Honest answers.

Every Apple device you own, Apple Watch, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, and Vision Pro. One purchase, every platform, no account. The Watch is a place to play, not a place to glance: a real fight runs on the wrist, with both swing timers, your familiar, and the heal on the button.

Apple only, and that is a real limitation, not a phase. There is no Windows, Android, Steam, or web build, and none is planned. If you play on Windows, Melvor Idle 2 is the one to watch. I would rather point you somewhere good than sell you a device you do not own.

When you close the app, Tideward records the moment. When you open it again, the game simulates everything you would have done, at full speed, for up to 24 hours. You walk back to a screen of XP gains, drops, and crafted items, just like you'd been playing the whole time.

There is no offline-gain throttle, no ad-watch button to "unlock" your time, no premium tier that doubles it. Twenty-four hours, every time. Full math and design rationale here.

The game tells you before you walk away. The Harbormaster's Forecast dry-runs the fight you are about to leave, over the full offline window, and reports whether you hold or fall, the haul an idle stretch should bring, and how long the climb to your next combat level will take.

It runs the same code that will resolve the offline fight, not a separate model that can drift out of step with the game. In most idle RPGs this question is answered by a third-party combat simulator you install yourself. Here it is a screen in the game.

Same lineage, different bet. Tideward is built in the RuneScape-to-Melvor skilling tradition: multiple trades that level independently, gear and drops, and progress that keeps running while the app is closed. Melvor is deeper today and plays on almost anything; Tideward is native on all six Apple platforms from one purchase and computes its full 24-hour offline window on your device, with no server and no account.

Both comparisons are kept current, with a disclosure wherever we rank ourselves: 12 games like Melvor Idle and the idle games closest to RuneScape.

None that leaves your devices. There is no analytics SDK, no crash reporter that ships your stack to a third party, no advertising ID, no fingerprinting, no telemetry of any kind.

Crash reports, if you opt in via iOS Settings, go to Apple, not to me. I read aggregated, anonymized stats in App Store Connect, the same as any developer. Architectural deep dive on the privacy stance.

More than the genre norm, deliberately. Idle RPGs are an accessibility desert, and that felt like a bad reason to leave anyone out of a game whose whole premise is patience.

What that means concretely: VoiceOver labels on every control, with a speech budget so a busy fight does not talk over itself. Dynamic Type honored up to the largest sizes. State is never signalled by color alone. Reduce Motion, Reduce Transparency, Increase Contrast, and Smart Invert are all respected. The game is playable with one finger, and nothing is gated behind a gesture chain or a timed input. Apple's Accessibility Nutrition Labels are in audit ahead of the 1.0 submission.

The whole game answers by ear today. What is in progress now is widening the options past that: more of the game's fixed assumptions becoming settings you control, and the remaining per-platform passes. If something in the game is unusable for you, tell me on Discord and it goes to the front.

The download is free, so you can play a good way in before you decide. A single one-time $9.99 unlock opens the full game, and that one purchase covers every Apple device, iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV, Vision Pro, and Apple Watch. Family Sharing is on, so your household is covered by the same purchase.

Beyond that unlock you can buy cosmetics if you want to: a few profile icons and a card background. They are decoration. They do not touch a single number in the game, and you never need one. I would rather name them here than have you find them and wonder what else I left out.

The commitment, in full: Tideward is not built to keep taking your money. Every purchase is direct and one-time: you see exactly what it is, you pay once, and it is yours for good. No ads, no subscription, no loot boxes, no premium currency. Everything you bought keeps working.

Because I would rather be paid for decoration than for advantage. A lot of games on this store make their money by finding the few players who will spend hundreds, then building everything around keeping those players spending. That is not a business I want to be in, and I do not think it is good for anyone.

So the line is simple, and it does not move: you can buy things that change how your character looks. You can never buy anything that changes how your character performs. If a cosmetic ever carried a bonus, however small, it would have stopped being a cosmetic.

It is also worth knowing what is structurally absent. There is no currency to buy, so there is nothing to buy in awkward bundles that leave you holding a remainder. Nothing is random, so there is nothing to roll for. Nothing is consumable, so nothing can be bought twice. Every purchase in the game is one time and permanent.

No, and I am not going to imply otherwise. App Store apps cannot load third-party code, so a mod loader is not something I am withholding, it is something the platform does not permit. Everything in the game is in the game.

What I can do instead is build in the things people usually reach for a mod to get: the Harbormaster's Forecast in place of a combat simulator, visible drop rates and item sources in place of a wiki tab, App Intents and Shortcuts for automation, and a full export of your own save data.

Not in Tideward, and that is a design decision rather than a missing feature. Tideward is a single-player game with no live layer of mine behind it: no servers, no accounts, no friends list of ours, no presence counter, no online status. There is nothing running that could tell you who else is playing right now, because there is nothing running. A private, offline-first save is the thing this game is good at, and a live layer would compromise it.

The social features that do exist come from Game Center, which is Apple's, opt-in, and already in the game: achievements and leaderboards. The recurring leaderboards and Activities on the roadmap work the same way. None of it requires an account of mine or shares anything without your say-so.

Multiplayer, if it happens, is a separate game built on the back of this one, penciled for roughly the first quarter of 2028. That is an intention and not a promise, and nothing about it changes what Tideward is or costs.