Clicky Islands is an incremental tile-building strategy game where you play a governor sent by the king to settle and grow a string of islands. It mixes clicker gathering, city-building, and resource trading, and runs from a tiny campsite all the way up to a full kingdom. Karrot Games is developing it, with Pocketpair Publishing sharing publishing duties alongside the studio.
Quick answer: Clicky Islands launches on Steam on November 16, 2026. Status is confirmed by the developer; no specific launch hour or time zone has been given. A free demo is already available to play.
Clicky Islands release date and platforms
The full game is set for release on November 16, 2026. It is listed for Windows, SteamOS, and Linux, with a single-player experience that includes Steam Achievements, Steam Cloud, and Family Sharing. The minimum requirements are modest: Windows 10, a 2 GHz processor, 4 GB of RAM, Intel HD Graphics 4000 or better, and 1 GB of storage.
Interface and subtitles are offered in eight languages, including English, German, Polish, Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Latin American Spanish. You can wishlist the game ahead of launch on its Steam store page.
How the core loop works
You start each island by hand, holding the left mouse button to gather basic resources through classic clicker play. Once you have enough, you recruit units that automate the grind. Right-clicking a resource or building assigns the nearest idle unit to it, and right-clicking again pulls them off. Production keeps running even while you are away, so the island grows between sessions.
Settlements climb through named tiers as you pour materials into upgrades. The progression moves from Camp up through Settlement, Village, and Town stages, each one labelled with a level such as Settlement II, Village II, or Town II. Building costs scale sharply along the way, with cost multipliers climbing from x1.0 to x17.2 and beyond as the island fills out.
Buildings span the full chain of a growing colony, from a Brush Hut, Wood Workshop, and Fisherman’s Hut early on to a Jam Factory, Cider Mill, Glassworks, Brewery, and Town Hall later. Each island is procedurally generated based on the perks you have unlocked, so the layout and resource mix change every time.
Trading goods for gold
Crafted goods and raw materials go into a warehouse, then onto cargo ships you send out for gold. Early shipments carry low-value stock like honey and barrels. As the island matures, you load luxury goods such as spyglasses, gold necklaces, candlesticks, iron rings, and pearls, with single runs pulling in millions of gold once a ship income multiplier is in play.
Gold funds the upgrades that speed up gathering and production, feeding the loop back into bigger shipments and faster island growth.
Meta tree perks and permanent progress
Between islands you spend accumulated Reputation points in a branching perk tree, reached through the Set Sail screen. Perks and island modifiers carry over to every future run, so each new start is stronger than the last. You can freely reset perks and experiment with different routes without losing your Reputation, which makes build experimentation low-risk.
The game saves automatically whenever you enter and then leave the New Island screen, where you spend Reputation, break fossils, and view your collection. You can wipe your data from the settings menu if you want a clean slate.
Fossils, artifacts, and island events
Search the old ruins on every island for fossils. At the researcher’s table, open them between island trips to uncover artifacts of varying rarities. Among the Legendary discoveries is the Tiki Mask, which the game describes as something that “technically protects you” but mainly floats and makes noise. Artifacts are permanent, just like perks, and carry over from run to run.
Islands also throw out one-off events and hazards that shift how a run plays. These include an Ancient Cauldron that demands resources before it is satisfied, a Scarecrow machine where you trade Amber for tokens and spin for a random prize, volcano timers that fail the run if you cannot feed them in time, and royal decrees from the King asking for specific goods such as top-grade wheat.
Map modifiers can also tip into chaos, with ghost swarms, erupting volcanoes, and invasions of marching frogs among the disruptions a run might face. Artifacts like the Legendary Tide’s Favour, which raises shipping capacity, exist to help counter those swings.
Try the demo before launch
A playable demo covers the opening stages and core progression, letting you sample the pacing before the November launch. The demo unlocks only a few island stages and leaves later content out, and the developer recommends the downloadable build over the browser version, which can show glitches.
With the full release locked to November 16, the demo is the clearest look at how the island loop, meta tree, and trading tie together before the complete campaign to kingdom status goes live.
