format (K/M/B/T suffixes, scientific notation, or full numbers), a display color, and all your custom properties.
This is always the first forge you use. Every other forge pulls resource codes from here for costs, production, rewards, and prestige currencies.
Generator Forge
Define the buildings, workers, factories, and producers that generate resources over time. Each generator can produce multiple resources, cost multiple resources to buy, and scale its costs using five formulas (None, Linear, Exponential, Polynomial, or Logarithmic) with interactive preview sliders that show you the exact cost at any level before you generate.
Generators support two production modes: Continuous (Cookie Clicker style — resources flow every frame) and Timer (Adventure Capitalist style — resources arrive in batches every N seconds with a visible progress bar). You can mix both modes in the same game.
Each generator can have milestones — level thresholds that grant bonuses like "x2 production at level 25" or "+50% output at level 50". The Generator Forge is the only forge with two-level properties: you define properties on both the generator itself and on each milestone independently.
Upgrade Forge
Define the boosts, multipliers, unlocks, and automation triggers that players purchase to accelerate their progress. Each upgrade has multi-resource costs, an effect type, a target, and optional prerequisites that control when it becomes available.
Six effect types cover everything an idle game needs: Multiply (x2 production), Add Flat (+100 per second), Add Percent (+50% bonus), Unlock (reveal a locked generator), Automate (enable auto-buying for a generator), and Resource Grant (give the player a one-time resource dump). Upgrades can be one-time or repeatable.
Prestige Forge
Define the reset-and-earn-permanent-bonus cycles that give idle games their long-term depth. Each prestige layer has a source resource (what the formula reads from), a prestige currency (what the player earns), a formula type (Sqrt, Linear, Log, or Polynomial), reset rules that control exactly what gets wiped and what survives, and permanent bonuses that scale with total prestige currency earned.
You can stack unlimited prestige layers. The Survival demo has three (Season Reset, Migration, Evolution). The RPG demo has four (Awakening, Reincarnation, Hollowing, Apotheosis). Each layer can reset different things — one layer might reset generators but keep upgrades, while a deeper layer resets everything including the first layer's currency.
Achievement Forge
Define the global milestones, challenges, and goals that keep players engaged. Each achievement has a condition (reach 1M gold, buy 100 miners, prestige 5 times), one or more rewards (grant resources, add multipliers, unlock features), and optional flags for hidden (secret achievements revealed on completion) and repeatable (daily challenges that can be earned multiple times).
Conditions can check against resource amounts, generator levels, upgrade purchases, prestige counts, total production rates, or milestone completion — giving you complete flexibility in designing your achievement progression.
What Makes It Different
Offline Progress Calculator
The feature that no other idle game toolkit on the Asset Store provides. When your player closes the app and comes back hours later, the offline progress calculator figures out exactly what they earned while away. It takes the current production rates, the time elapsed, and your efficiency configuration (flat percentage, smooth curve, or step-based diminishing returns) and produces a detailed report of resources earned. You can cap the maximum offline time, and the calculator handles all the edge cases — cap limits, multi-resource production, and bonus stacking.
Your players come back to meaningful rewards instead of a blank screen. This is the single most requested feature in idle game development, and it's built into Simple Idle Forge from the ground up.
Numbers That Go to Infinity
Every game value in Simple Idle Forge uses double-precision floating point. That means your numbers can reach 1.7×10308 — far beyond the 3.4×1038 limit that breaks most Unity projects. The built-in number formatter handles the display automatically with K/M/B/T/Qa/Qi suffixes (and 51 more tiers beyond that), scientific notation, or engineering notation. Your game's economy can scale as far as your design demands.
Five Cost Scaling Formulas
Every cost entry in the Generator and Upgrade forges lets you choose from five scaling formulas: None (constant cost), Linear (steady increase), Exponential (the classic 1.15x per level that Cookie Clicker uses), Polynomial (quadratic or cubic curves), and Logarithmic (gentle late-game scaling). Each formula has preset buttons for common configurations, and an interactive slider that previews the exact cost at any level from 1 to 200 — so you can tune your economy before generating anything.
Two Production Modes
Generators support Continuous production (resources flow every frame, like Cookie Clicker) and Timer production (resources arrive in batches after a countdown, like Adventure Capitalist). Timer generators show a visible progress bar that fills up and resets when the batch is collected. Speed bonuses from upgrades make timers tick faster. You can mix both modes in the same game — the Factory Tycoon demo uses Continuous for extractors and Timer for refineries and assemblers.
Bonus Stacking That Makes Sense
Every bonus in the game — from upgrades, prestige layers, achievements, and temporary buffs — feeds into one transparent stacking pipeline: (base + flat bonuses) × (1 + percentage bonuses) × multipliers. No hidden interactions, no mysterious order-of-operations bugs. You always know exactly how your bonuses combine, and the system handles collecting and resolving them automatically.
Temporary Buff System
Apply timed bonuses like "2× production for 2 minutes" from ad rewards, daily login bonuses, skill activations, or timed events. Buffs integrate into the same bonus stacking pipeline as everything else, expire automatically, and support refresh (extending an active buff's duration). The system is ready for you to wire to your own reward sources — the toolkit never touches ads, in-app purchases, or platform-specific code.
Four Complete Games Included
Simple Idle Forge ships with four fully playable demo games, each built entirely with the toolkit. They aren't just tech demos — they're complete idle games with resources, generators, upgrades, multiple prestige layers, achievements, and polished UI. Each one demonstrates a different genre and teaches different features of the toolkit.
Every demo includes both its generated game databases and its JSON source data, so you can see exactly how the JSON-to-game pipeline works from start to finish. You can study them, modify them, or use them as a starting point for your own project.
Simple Kingdom
Genre: Classic idle clicker (Cookie Clicker style)
Layout: Centered column with dark fantasy theme
Content: 7 resources, 8 generators, 20 upgrades, 1 prestige layer, 20 achievements
The "hello world" of idle games. Tap for gold, buy generators that produce gold automatically, purchase upgrades that multiply your output, and prestige to restart with permanent bonuses. This demo teaches the core idle loop that every incremental game is built on.
Factory Tycoon
Genre: Industrial supply chain (Adventure Capitalist style)
Layout: Centered column with royal maroon and gold theme
Content: 12 resources, 10 generators, 24 upgrades, 2 prestige layers, 25 achievements
A supply chain game where raw materials flow through extractors, refineries, and assemblers. Extractors run continuously, but refineries and assemblers use timer production — each crafting cycle takes real seconds with a visible progress bar. Two prestige layers (Retool and Conglomerate) provide long-term progression depth. This demo teaches timer production, multi-resource economies, and stacked prestige.
Survival Idle
Genre: Survival with resource decay (Melvor Idle style)
Layout: Full sidebar with neumorphic black-and-white theme
Content: 16 resources, 12 generators, 24 upgrades, 3 prestige layers, 30 achievements
A survival game where food, water, and warmth drain over time. You must balance gathering and crafting to keep your settlers alive. Vital resources display as color-coded bars in the sidebar (green above 50%, amber 25–50%, red below 25%). Five basic gatherers run continuously while seven crafting buildings use timer production. Three prestige layers (Season Reset, Migration, Evolution) let you restart with increasing permanent advantages. This demo teaches resource decay, vital management, and the full sidebar UI pattern.
RPG Idle
Genre: Dark soulslike RPG with cross-forge integration
Layout: Full sidebar with dark neumorphic crimson theme
Content: 19 resources, 14 generators, 27 upgrades, 4 prestige layers, 35 achievements
A dark RPG where combat zones drain your health and endurance while producing souls, crafting materials, and prestige currencies. Ten generators use timer production (representing combat rounds and crafting cycles), while four passive generators run continuously. Four prestige layers (Awakening, Reincarnation, Hollowing, Apotheosis) create a deep progression system.
This is also the cross-forge showcase. If you own other Simple Forge packages (Quest, Enemy, Item, Skill, or Attribute), the RPG demo detects them at runtime and enriches its UI with their data. If you don't own them, the demo works perfectly standalone — it just shows a checklist of available companion packages so your players know what's possible.
The JSON Pipeline
Every forge can export its complete structure as a JSON file — definitions, entries, costs, prerequisites, milestones, rewards, and all custom properties. This JSON file serves as both a backup of your work and a template for bulk content generation.
The workflow is simple:
Export Your Schema
Use the JSON Workflow tool (or the Database Export window) to export your current database as a structured JSON file. The export includes your property definitions, all existing entries, and complete documentation of every field — what it does, what values are valid, and how it connects to other forges.
Generate Content
Take that JSON file and use it as a reference to create new entries. You can write them by hand, use a spreadsheet, or use any external tool that outputs JSON. The structure is fully documented and consistent across all five forges. All four included demo games were built this way — their JSON source files are included so you can see exactly what the format looks like.
Import and Generate
Import the JSON back into the forge wizard. The toolkit validates every entry, checks resource codes against your linked databases, and flags anything that doesn't match. Once validated, click Generate and your game database is rebuilt with the new content — dozens or hundreds of entries created in seconds instead of hours of manual entry.
This pipeline is how the four demo games were created. Each demo's JSON source data is included in the package, so you can study the exact format and workflow that produced complete, playable idle games.
Runtime Features
Beyond the wizard tools, Simple Idle Forge includes a full set of runtime components that power your game's live systems. These are the engines running under the hood of every demo game.
Offline Progress
Calculate what happened while the player was away. Configurable efficiency (flat percentage, smooth curve, or step-based diminishing returns), optional max offline time cap, and a detailed report showing exactly what was earned. Also includes time-to-afford queries for UI countdown timers ("You can afford this in 2m 34s").
Auto-Purchase System
Automatic buying for generators and upgrades with four strategies: buy the Cheapest first, the Most Expensive first, Round Robin through all options, or Disabled. Automation upgrades from the Upgrade Forge wire in automatically — when a player buys an "Automate Miners" upgrade, the auto-purchase system picks it up without any extra setup.
Statistics Tracking
Lifetime totals for everything: resources earned, resources spent, peak amounts, generator purchases, upgrade purchases, prestige count, milestones completed, buffs used, total play time, and total offline time. Auto-subscribes to all game events — just wire it up once and it records everything. Perfect for achievement conditions or a stats screen.
Save & Load Ready
Every runtime component can create a snapshot of its complete state and restore from one. The toolkit defines the snapshot format but leaves the actual persistence to you — PlayerPrefs, JSON files, cloud saves, whatever your game needs. Three API hook interfaces (Save, Reward, Notification) define clean integration points without touching platform-specific code.
Number Formatting
Built-in formatter that handles K/M/B/T/Qa/Qi suffixes (with 51 more tiers beyond that), scientific notation, engineering notation, time formatting ("4h 23m"), and rate formatting ("1.5M/s"). Every idle game needs this, and it works with the double-precision values that Simple Idle Forge uses throughout.
Event-Driven Architecture
Every runtime component fires events when things happen: resource changed, generator leveled up, milestone reached, prestige available, buff expired, and more. Your UI subscribes to the events it cares about and updates only when something actually changes — no polling, no wasted frames.
Getting Started
Import the Package
Import Simple Idle Forge from the Unity Asset Store. No external dependencies — it works out of the box with Unity 2021.3 and later.
Play the Demo Games
Open the Hub scene and try all four demos. See how a Cookie Clicker, a factory tycoon, a survival game, and a dark RPG all come out of the same toolkit. Pay attention to how resources flow, how prestige layers stack, and how timer production feels different from continuous production.
Open the Resource Forge
Go to Window → Living Failure → Simple Idle Forge → Resource Forge. Pick a genre template that matches your game, create a few resources, and hit Generate. You just built the foundation of your idle game without writing any code.
Work Through the Chain
Open the Generator Forge next, link your resource database, and define your producers. Then the Upgrade Forge, then Prestige, then Achievements. Each forge builds on the ones before it. By the time you've walked through all five, you have a complete idle game's worth of data — ready to wire into your UI.
Read the Forge Guides
Each forge has its own documentation page with detailed walkthroughs, explanations of every field and feature, and tips for designing your game's economy. Start with the Quick Start for a hands-on tutorial, then dive into the individual forge pages when you need specifics.
The Forge Ecosystem
Simple Idle Forge is part of a family of no-code database generators for Unity. Each one handles a different domain, and they all work together through optional bridges that detect each other automatically — no setup, no configuration, no dependencies.
| Package | What It Handles | How It Connects to Idle Forge |
|---|---|---|
| Simple Attribute Forge | Character stats, modifiers, templates | Attribute names appear in wizard dropdowns for stat-based scaling |
| Simple Item Forge | Items, equipment, loot tables | Item codes appear for loot rewards and crafting references |
| Simple Enemy Forge | Enemies, factions, squads | Enemy and faction codes appear for combat zone references |
| Simple Quest Forge | Quests, quest chains | Quest codes appear for milestone conditions and unlock triggers |
| Simple Skill Forge | Skills, skill trees, loadouts, combos | Skill codes appear for ability-based generator and upgrade references |
Install any companion package and its data automatically appears in your forge wizards. The RPG Idle demo showcases this integration — it detects which packages you have installed and enriches its UI accordingly. If you only own Simple Idle Forge, everything works perfectly standalone.