Pilots: Ascension

About this app

Your fleet keeps flying while you sleep — build from a grass airstrip to interstellar flight. Pilots: Ascension is a deep aviation idle and incremental strategy game. It starts with a hand-cranked fuel drum and a wood-and-fabric contraption that has no business leaving the ground. Your job is to get it into the sky anyway. You're the quartermaster of a tiny airfield. Crank fuel, recruit crew, and coax the first machines into the air. Then build an industry: depots, mines, smelters, and workshops; assign aviators to the jobs that suit them; and research your way up the altitude spine, from the Dawn of Flight and the Propeller Age into the Jet Age, with Rockets, Orbit, and deeper eras still ahead. It keeps the incremental loop you already know (gather, build, assign, research, trade, prestige) and adds mechanics built around flight: • Fleet and routes: design aircraft and fly cargo, passenger, and mission routes for funds, materials, and reputation. • Dynamic weather: four seasons plus live conditions. Tailwinds, fog, and thunderstorms can ground flights and shift production. • Pilot ranks: aviators gain experience and climb from Rookie to Wingman to Veteran to Ace, multiplying their output. • New Horizon: a prestige reset that banks Legacy and Ace Points, unlocks permanent upgrades, and makes every future run faster. No timers nagging you, no ads, no in-app purchases, and no account or login. Your save lives on your device and syncs across your devices through iCloud. It autosaves often, and offline progress is fully simulated when you come back. Start with a windsock and an empty field. Climb one horizon at a time.

AFTERBURNER — the biggest update yet. • Flight Plan: objective chains guide you from first crank to the Jet Age and your first New Horizon — with an interactive First Solo onboarding. • The Transonic Program: a six-step flight-test arc that gates supersonic flight behind real feats, not just research. • Jet-era industry: jet fuel refining, new buildings, jobs, refinements, and behavioral records that reward how you fly. • Aerology forecast: see the next few days of weather and plan clear-window operations; storms and fog now shift production. • Route economics: payout, fuel burn, and live risk per route — make informed dispatch calls. • Daily Contracts: three fresh goals each day. No streaks, no penalties — just reasons to fly. • Prestige as ceremony: your New Horizon is now a proper Final Flight with a full run debrief and Founding Charters that make each run play differently. • Feel everything: ETAs on every cost, welcome-back Flight Debrief, record and era celebrations, instrument-panel gauges, and a smoother, juicier cockpit throughout. • Optional anonymous usage stats (off by default, opt-in) to help tune difficulty — no personal data, ever. Hotfixes from launch feedback: • Fixed a research deadlock that blocked the Orbital Age — Nuclear Flight is now reachable (thank you, r/incremental_games) • Big performance improvements for large fleets — smoother late game, less battery drain • Bulk controls: build ×10/×100/Max, bulk trades, and grouped fleet management with bulk scrap • Clearer Ace Point carryover math in the New Horizon ceremony

Momentum comes from crawler snapshots for the tracked storefront. “Viral growth signal” means unusually fast recent rating gains; it is an indicator, not download data.

1. First observed Sep 4, 2026 · 2:39 AM $0.99