You hit stone. Ore comes out. You spend the ore on cats, and the cats hit the stone for you while you do something else.

That is the whole game. Everything below is a way of doing it faster.

An idle game that respects the "idle" part. It runs while you are away, it runs with the tab closed, and nothing in it asks you to come back at a particular hour. There is no energy bar, no daily streak to lose, no timer built to make you feel bad for having a life.

What it does have is a mine that gets stranger the deeper you go, and a crew of cats who are very bad at organising themselves.

• One click to start. Hit a rock. That is the tutorial.

• Two ways to play it. Actively, chasing combos and placing traps by hand, or in the background while it earns for you. Both work. Neither is the wrong one.

• It ends. Or it does not — you choose the mode at the start.

Every rock you break raises your combo, and the combo multiplies your damage. It falls the moment you stop, so it rewards streaks, not patience.

Rocks with a golden ring are seams: hit them one after another and the combo climbs fast. Some layers grow crust, hardened stone your pick bounces off — that is what the demolition cats are for, and the Diamond Tip if you get that far up the tree.

And when the combo is high, you can spend all of it at once on a giant ball of fur that bounces around the gallery wrecking everything it touches.

Cats mine, fish, scout, demolish and boss the others around. Each one is generated with its own name, rarity and quirk — a trait that helps at something and costs you somewhere else.

They also get tired, get hurt, and catch things. A cat in low spirits mines badly, and one with mange spreads it to whoever is standing nearby. You feed them fish, you send them to the infirmary, and sometimes you decide that a common cat with a bad chest is not worth the fish.

Two of them are real. Gizmo and Igris are my own cats, in the game with their own coats, their own faces and — in Igris's case — a crown he did not earn but will not give back.

Nine layers between the Quarry and the Core, and each one changes something about how you mine, not just the numbers on the rocks.

Above them sits a tree of 155 nodes with fog on it: you see what you own and what it opens, never the whole map. Some nodes are specialities — forks that close the other side permanently. Quality or Quantity. Precision or Brute Force. You will not see both in one run, and that is the point.

Rats, moles and bats come for the mine in waves. You can meet them with your own pick, with cats who fight back, or with crossbows, cannons and tesla coils planted along the gallery.

Every fifth wave brings the Rat King, with an escort, because a big enemy walking slowly into six turrets is a nice picture and nothing else.

Deep rocks drop remains, and remains buy research.

The bag holds eighteen discoveries and a run gives you eight or ten of them, so no two runs end the same way. You pick one of three, and it fills while you play — and while you do not.

If you want it faster there are three small games down there: stop a marker in the golden zone, sort bone from tooth from rubble against the clock, or rebuild a fossil with no timer at all. They are accelerators, never a toll: skip all three and the research still finishes on its own.

• Buy it once. No microtransactions, no season pass, no currency you pay real money for. The gacha inside spends ore and fish, which you mine.

• It works offline. No account, no server, nothing phones home.

• Ten languages, including a full Russian translation with its four plural forms, because "5 котов" and "2 кота" are not the same word.

• Your save is yours. Four slots, export and import as plain text, and it never leaves your machine.

Now go and hit some stone.

Developer Note:

I made this by myself, after work.

Gizmo and Igris are real. They're my cats — the grey one who supervises everything, and the white one wearing a crown he never earned and has no intention of returning. Dropping them into a mine full of pickaxes is the most fun I've had with a keyboard.

I'm not a studio. The art is made with AI tools, because that's what I can reach today, and I'm learning to do more of it by hand with every update. But the game itself is mine, written line by line: the tree with its 155 nodes, the specialities that close each other off forever, the way each layer changes how you mine and not just the numbers on the rocks. It's even translated into ten languages, with the Russian plurals done properly — because "5 котов" and "2 кота" are not the same word, and someone had to care about that.

Here's what I can promise. You pay once. No energy bars, no daily streaks, no timer built to make you feel bad for having a life. It runs while you're away, it works offline, and it never phones home.

If you buy it, you're not funding a roadmap. You're buying an afternoon of cats hitting rocks — and giving one person the time to make the next thing better.

Thanks for being here. Now go and hit some stone.