Build An Ant Empire is a free Roblox colony tycoon by Insect Kingdom studio. Servers hold 6 players. You start with a small nest, roll ants, sell food, and reinvest Cash.
Before you spend anything
Finish the short tutorial. Code redemption stays locked until that tutorial is done. On desktop the controls used by the colony loop are WASD to move, Space to jump, and E to interact. The gear icon for Settings is a screen button, not an E target.
You begin with one nest slot. The Ant Queen starts by offering a Common egg. Rolling is free. Buying the ant costs Cash, so do not spend the last of your money on a board and then stand in front of an offer you cannot take.
The first working loop
- Press E at the Ant Queen and buy the first affordable ant.
- Place it in the open slot. An ant left in inventory does not produce food.
- Pick up food boxes at the collection station.
- Carry them to the Sell station and convert them to Cash.
- Open Settings from the top-right gear and redeem a code you have not used. See the codes page for which strings are still listed.
- Put the first Cash into Egg Luck and Egg Rolls, not into a mutation potion.
If no food appears, no ant is placed. If food appears and Cash does not, the boxes never reached Sell. If every purchase is a Common, the luck boards are still the blocker.
What to ignore in the first hour
Leaf Mutation Potion starts at $1M Cash, and Starlight is listed at $5.1Qi. Those are not starter buys. Mount training removes the ant whether it succeeds or fails, and a teleport back to the nest already covers most of the walk. Speed Jelly is a timer, not a permanent ant.
The Index pays one-time rewards for discoveries. Claim a prompt when it appears, then go back to the loop. A discovery does not mean that ant deserves the only slot forever.
After the loop is stable
Compare each new offer with the ant already in your weakest slot. Empty space can hold a temporary Common. A full nest should replace that Common when a higher rarity is affordable. The rarity ladder and the editorial slot tiers are on the tier list. Named workers, without published per-name stats, are in Ants.
Then read upgrade order before you buy a second board level, because every level costs more than the last.