Time is the resource
Skills train and missions run in real time. Sessions are short decision bursts; the game plays out between them.
⬠
In development
Cradleward
IdleSpace tradingMobile firstWeb prototype
An idle space-trading game where you never leave the station.
Read on
The premise
You are an immortal
trader‑baron.
You grow clones of yourself, train them over real time, seat them in ships, and dispatch them on long-running missions — trade routes, mining ops, exploration, escort, smuggling, piracy — through a shared persistent galaxy where other players' clones are doing the same, and where a freighter crossing lawless space can be caught in a pirate's net.
The galaxy is alive without other players. NPC convoys run real trade routes. Pirate clans set real ambushes. Factions patrol, an alien Swarm spreads along the rim, and buried in Precursor ruins is the story of where your clone technology actually came from.
Dispatch
→Wait
→Report
→Adjust one thing
→Re‑dispatch
The session
Two to ten minutes, a few times a day. Collect the results, read the interesting ones — a haul that slipped a pirate net, a rare scan — then send everything back out.
The week
Unlock a clone slot or a hull class. Finish a long skill. Push a corporation project. Answer the ecology — a Swarm push, a depleted field, a trade lane that moved.
The yards
Role is silhouette.
Yard is language.
Frigate
Brandt
Hauler
Kettle
Miner
Hollowmark
Explorer
Cassara
What a ship does should be readable in its outline; who built it should be readable in everything else. Four yards, one constrained palette.
Design pillars
Seven invariants.
Every feature is tested
against them.
The fleet acts, not the player
No turn economy, no action points. Your throughput is capped by clone slots — never by the hours you can afford to grind.
Shared galaxy, async interaction
Nothing requires two players' time windows to line up. Everything another player can do to you resolves against your standing decisions: route, fit, escort, insurance, backup cadence.
The NPC world carries the game
The galaxy must be fun and dangerous at population one — convoys to rob, pirates to dodge, patrols to fear. Other players multiply a living world; they are never the missing organ it can't live without.
Every session contains a decision
Pirate heat rises, fields deplete, the Swarm spreads, the contract board rotates. The optimal answer keeps moving. If a check-in ever reduces to login-and-collect, that is a design bug.
Risk is opt-in and priced
Safe space is truly safe and modestly profitable. Contested and lawless space pay better, because things are allowed to hunt there.
Time, convenience, identity — never power
Monetization sells those three and nothing else. No gacha. Variance can be reduced for money; upside cannot be bought; risk can never be reduced to zero.
Inspiration
Inspiration
from favorites.
Trade Wars 2002
Port trading, sector navigation, and pirates waiting on the lanes.
EVE Online
Real-time skill training, clones, zoned security, and loss that matters.
Elite Dangerous
Ship roles and the outfitting fantasy.
Clash of Clans
Async raids, the dispatch-and-return loop, and corporation group play.
X4: Foundations
A production economy run on a handful of raw materials, deepened by chains rather than widened by count.
The name
Cradleward — the heading the whole game bends toward.
The Cradle is the dead Precursor megastructure at the galaxy's center: the forge where cloning was born, the source of the technology every clone in the game runs on, and the place the story is walking toward. Every career converges on it. Explorers find the way in, combat breaks the gate-rings, miners extract, traders run the evacuation.
The name states the destination and the question at the same time.