Little Ant Colony Beginner’s Guide: Tips, Tricks & Strategies for Managing Your Ant Colony

Ever owned an ant farm before? If you haven’t, we at Level Winner guarantee that you will find a similar amount of fun (or maybe more, if you’re into idle games) with this guide. Unlike real ant farms, you won’t have to catch the little bugs yourself as these are readily available at the push of a button. Gismart’s latest entry into the idle game genre is leaning on the natural and the scientific. As opposed to some other games where your idle character fights off hordes of monsters or zombies, this one is a bit more similar to the likes of Terrarium and Pocket Frogs. Welcome to Little Ant Colony.

While the games we had previously mentioned have more depth and more content, Little Ant Colony is only but a brand new game with limited features as of this writing. The basic idea of the game is for you to control a small colony of ants that strips food (or money!) apart. With each little success you have under your belt, your colony grows stronger with even more ants.

Once your army of ants have successfully ripped something to shreds, you move onto something else. If there’s any praise to be given to this game, it’s how well-rendered the food items are; pay attention to the pepperoni pizza slice you start with. You’ll quickly notice that the pepperoni slices are their own models!

Before we begin our Little Ant Colony guide, we would like to first point out what each button does on the screen as the tutorial doesn’t provide enough info:

Grow Ant – Tap this button to add DNA to the growth of your next ant. Keep in mind that your ants grow based on the percentage on the button. If it says that it will grow by 50%, you will fill that counter by 50%. The next time you press it, you’ve got yourself a brand new ant in your army.

Ant Power – This button decreases the time it takes for any of your ants to break apart a piece of food away with its mandibles as well as the amount of food that comes with each piece. The higher the level of your Ant Power, the more productive and efficient the ants will be.

Food Upgrade – The Food Upgrade button increases the amount of food you gain when you press the Food button. This stacks with Ant Power, but it sometimes becomes more costly to upgrade.

Increase Max Limit – This button increases the limit of your DNA production (you can view how much DNA your colony produces by looking at the green bar at the topmost part of the screen). This Max Limit also allows for the creation of new ants as more DNA will be needed as your colony grows.

Fast Refill – This button quickly refills how much DNA you have in your DNA bar. It costs food for every refill. The bigger your colony, the more food you will need.

Food – This is a button that is manually tapped. The more you tap it, the more food your colony will generate. That way, you will be able to gain upgrades more quickly.

Ad Rewards – These are buttons that will pop up from time to time. Given that Little Ant Colony is a free game, it’s bound to have ads. The benefits you get from watching these ads are as follows:

• Instant Food
• Food Auto Clicker
• Ant Speed Increase
• DNA Refill
• Free Ant Growth
• Free Gems

We all dislike how ads can be intrusive, but if you want to get ahead of everyone else (especially if Gismart decides to implement multiplayer into this game), read our guide below to making the most productive colony in the yard!

Hold it! For this Little Ant Colony guide, we thought we’d try something different: after every tip, we will add some trivia about ants in general. Aside from learning how to play the game better, you’ll even learn a thing or two about these sugar-loving critters. How about that?

1. Focus On Strengthening Your Ants

Because we mentioned that tapping the Grow Ant button only adds to a percentage, this percentage gets steeper and steeper as you increase in level and colony size. Not only does the DNA percentage shrink, but the cost of actually growing an ant with DNA will increase after every push of the button. To alleviate this, it’s always a wise idea to keep your ants strong and on top of things.

Generating food is a lot easier than generating DNA and because of that, you should be strengthening your ants. Having them pick food apart more quickly and with more nutrients in them is more efficient than having plenty of ants but they take a while to build food up in your colony. Stronger ants will always mean a quicker food yield especially if you’ve chosen to increase their speed.

ANT TRIVIA: Ants can carry up to 50 times their body weight. This means, if you had the strength of an ant, you should be able to carry your car by yourself! Now, imagine what they can carry together as a group…

2. Tap The Food Button Like Crazy

If you’ve nothing better to do outside of playing this game, the least you can do for your little colony is to make it rain food. Place your thumb on the right side of the screen and tap that bad boy like crazy. It might be tiring, sure, but the ants will thank you later once you’ve realized that they’ve grown in strength and in number. If the tapping’s too much for you, you can always choose to watch an ad that rewards you the Food Auto Clicker which, for one minute, can yield even more food for your colony.

On top of that, if you choose to tap the Food button while this clicker is active, the yield of food will stack. The reason why we encourage you to actually watch the ads for this feature is so that you can consider these ads as a break for your finger. After all, we don’t want it getting sore, do we?

For the Gem option of this reward, we do not recommend you use it as there are other, cheaper ways to spend your gems.

ANT TRIVIA: A colony, which can also be called a formicary, is made up of singular or multiple queens that provide eggs accompanied by armies of female workers who tend to them. In addition, the workers build the nest and keep it tidy, tend to ant larvae, and even scout for food outside of the colony. Male ants, on the other hand, are winged and have the sole purpose of reproducing with any of the colony’s ant queens. The next time you see an ant, you’ll be able to tell which ones are male and which ones are female!

3. Upgrade Your Food Bonus

It’d be quite useless if you’ve been tapping the Food button this whole time and your ants aren’t getting enough. Aside from prioritizing the strength of your ants, we recommend that you also prioritize upgrading your Food Bonus. Ironically, you need Food to increase this, but the return will be much greater in the long run. If you increase your Food Bonus high enough, you’ll be able to generate your own food reserves with fewer taps.

Again, like the previous tip, if you happen to have the Food Auto Clicker on while you upgrade this, you’ll be able to increase your Food generation by a lot in such a short span of time. Just remember that making your ants stronger still makes for an easier and quicker way to earn Food fast.

ANT TRIVIA: Ants have been doing agriculture longer than humans have! They began their agricultural activities by farming fungus almost 50 million years before we even thought of growing our own produce. It’s suggested that ants began to farm around 70 million years ago, early into the Earth’s Tertiary period. What is even more fascinating here is that these ants used rather complex horticultural methods to increase their harvest by secreting antibiotic chemicals to stimulate fungus growth and even performed fertilization using their own dung! Wow!

4. Watch Ads For Bonuses

We know, we know. Everyone hates ads. They’re annoying, they’re long, they interrupt the flow of the game, and sometimes you might even find them a load of cringe. But hey, it should help the developers, right?

Despite having lots of ads, Little Ant Colony not only gives Gismart some ad revenue, these also reward you for watching them. Just like we said in Tip #2, consider watching ads as a break, especially when it comes to the Food Auto Clicker. Now, for which boosts are worth it, we can tell you because not all the ad-watching should consume your playtime with this game:

Food Auto Clicker – Again, it’s a break for your thumb and an easy way to gain Food overtime. If you’re working your thumb out, then this doubles your food production.

Ant Speed Increase – Faster ants means faster returns. Watch them dart to the food and back to the anthill in a matter of moments. Don’t blink, that cookie might already be cut in half if you do!

Free Ant Growth – Admittedly, the Grow button is really, REALLY expensive. To skirt this, we highly recommend that you just watch an ad to gain easy access to a new ant. Do note that the Gem option of this boost is better, but we will talk more about that later.

Free Gems – Why would you say no to free premium currency?

Clearing an Element – After consuming the food before the anthill, watch that ad. Instead of getting a measly 10 Gems, you’ll get 40.

As you can see, we left out the Free DNA Refill and the Instant Food because they just seem counter-intuitive right now. If they ever pop up, don’t bother. Focus on making better ants and better food. Keep in mind that as you upgrade any of your colony’s buttons, you might accidentally click an ad. To avoid this, tap these buttons carefully.

ANT TRIVIA: Ants have an efficient way of finding food. After leaving the nest in search of food, the scout ant meanders anywhere until it finds something that can be eaten. It eats some of the food and goes straight back to the nest in a direct line. Scout ants can observe and remember visual cues that allow them to instantly find their way back home.

As they march back to the colony, the scout leaves a pheromone trail that guides the members of their colony to the food source. When the foraging ants pick up this scent, they follow it, secreting their own pheromones on the path so it will encourage more members of their colony to take the food home. The worker ants will march back and forth along the pheromone trail until there is no food left to retrieve. Now THAT is efficiency!

5. Save Your Gems, Spend Them Wisely

With what limited ways there are to gain Gems in this game, there are so many more options here that will allow you to gain crazy long bonuses or even large sums of rewards. Below, we will tell you which are the wisest ways to spend your Gems to further improve the quality of your ant colony.

Ant Speed Increase – By spending 20 Gems, you will increase your ants’ speed for 100 seconds. Think of all the crazy amounts of food they’ll chew through to get you to the next element!

Colony Level Up – By spending only 10 Gems, you will gain 500% of the rewards presented to you. That’s five times whatever rewards you normally earn and it’s only 10 Gems!

Free Ant Growth – By spending only 10 Gems, the Grow button will be free for 25 seconds. Regardless of how much DNA you fill, you’ll always be closer to that new ant thanks to this.

Food Auto Clicker – By spending 30 Gems, you can have the Food Auto Clicker on for a solid 5 minutes. 30 Gems is a little bit steep, so this one’s your call.

If you’re feeling affluent (in real life, of course), you can always send money to the developers of this game. As of now, spending Gems in the Store tab at the bottom only allows you to buy large sums of food and that’s not always worth it.

ANT TRIVIA: Ants can be farmers, too! To gain any sugary secretions of insects that feed on plant sap, ants herd other insects such as aphids or leafhoppers by carrying them into their colonies. Leafhoppers are especially herded as they would take advantage of how ants take care of their own young. The leafhoppers would leave their larvae to be raised by the ant colony which, in turn, enables the growth of another leafhopper brood. This allows them to produce more sugar for the colony when needed.

So, that’s that about Little Ant Colony. In the coming weeks or months there might be updates to this game as in the interface below, there are buttons that are grayed out. A Map might mean more places to invade, Skins would certainly mean new looks for your ants, and Growth might mean more ways to improve your ants. Hopefully there will be a time you’ll get to watch your ants eat through leftover meat or even more interestingly, a bigger dead insect.

If there are any tips or tricks you’d like to share about this game, be sure to leave them in the comment section below!