Who really banks your hours away?

The offline caps, side by side

The dividing line is not the number of hours, it's where the progress runs. Two of these games simulate your time away on your own device, so the full window works with no connection at all. The rest are always-online: a server advances your task while you're gone, but you need a connection to play at all.

Caps checked August 2026 against each game's own wiki or store page. Spot an error? Tell us at support@manugames.com and we'll fix it with a note.

Why "true" offline progression is rare in idle games

Most idle games on the App Store advertise offline progression. Most of them then quietly add caveats:

• "Up to 8 hours offline" (then ads to extend)
• "50% offline multiplier" (active play earns 2× what offline does)
• "Watch a video to unlock today's offline rewards"
• "Offline cap scales with your VIP tier"
• "Combat XP doesn't accrue offline" (only passive skills do)

Each caveat trades one of the genre's real promises for short-term retention metrics. The pattern is so common that the genre veterans, players coming from RuneScape, Melvor Idle, Idle Slayer, NGU, assume any new idle game has the same retention-engineered caveats hidden somewhere.

Tideward made a different commitment. The 24-hour cap is the only constraint. Within that 24 hours: full speed, every skill, every combat encounter, no premium gate. The "what happened while you were away" summary is real. The numbers in it are the same numbers active play would have produced.

Does Melvor Idle work offline?

Yes. Melvor Idle runs a full simulation of your time away when you reopen it, capped at 24 hours at 100% of the online rate (the cap started at 12 hours and was raised over time to 24 after player feedback), and it even simulates combat with food use and death risk. It's a genuinely good offline model, and Tideward deliberately mirrors it: the same 24-hour window, the same full rate, the same combat-with-food-and-death math.

The real difference is platform. Melvor is browser-first (it also ships on Steam, iOS, and Android), and its cloud saves and cross-play run through a Melvor account. Tideward is Apple-native and local-first: the simulator runs entirely on your device with no server and no account, so a full 24-hour window computes on a plane, in a tunnel, or with Wi-Fi off, and optional iCloud sync only reconciles between devices you already own. Same generous offline progression, built to run on nothing but your device.

The math, in plain English

When you close the app, Tideward writes the current Unix timestamp to your save file. The save also includes your active trade, current gear, current Vitality, food stack, prayer state, and active buffs. Everything needed to resume.

When you open the app again, the simulator looks at:

• Elapsed wall-clock time since the last save (capped at 24 hours).
• Per-action duration for your current trade (e.g., one Forging tick = 2.4 seconds; one Mining tick = varies by ore tier).
• Resource availability, do you have enough coal for the bars? Enough arrows for Ranged combat? Enough food to survive the elapsed combat?

The simulator then runs N action ticks, where N is elapsed-time / per-action-duration. Each tick rolls success/failure, applies XP, consumes inputs, produces outputs. For combat, the simulator additionally rolls accuracy, damage, food consumption, prayer drain, and death checks.

The whole simulation runs in about 100-300 milliseconds for a full 24-hour window, short enough to feel like an instant transition rather than a loading screen. The result is presented as a "what happened" timeline: XP gained, drops collected, food consumed, items crafted, deaths (if any) and the time at which they happened.

What's special about Tideward's implementation

Three things matter:

• Closed-form simulation, not a real-time tick loop. Some games approximate offline progression by replaying a fast-forward of the active loop. Tideward does the math in O(actions) rather than O(time elapsed), the simulator collapses long stretches of identical actions into a single statistical draw rather than rolling each tick separately.
• Deterministic seeding. The same offline window produces the same result regardless of which device simulates it. You can't game the simulator by re-opening on a different device.
• Real-resource accounting. If your character would have run out of food at hour 14, the simulator stops the combat loop at hour 14. If your arrows run out at hour 6, the Ranged loop pauses there. The simulator doesn't cheat to give you an unrealistically full reward.

How offline progression interacts with the 28 trades

Different trades behave differently offline:

• Combat trades (Attack, Strength, Defense, Vitality, Ranged, Magic, Vigil, Quarry) consume food, ammunition, and runes. Death stops the loop at the death timestamp.
• Gathering trades (Woodcutting, Fishing, Mining, Pilfering) loop on resource availability, Mining stops if your inventory fills up, Fishing stops if the spot is exhausted in some configurations.
• Farming is the unique case: it uses real wall-clock time independent of the offline-simulator cap. A magic tree planted at midnight matures at 6am whether the app is open or not. The 24-hour cap doesn't apply.
• Artisan trades (Kindling, Cooking, Forging, Handicraft, Bowcraft, Inscription, Apothecary) consume materials at the rate they would actively. The loop stops if you run out of inputs.
• Wayfaring trades (Wayfaring, Stargazing, Binding) interact with offline progression in skill-specific ways, Stargazing observation windows still depend on real-world time; Binding familiars still expire on their normal duration.

For per-skill offline behavior, see the individual skill pages, each has a section on what changes between active play and offline simulation.

Why 24 hours and not something longer?

Two design reasons. First, daily check-in retention: idle games that allow unlimited offline time train players to skip days, which is bad for long-term engagement. The 24-hour cap encourages a once-a-day rhythm without punishing missed days (the cap stays at 24, not "your missed days carry forward").

Second, simulation cost: a closed-form simulator gets slower the more actions it has to roll. Twenty-four hours of high-tick-rate combat is roughly 30,000 simulated actions; 72 hours would be 90,000. That math runs at app launch, on-device, with no spinner. The 24-hour cap keeps the resume-to-summary transition feeling instant.

FAQ, offline progression in Tideward

How does Tideward's 24-hour offline progression actually work?

When you close the app, Tideward writes the current timestamp to your save. When you open it again, the offline simulator runs the same combat math, gathering rolls, and crafting cycles your character would have done, at full speed, for the elapsed time, capped at 24 hours. You return to a "what happened while you were away" summary: XP gains, drops, food consumed, items crafted. There's no throttle, no ad-watch button, no premium tier that doubles it.

Does Melvor Idle work offline, and how is Tideward different?

Yes. Melvor Idle simulates your time away on reopen, capped at 24 hours at the full online rate (raised over time from an original 12-hour cap), including combat with food and death. Tideward uses the same generous model. The difference is platform: Melvor is browser-first with cloud saves and cross-play through a Melvor account, while Tideward is Apple-native and local-first. Tideward's simulator runs entirely on your device with no server and no account, so the full 24-hour window works with no connection at all, and optional iCloud sync only reconciles between your own devices.

How long does Idle Clans offline progress last?

Twelve hours base. The in-game Upgrade dealership can extend it by up to 6 more hours, and an active Premium membership adds another 6, for a maximum of 24 hours. Premium can be bought with real money or with in-game gold on the player market. The difference in kind matters: Idle Clans is an always-online game whose server advances your selected task while you are away, so you need a connection to play at all. Tideward and Melvor Idle instead simulate your time away on your own device, no connection needed.

Does Milky Way Idle have offline progression?

Yes, about 10 hours of queued actions continue while you are away. Milky Way Idle is browser-first with a Steam Early Access build, always online, and has no official iOS app, so on an iPhone you are playing it through a mobile browser. If you want an idle RPG whose full away window runs natively and offline on an Apple device, that is the gap Tideward is built for.

Does Old School RuneScape have offline progression?

No. OSRS is an always-online MMO, and skilling only advances while your session is open. The "AFK training" style popular in OSRS (start an action, check back every few minutes) is the play pattern that dedicated idle games turn into true away progress, which is why so many OSRS players end up trying Melvor Idle or Tideward.

Why is the cap 24 hours?

Two reasons. First, retention math: idle games that allow unlimited offline time train players to never open the app daily, which collapses long-term engagement. Twenty-four hours encourages a daily check-in without punishing missed days. Second, simulation cost: the offline simulator runs on the device when you open the app, running 72+ hours of math at app launch is slow enough to feel like a loading screen. 24 hours is the sweet spot.

Does offline progression work the same as active play?

Yes. The simulator uses the same RNG seeds, same accuracy formulas, same drop tables, and same XP curves as active play. A 1-hour AFK Forging session produces (within statistical noise) the same number of bars and the same XP as 1 hour of standing at the anvil. There's no offline-tax. Some genre-veteran games charge a 50% offline multiplier, Tideward doesn't.

What about combat? Does my character actually fight while offline?

Yes. The combat simulator runs accuracy rolls, damage calculations, food consumption, prayer drain, and Vitality regen exactly as it would in active play. If you set a Quarry assignment and close the app, you'll come back to the count progressed and the loot table rolled. If your character runs out of food and dies during the offline window, the simulator records the death and stops at that timestamp, you don't lose more time than the moment you would have died in active play.

Can I exceed 24 hours of offline progress somehow?

No, by design. Stargazing constellation buffs and certain Vigil prayers can boost your offline XP rates within the 24-hour window, but the wall-clock cap stays at 24 hours. If you've been away for 72 hours, the first 24 are simulated and the remaining 48 are forfeit. The cap is the same for everyone, there's no premium tier that extends it.

Does offline progression require a server connection?

No. The offline simulator runs entirely on your device when you open the app. CloudKit syncs the resulting state to your other devices afterward, but the simulation itself doesn't need a network. You can play Tideward fully offline (no Wi-Fi, no cellular) and the offline-progression math still works.

What happens with offline progression across multiple devices?

CloudKit reconciles to the most recent save. If you had an active session on iPhone yesterday at 11pm and pick up Tideward on iPad at 11am today, the iPad will simulate 12 hours of offline progress from the iPhone's last-saved state. The deterministic seed means the same offline window produces the same result regardless of which device runs the simulator.

Related reading

Comparing offline models across the genre? See 12 games like Melvor Idle and the best idle RPGs for iPhone, both note which entries simulate offline progress and which quietly charge an offline tax. The RuneScape-idle list splits the same field a different way: which games keep banking progress with the app shut, and which only run while you stay connected. And for the two always-online games in the table above, games like Idle Clans and games like Milky Way Idle rank the alternatives in full.