Cosmic Forge vs Celestrike
Price, ratings, monetisation and update history for both games, side by side โ with what reviewers say about each.
Cosmic Forge
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Cosmic Forge is a deep offline idle game about turning a single iron vein into an interstellar mining empire. START SIMPLE Tap rocks. Upgrade your shaft. Automate with a baseline foreman. Watch a transporter shuttle ore from the mine to the refinery, then to the warehouse, where it sells for Coins. Every component โ shaft, transporter, refinery, warehouse โ has its own milestone multipliers every 10 levels, so progression keeps unlocking speed and capacity spikes. UNLOCK THE COSMOS Beyond Alpha Asteroid there are comet clusters, planets, moons, anomalies, and singularity zones. Each location type has its own production multipliers and warehouse sell rates โ anomaly-grade minerals pay poorly per second but richly per sale. HIRE MANAGERS Common managers enable auto-mining; bonus managers stack passive multipliers and trigger powerful active abilities (instant trips, production boosts, free upgrades). Assign them per mine. Some managers survive prestige. RESEARCH TREE 50+ research nodes across multiple branches โ economy, production, transport, offline efficiency, stock capacity, coin multipliers, prestige. Queue active research in parallel slots (expand via Galactic Research). Every tier you complete compounds. PRESTIGE FOREVER Perform a Stellar Reset when the cosmos is ready. Earn Stardust based on your total iron-equivalent across every resource. Spend Stardust on permanent upgrades that carry across runs. Eventually unlock Galactic Ascension โ a meta-prestige layer with its own research tree and Dark Matter currency. DAILY CHALLENGES Three challenges per day with streak rewards at 7 and 14 days. Missed days reset the streak but the game doesn't punish absence. OFFLINE EARNINGS Step away for up to a week โ Cosmic Forge continues mining at a tapered efficiency schedule and rolls a summary up on your return. Research that was in flight completes while you sleep. COMPLETELY OFFLINE No account required. No internet required. No ads. No in-app purchases. No subscriptions. No tracking. No analytics. No SDKs phoning home. GOD MODE (OPTIONAL) Want to test builds, skip a grind, or just play sandbox? God Mode is free for everyone โ a one-tap toggle in Settings (behind a "this may corrupt your save" warning, because it really can). First public release โ 0.19.0. Thanks for playing through 100+ pre-release builds with us.
Celestrike
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They came to shut your black-budget satellite programme down. Something didn't smell right, so you took it rogue: the satellites, the stealth launch site, all of it. Now you spy on the world from orbit, fight a cold war nobody admits is happening, and chase the UFOs everyone says aren't there. Celestrike is a spy-satellite strategy game played on real orbits, over an Earth drawn from NASA imagery, with drifting cloud and city lights after dark. SPY Secret sites are invisible from orbit until you zoom in and hunt for them. Pick a satellite, pick a site, and collect intel every time it passes overhead. Collection carries on with the app closed. Sell the intel for credits, then spend them on better parts or another satellite. STRIKE Other satellites share your sky. Fly past one for a look, or fall in behind it and shadow it. Hold close and you steal its technology; hold at any range and you drain the data it has collected. Arm your satellites with mines, a railgun or EMPs and bring rivals down. Some targets fire back. INVESTIGATE Not everything up there is ours. UFOs circle faster than any orbit allows and answer to no registry. Your camera catches them as blurs at first; a better camera shows shapes nobody has on file. Plot your sightings and they lead you to alien bases hidden under open ocean and polar ice. Craft come down, sit on the ground for days, then leave: find one from orbit and send a recovery team to take what it leaves behind. Enough recovered hardware builds the TRB-01, a strike craft fast enough to catch a UFO in flight and bring it down in a real-time dogfight. Then send a team to collect the wreckage. Alien technology unlocks parts no human factory builds. EVERY MOVE COSTS Where a satellite flies decides what it can see and how often it comes back. Every manoeuvre burns propellant, and only a paid servicing flight puts any back. Imaging satellites need daylight, and a storm under the pass slows them down; signals satellites work at three in the morning, in any weather. You never need to know orbital mechanics: every option says what it costs and what it buys. BUILD YOUR FLEET Start with one satellite; your first finished site pays for a second. Three hulls, and every bay is an upgrade ladder researched from the intel you collect, so the targets you chase decide what you unlock. No level gates. Satellites, parts and propellant are only ever bought with credits the fleet earns. SKIP THE WAIT, IF YOU WANT TO One real minute is one game hour, and waiting always works. If you would rather not wait, an optional purchase sells packs of in-game hours that fast-forward the whole world: every satellite collects, every mission lands, every tank burns. You choose how many hours to spend each time, and the game never spends them for you. New campaigns start with 200 hours free. Single player. Fully offline: no account, no sign-in, no server, no ads, no tracking.
Screenshots
Verdict
The clearest difference is in-app purchases: Cosmic Forge at none against Celestrike's 3. Celestrike's advantage is update cadence (every 11 days vs every 5 weeks) and iOS requirement (15.1 vs 17.0). On price, ads and device support there is nothing between them.
Scored on Price ยท Rating ยท Positive reviews ยท Number of ratings ยท Update frequency ยท Ads ยท In-app purchases ยท Monetization ยท Best chart rank ยท Devices ยท Requires iOS
Both are free to download. Celestrike sells 3 one-off in-app purchases. Cosmic Forge asks for nothing beyond the download.
Cosmic Forge ships an update every 5 weeks, Celestrike every 11 days. The most recent releases landed on October 25, 2026 and October 24, 2026 respectively.
| Parameter | Cosmic Forge | Celestrike |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | Free |
| Update frequency | Every 5 weeks | Every 11 days โ better |
| Ads | No | No |
| In-app purchases | No โ better | Yes |
| Devices | iPhone | iPhone, iPod โ better |
| Requires iOS | 17.0 | 15.1 โ better |
| Further details โ not scored | ||
| Size | 6 MB | 68 MB |
| Age rating | 4+ | 4+ |
| Developer | QUALITY CAT SP Z O O | ANDREW IRELAND |
In-app purchases
Cosmic Forge
No in-app purchases
Celestrike
- 2 Weeks of Game Time$1.99
- 1 Month of Game Time$4.99
- 3 Months of Game Time$9.99
Questions
Is Cosmic Forge free?
Is Celestrike free?
Do Cosmic Forge or Celestrike have ads?
Which is updated more often, Cosmic Forge or Celestrike?
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