A new roadmap

We have reorganized the roadmap. Versions are out; phases are in. Phases describe what we are building. Versions describe where we are. Those are different questions, and the old roadmap was trying to answer both with the same label.

Where we are

Subterrans is around v0.2. The simulation runs. Two colonies, pheromone trails, foraging, combat, a rule-based AI opponent. You can play a round end-to-end and lose to the enemy queen.

What rounds do not yet have is shape. There is no middle. You dig, forage, and fight until one queen dies. That is a loop, but it is not yet a game — there is nothing that builds pressure, no moment where the match turns, no point at which the right decision earlier becomes visible as the right decision in retrospect.

That is what Phase 3 is for. More on that in a companion post.

Where v1.0 is

Version 1.0 is feature-complete and genuinely fun. Not a date. A destination. The phases between here and there are the things we have to build to know whether the game is actually fun, and to fix it if it is not.

That framing matters. The old roadmap listed v1.0 as a milestone we had already shipped — the PRD and architecture phase. That was wrong in a way that mattered: it implied more progress than there was, and it made “v2.0” the new thing instead of acknowledging we are early in a long arc. The new numbering is honest. We are around v0.2. We know what we are building. The destination is clear.

The phases

The roadmap page has the full detail. Short version:

Phase 1 — PRDs & Architecture. Shipped 2026-04-14. Requirements and architecture for the seven essential systems.

Phase 2 — Playable POC. Shipped 2026-04-28. The simulation runs in a browser with two colonies and a functional game loop.

Phase 3 — First Real Round. In implementation now. Seven mechanics that give a match a beginning, middle, and end.

Phase 4 — Yard Scale. The world grows from one patch to a yard of connected territories with biome diversity.

Phase 5a — Sensory Pass. Audio and pixel art. The game starts to feel like a finished product.

Phase 5b — Variety Pass. Additional predator types, multiple map seeds, expanded round configurations.

Phase 6 — Mobile. Touch input and a performance budget for mid-range phones.

Phase 7 — World & Social. Castes, weather, day/night. Multiplayer is also here, framed as exploring — see below.

Version 1.0. Feature-complete, genuinely fun.

What changed from the old roadmap

Three things came off the list or moved.

Yellow Ant is removed. Direct control of a single ant, SimAnt-style, was on the old roadmap as a planned depth feature. It is not in any current design. The game’s interesting design space is in colony management, not individual control. Removing it is not a concession — it is an honest accounting of what the game is.

Castes, weather, and day/night have moved. They were filed under “Beyond v2.0” with no home. They now belong to Phase 7 — World & Social — which gives them a place in the sequence without implying a timeline.

Multiplayer stays, framed correctly. It is in Phase 7, labeled as “exploring.” The architecture preserves the option — deterministic simulation, replay logging, the whole foundation — but no design work has started, and a commitment to ship multiplayer before we know whether the single-player game is fun would be the wrong commitment to make. It is on the roadmap to anchor future architectural decisions. It is not a promise.

The point

Working in phases keeps us honest about scope. Each phase has a question it is answering. Phase 3 asks whether a round can have shape. Phase 4 asks whether the world can have scale. Phase 5 asks whether the game can be felt as well as played. Each question has a real answer, and if the answer is no, the phases after it are wrong.

The roadmap is subject to change. Phases may be reordered, split, or dropped as we learn what makes the game fun.