Something wrong?

The usual questions

My town is gone.

Your town lives in a single file inside the app's own private storage on your device. Two things remove it: deleting the app, and offloading it in Settings → General → iPhone Storage.

It is not backed up to anything I control — there's no account and no server, so there is nothing for me to restore from. It is included in an iCloud or Finder backup of your whole device, so if you have one from before the town disappeared, restoring the device brings the town with it.

A building has stopped and I can't work out why.

Tap it. A stopped building always says what's wrong in plain words, and there are only four things it can be: it's waiting on an ingredient, nobody is working there, the store is full, or it hasn't got the ground it needs.

The bubble floating over it says the same thing without tapping, and the Goods tab shows every good with what's coming in and going out per second — which is usually where you find the real culprit, one step further back down the chain.

Nothing seems to be happening any more.

Open the Town tab. It shows the age you're in, exactly what the next one needs, and how close you are to each part of it. If your people are short of something they want, it says so there too — a town that's going without grows more slowly, though nobody ever leaves over it.

How does starting over work, and what do I lose?

You give up the town and keep your points, which buy permanent improvements for every town after it. The Town tab tells you what your current town would be worth before you commit to anything.

You keep your points, your achievements and your statistics. The town, its buildings, its land and its research go.

Does it really keep running when I close it?

Yes. When you come back it works out how long you were away and tells you what the town did. It uses whichever is shorter of the wall clock and how long your device has been switched on, so moving your phone's clock forward buys nothing — and moving it back costs nothing and nobody is accused of anything.

I can't see well. Is it playable?

That's meant to be a yes. Every screen works with VoiceOver, and the whole town can be played as a list rather than a map — including placing buildings. Every text size iOS offers is supported, up to the largest accessibility sizes, and the four states a building can be in are told apart by words and shape as well as colour.

If you hit something that doesn't work that way, that's a bug and I'd like to hear about it.

Will there be ads or things to buy?

Not today — there are none of either, and no code for either in the app. If that ever changes, the privacy page will say exactly what, in the release that changes it.

Reporting a bug

idleeconomy@protonmail.com. The three things that help most:

• What you were doing, and what you expected instead.
• Your age and roughly how big the town was — a screenshot of the Town tab covers both.
• Your iPhone model and iOS version, from Settings → General → About.

There's no crash reporter in the app, so nothing reaches me unless you send it. That's deliberate, and it does mean I'm relying on you.