Victorian Idle
Presentation
Embark on an immersive journey in Victorian Idle, where you shape a thriving city by constructing buildings, meeting resident needs, and strategically managing resources.
Navigate the delicate balance of city planning as you ensure a seamless supply chain, preventing shortages and fostering the growth of your populace. Dive into the challenges of resource management and watch as your city evolves into a harmonious and prosperous Victorian masterpiece.
You can find the website online here.
Features
A non exhaustive list of supported features:
- Peasant population with related buildings and resources
- Worker population with related buildings and resources
- Essential buildings
- Random city incidents
- Auto merchant trades
- Productivity rate: you can adjust the speed of your buildings, at a cost of happiness
- Support different languages
- Propaganda to hide bad news / effects in the city
- Handle multiple cities
- Mini-games to challenge yourself, while big decision has to be made!
Others
- Cloud saves
- Dark / Light theme
Feel free to join the discord.
Also available on
Development log
- 1.17.3 is live38 days ago
- New version is live (1.16.0)57 days ago
- 1.15.x is live!63 days ago
- Newspaper and propaganda system (update 1.13.x)91 days ago
- 1.12.x is liveJul 28, 2025
- 1.10.x is now a thing! šJul 09, 2025
- 1.9.x is live ā¤ļøJul 02, 2025
- 1.8.x is live!Jun 20, 2025
Comments
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How do i increase morale on colonizing
Hey š, currently the only way you have to increase the moral on an expedition, is to use a ābiggerā ship (frigate or barbette).
Iāll add modifiers early next year š
thank you so is it possible to colonize
a proper tutorial would be nice
Appreciate the feedback! Was there something specific in the tutorial that didnāt work for you? Or anything missing?
ok how to word this
the tutorial should walk you through the basic steps 1 step at atime as i did not even know what to do it just said "open this menu" with out explaining where the menu was or what to do in it
I seeā¦ I have an idea on how to improve it.
Thank you for the feedback š
Tip; dont use AI. the game will be better with shitty doodles over stolen Ai images that frankly look ugly asf
everyone who downvoted supports the cessation of creativity and the defunding of creators around the globe.
Game developers are creators too and just because you use AI tools to speed up the process does not mean that there is no creativity involved.
When you give AI generation a try, you'll realize that you have to do quite a lot of work and selecting to get decent results.
Also this bullying of creators needs to stop.
Most of game developers who publish free games here are solo devs who simply do not have the budget to hire multiple artists for months to create these images. So there is no "defunding" happening as the budget that would pay the hypothetical artists simply does not exist.
the literal LIVES of people (https://news.mit.edu/2025/explained-generative-ai-environmental-impact-0117 , https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-25-107172) is NOT worth ANYTHING in video games. plus Ai is ACTIVELY making people stupider (https://tech.co/news/another-study-ai-making-us-dumb).
i will CONTINUE to bully those who use ai, it is an EXTREME turnoff for most consumers. if solo devs want their works out there, make shitty doodles, or even better, work with artists! There's a LOT of people, if you look, who would be happy to provide art, either at a cheap cost or even for free. many many actual artists would be gleeful if someone came to them over using ai.
YOU JUST NEED TO FUCKING LOOK.
if you use ai, you are a low life scumbag with a room temperature IQ and that IQ is actively dropping. put some actual effort into your damn work and not letting ai do it all for you.
You say "LOT of people" will provide art, even for free. Have you ever tried to create an unknown project with free online collaboration? Why don't you go ahead and give it a try...
Also do you know that running AI generation on my GPU takes less energy than running some AAA game? Are you bullying random gamers too, or just solo developers? If you were concerned about electricity consumption in the games industry, you'd be protesting AAA games, cause it costs more energy to run the games and they have hundreds of millions of players. I bet the energy consumption of a month of GTA5 is more than the total AI-image generation of solo developers over the last 10 years.
Please put these things in perspective and ask yourself what you are doing.
ai is literally killing our planet. it takes 10x more power than anything you can conceive of. (https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/05/20/1116327/ai-energy-usage-climate-foot...) actually provide proof of the bullshit you're spewing.
and i have! i currently AM. you literally just need to LOOK. and there's PLENTY of free assets someone can use,. there is always an alternative, ALWAYS.
Bit of a side suggestion but maybe allow the game to run alongside the mp3 loading instead of being stuck at the loading screen.
Thank you for your suggestion, Iāll have a look for one of the next release
Just downloaded this weekend and I'm really enjoying it!! Maybe a little too much bc it's very addicting lol. I did have a question about the detoxification center - it seems like the risk there is constantly rising faster than I can balance enough inventors to staff it. Is there a specific building/item production that causes it to rise so I can cut back on that until my population is stable?
Also it might be my laptop settings, but the colors in the incident response minigame cause some eyestrain, I'm not sure if they're overbright/oversaturated? Thanks for such a fun game!
Could you take a screenshot, so I can check and fix it, please?
I will share one as soon as I have another incident, thank you!
Here is a picture! I think it might be the red?
Hey, thank you very much for your comment. The risk is increasing a little bit slower than the disease (modulo how many detoxification center you have). For the disease and poisoning, only residences are taking into account: the more residences you have, the more the risk will increase. However, since the detoxification center is very expensive, perhaps I should lower a little bit more the risk increase. Would you mind sharing how many residences and how many detoxification center you have, please?
Thank you for the response! For Central Land, I have about 1784 residences total (estimating on peasant since it says 1.1k) and 12 detoxification centers. At one point I had 24 before I destroyed some, and the risk was constantly rising, maybe because I needed to have so many extra residences to support that many centers? For comparison, I have 20 hospitals since they were more affordable, and those incidents happen far less frequently. For Islands, I have 3 detox centers and 492 residences, and it has quite frequent poison incidents, though I don't know how many would be considered a normal rate. Hope that's helpful!
Hi, thanks for making such a great game. Am I missing something with the boats? It seems to indicate modifications are possible, but I canāt see anywhere to do that. At the moment Iām only able to load 30 items into each slot on a boat, meaning I need to create dozens if not hundreds of boats to carry enough items between islands.
Hey, thanks for your comment š Boat upgrades are planned for an update later this year. In the meantime, the next version will make inter-island resource transfers much smoother (and youāll be able to add multiple boats on the same route)
Hi, Thank you for this game, I was looking for one like this one for a long time.
However, shouldn't producing ressources be a source of revenue ? I mean look at the planks for instance : one unite of log costs (10\4=)2.5g (sold 1g) => so one unite of plank costs (1 log)2.5+(10\4)2.5= 5g and is sold 2g. The same for every ressource I saw so far.
I loose money by producing goods. Like someone said before, the only way to earn money is by taxing a large population maintained unemployed for the most part.
What kind of nation could prosper by willingly maintaining its population into poverty to tax it ?
Hey, thank you for your feedback!
Using instant buy/sell costs you money ā itās the price of convenience. If you sell resources passively, when the merchant visits your city, you earn a small profit. But if you travel and sell the resources yourself (e.g., by boat to another city), you make a much higher profit.
How much you earn depends on the method you choose ā faster trades mean lower gains, while slower, active trade gives higher returns.
That said, trade and taxes alone arenāt enough to sustain your economy. War also plays a role, but probably needs a little bit of tweak.
Additional income sources are planned and will be introduced in a future update later this year.
Hi Alex, thanks for developing this awesome idle game. Quick question, where can I produce ponchos? I canāt seem to find them anywhere thatās why I donāt have a production of it. I can only buy them from the resources. Is this a bug or thatās just the case? Thank you!
Hello, Iāll give you a small hint: you have to expand to another (tropical) place to produce them. You can have a look at the expedition tab (in the harbour menu).
Interesting… thank you Alex!
really loving this game. Its so satisfying to see your village build up resources. I'm having difficulty in maintaining cash. I think the only way to earn is through tax and selling resources. basically I have to keep a lot of unemployed workers/peasants to keep my cash flow in the positives. But I think that is the way to go for now. I'm not sure where I could get a rundown of my expenses, like is there a tab which shows the percentage of cash each type of building is consuming
Hello,
Thank you for the feedback!
Cash is the main thing to look for. The biggest part is coming from your population (taxes). You can also leverage trading and explorations / attacks (which may bring you a lot if they are well managed).
In the roadmap, Iāve included a way to track the expenses, to help you take the best decisions. Iāll also add new ways to generate money, but it will be later this year ;)
Hello Alex,
Really looking forward to new updates.
Might I suggest a new feature? Currently there's no way of knowing how close you are of running out of coverage of essential buildings like fire/police/church/pub etc. You get notified only when the city or public requirement/coverage of these buildings drops below 100%.
Also there needs to be a wiki page detailing all the mechanics, that would be insanely helpful to new players
In the next version, Iāve tried to change the āefficiencyā rate to a āsaturationā rate, but it feels not that great, so I may remove it from next version. However, a notification would be better, thanks for the suggestion!
Could you provide a save export method? My save is gone even if I logged in.
Also, are itch and production website use the same account? It seems like my account can not login production website.
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This is a great game with lots of fun. I can't wait to see the future update.
I was wondering if you might reduce the difficulty in the earily stage. Keeping the income blance is already difficult for new player. The fire/riot makes the blance even more fragile. They are nothing in the later game. But in the beginning, tt is frustrated because we can only sit through the minues-long event and see the gold drain out.
Hey,
Thank you so much for your feedback !
Itch is now using the production environment. It was not the case in the previous version, this explains why your save is not present. I can retrieve your previous save and import it back to the prod env, if you want (I just need your email).
Iāll reduce a little bit the difficulty in the early stage of the game, and will harden it on the late game.
Best regards, Alexdb
Thanks!
I alreay started a new game, made much more progess, and ran into game over. XD
I build 20 hospital but the risk bar never drop below 100%. The sense of not making any progress doesn't feel good. On top pf that, if I want to build more hospital and build faster, I need more population to provide me tax. This would make the risk event higher.
in addition, when the work force reduce by rito or fire, player has only two options: do nothing, or build more house to get work force. This make my risk management even more broken.
I like your idea of this game. I never see other game like this. but in my oppion, the negative feedback loop on risk is too strong for an "idle" game.
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I am not sure this is a bug or not:
If you don't have any hospital. The pandemic would never end. However, it won't go worse. Paying the pandemic upkeep is much eaier than building hospital.
Thanks for your feedback <3 !
FYI, Iām working on the city incident, and the next patch should make them less impacting, less frequent by still annoying. Also, in the next patch, the risk of a city incident displayed in front of a fire station / police station and hospital, will be much more comprehensible: it will display the immediate probability of an incident.
I hope Iāll be able to release this patch by the end of the week!
Again, thank you so much for your feedback!
how can ı sell item ?
Hey !
You can mark items to sell, by going to the āResourcesā screen, and click on a resource. This will pop up a window, where you will be able to select the quantity you want to sell. After that, every 5 to 10 min, a merchant will try to buy some resources from you.
Best regards, Alexdb
Is it a lost safe if I get to negative money?
Hey !
For now, there are no win / lose conditions. However, in the next release, I plan to add at least some lose conditions. One of them will be to have less than -2k coins. If you are stuck with your current game, because you donāt have enough coins, you can start a new game by resetting your current save. To do so, you can go to Settings > Reset save.
Best regards, Alexdb.