
Shard Cycle
Shard Cycle is an incremental prospecting game about getting richer and stronger. Sweep your cursor through fields of thousands of crystals, spend your drops on upgrades, and unlock effects that shatter hundreds at once. Dig deeper for rarer, tougher crystals. Watch your numbers climb.
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Media
9 itemsAbout the Game
Thousands of crystals. One cursor.
A field loads and the screen fills with crystals. You sweep your cursor across them and they burst, dropping shards that fly straight to your counter. Bank it, spend it, go again with a cursor that hits harder than it did a minute ago.
Upgrade the cursor
Every shard you bank goes back into three things: Power, how hard each strike lands, Frequency, how fast the strikes come, and Radius, how much of the field one sweep covers. Push Radius far enough and you stop aiming at crystals and start aiming at regions.
Unlock effects
Effects are not stat bumps. They are abilities that break crystals in ways your cursor cannot: lightning that jumps from crystal to crystal until half the field is gone, a storm that roams the field on its own and grinds down whatever it drifts across.
You unlock effects by finding their patterns in the deeper layers. Then you fabricate attachments to feed them, raising how often they trigger, how many crystals they catch, and how hard they land.
Dig deeper
Clear enough of a layer and the next one opens. Every layer down means denser fields, tougher crystals, and drops you cannot get above it. New crystal types appear as you descend, each one paying out a currency the layers above it never gave you.
Earn while you are gone
Experience banks into a currency you spend with a traveling merchant on goods that tilt the run in your favour. Deeper still, you unlock generators that keep pulling in currency while you are not playing, so you come back to a bank worth spending.
Numbers go up. Nothing goes down.
There is no prestige and no reset. Every level, every effect, every attachment stays yours. The only direction is down into the next layer, with a bigger number attached to everything you own.
Features
Thousands of crystals on screen, breaking by the hundred under a single sweep
A cursor you upgrade along Power, Frequency and Radius until one pass clears a field
Effects that chain, roam and detonate, each fed by attachments you fabricate
Layer after layer of denser fields, tougher crystals and rarer drops
Several currencies, a merchant, and idle generators that earn while you are away
Heavy, tactile shatter audio and a counter that never stops climbing