THE COLONY DOSSIER

What this is. FORMICADIA is a first-person crawl through nine strata of a living ant colony: dirt tunnels, fungus farms, nurseries, granaries, barracks, dead bores, and at the bottom the Deep Mother herself. The ants are upright, intelligent, and organized - every one you meet has a caste and an assignment, and the alarm travels faster than you do. Everything below is drawn live by the game's own sprite painters, so this dossier always matches the tunnels.

Move W/S, turn A/D or ←/→, sidestep Q/E. Click the view for mouse-look (pointer lock; A/D become sidestep, left-click fires, ESC releases). Fire CTRL / F / ENTER, use doors & arches SPACE, weapons 1–5, roll R, automap TAB, pause P, mute M.

The descent. Each stratum ends at a glowing descent hole. Clearing a stratum saves your whole kit - weapons, ammo, plate, gear. Dying only sends you back to the door of the stratum you died in. From the title screen you can revisit any stratum you have reached - go back with new gear and the sealed side-tunnels of the early nest open like tins.

The asymmetry that keeps you alive: ants climb (root lattices are open roads to the colony, closed to you until you loot the climbing spurs) but ants won't stoop (low crevices are yours alone, rolled up). When the swarm is six deep behind you, a crevice is a door that closes in their faces.

Each stratum has its own movement of the Formicadia suite - one formic theme, nine variations, the way one genome becomes many castes. Listen for the same four rising steps everywhere.

Whole wings of the nest stand abandoned, crevice-blocked and resin-sealed, and this is why. The vermin fight the colony, the raid, and you, without preference. When you hear a chitter run the length of a tunnel, understand: the Hundred-Handed fills that tunnel, wall to wall, and it is coming.

Scouts scream. A scout that sees you wakes every ant within earshot. The mandible blade is silent; guns are not. Choose the order you are noticed in.
Nurses undo your work. They sprint to wounded sisters and knit them shut. In the nurseries, kill the medic first or kill nothing.
The raid is not your friend. In the Old Tunnels, army ants fight the garrison. Let them. Follow the noise, loot the aftermath, finish the winners.
Aphids burst into honeydew - free vitality - but the herders remember. Milk the paddocks with a plan.
Rolled is nearly invincible (a shell absorbs 85% of everything) but you cannot fight, use doors, or climb. Roll through the swarm, unroll behind it.
Secrets: every stratum hides at least one false wall. With the pheromone antennae, secret doors and every ant and treasure appear on the TAB map. Before that: bump the suspicious walls.
The Queen lays soldiers while you fight her. Clear the eggs' newborns fast, keep the pillars between you and her barrages, and spend the bombardier charges you have been hoarding. That is what they were for.

The campaign's nine strata are hand-dug, but they are built on a seeded, validated map pipeline - every map is checked by a reachability prover that plays through the gear gates (roll, spurs, acid, sigils) before it ships. A full procedural stratum generator - endless descents, hours of tunnels, same lock-and-key logic - is designed and documented in GENERATOR.md in the game folder, waiting for its dig crew.