You don't give the orders from above. You walk, forage, carry, dig and fight with your own mandibles: drag seeds home, feed the queen by hand, and bite whatever is biting your workers. Everything else runs without you. Workers and soldiers bid for the jobs the colony needs, so when food runs low more ants forage, and when beetles reach the door everyone fights.

Foragers lay pheromones as they walk. Good routes to food reinforce themselves, dead ones fade, and the colony only knows about food its scouts have actually found. Above it all turns a living meadow: four seasons, rain and fog, day and night. Rain washes out trails and sends the beetles home, winter stops the plants growing, and nights get dark enough that you'll be glad of the glowing fungus and the fireflies.

Walk down your entrance and the world turns side-on, into a cross-section of the nest you dig tile by tile. Draw tunnels and rooms yourself (nursery, food and seed stores, larder, royal chamber) and your diggers carve them out, or leave it to the colony's own planner, which builds whatever the nest is short of.

The soil fights back. You dig through dark topsoil, red subsoil and pale clay; boulders won't budge, roots take twice the work, and buried seeds are a free meal for the queen. Dig a hall too wide and its roof cracks, then caves in on whatever is underneath. Daylight and moonlight pour down the shaft, while glowing fungus and glowworms light the deep passages.

A colony is a queen and everything she needs, and she needs a lot. Plant matter, seeds and meat all become eggs, and meat is the good stuff. Nurses tend the brood and move it deeper as the nest grows; it hatches fast in warm soil and stalls when the ground freezes. You choose how much of it hatches as soldiers. Store seeds for the lean months and keep meat in a cool larder before it spoils, because when the stores run dry, workers starve.

Everything the colony does earns XP. Level up and spend perks in the Genome Lab on Agility, Vitality, Mandible Force, Metabolism and Fecundity, making every ant faster, tougher, deadlier, thriftier and more numerous. Each level also makes you, the ant, harder to kill.

Plenty of things in the meadow eat ants, and a few are worth hunting. The Giant Beetle waits in a lair marked on your map. Its carapace shrugs off small bites until you shatter it, and its telegraphed ground slam scatters anyone left in the ring. Rally a war band, anywhere from a dozen soldiers to every ant you have, and lead it in. A kill pays a big chunk of XP, a Perk for the Genome Lab and Royal Jelly that grants your queen one of six colony-wide buffs. Rival colonies send their own hunting parties to get there first.

Combat is click to target, cycle with a key and right-click to auto-attack. Crits land in gold, and a real threat table means hitting hard pulls an enemy off your workers and onto you. Elite beetles turn up more often as the world levels. Five species of spider each fight differently, from the jumping spider that pounces from range to the orb weaver whose web holds a whole war party. Then there's the Goliath: 60,000 HP behind armour, walking in from the edge of the map straight for your front door. You can outrun it. Your colony can't.

You aren't the only colony. Every rival digs, forages, breeds, levels and evolves the same way you do. Each has a temperament (Warlike, Raiding, Hunting, Peaceful or Scheming) and decides for itself when to build, when to hunt and when to go to war. They remember, too: kill their ants or storm their nest and they'll hold a grudge, pounce while your army is away, and raid you for food once winter empties the meadow.

A rival at war conscripts real ants, musters them, marches across the map and breaks into your nest, going for the eggs first, then the workers, then the queen. Your soldiers sortie to meet them at the door, and every attacker that falls becomes meat for your queen. Or take the fight to them: rally your own band, storm their entrance yourself, and be the last colony standing.

A colony dies with its queen. A bloodline doesn't have to. Rear princesses in the royal cell, and if the queen falls one takes her place. On a warm afternoon after rain, a princess sets off on her nuptial flight to found a daughter colony, and the farther she goes and the more predators on her route, the lower her odds of making it.

Each daughter inherits a random share of her mother's level and genome, so no two turn out the same. Walk into any nest of your line to take control of it; lose one and your line carries on in the others. Outlast every rival and your princess flies on to found a new colony on a fresh map, carrying your line's genome with her.

• Play as a single ant inside a full real-time colony simulation
• A side-view nest you dig tile by tile, with rooms, soil layers, boulders, roots and cave-ins
• Colonies of hundreds of ants, each one choosing its own job
• A world boss, elite beetles, beetle raids, five species of spider, and the Goliath
• Rival colonies with their own temperaments, grudges and war parties
• Colony levels, a five-trait Genome Lab and six Royal Jelly buffs
• Princesses, nuptial flights, daughter colonies and a bloodline that outlives its nest
• Four seasons, weather, temperature, and a day/night cycle with dynamic lighting
• Procedurally generated, seeded worlds: share a seed to share a map
• Easy, Normal and Hard presets, plus dozens of world settings to tune