You hold the parcel freight licence for a city that has stopped counting.
A drone-logistics idle game, run under the Corvid Line charter, with a bad attitude. Buy airframes, fly the night shift, and let the scrip accumulate whether you are watching or not — then keep flying as hazard, weather, rival carriers and an unending tide of compliance paperwork eat the margin. Ten airframe classes from a blister-pack quadrotor to a municipal delivery lattice, nine consignment tiers that pay better the less you want to know about the cargo, fifty-six scrip upgrades, an attrition engine that writes off airframes mid-flight, and two separate prestige layers to fall back through when the numbers stop moving.
STORY & LORE
The Stack
Airframes are cheap. Airspace is not. Everything above four hundred metres belongs to somebody, and everything below it belongs to whoever is holding it. Corvid Line's founding fleet was assembled from returns and insurance write-offs, and the airframe it started on remains certified for Class A consignments on the grounds that nobody has ever bothered to decertify it.
The Register
You start on Municipal Relief: subsidised, fixed rate, flown in daylight over lit streets to people who are pleased to see it arrive. This will not be true of every consignment class. The register runs nine tiers deep and the rate multiplier climbs from ×1 to ×1,600, with the hazard rating climbing right alongside it — from zero, to a number that has stopped being a percentage and started being a forecast. The last tier is called MANIFEST SEALED and the game does not tell you what is in it.
Attrition
Hazard is measured against fleet integrity, and the difference is paid in airframes. Write-offs are not a punishment for playing badly; they are a line on the P&L, and much of the upgrade catalogue exists to move that line. Losses on the clinical tiers, as the operations memo puts it, are not accidents. Price them in.
Falling Back
There are two ways to give it all up. Liquidate the fleet and you convert the operation into equity. Surrender the charter and you convert it into deeds. They are different resets at different scales, and a long game is a ladder of them.
HOW IT PLAYS
Two Axes
The economy is throughput (parcels per second) crossed with rate (scrip per parcel). Airframes and fleet upgrades push throughput; consignment tiers and rate upgrades push the multiplier. Neither one alone gets anywhere — the whole upgrade catalogue is arranged around keeping both moving.
Milestones
Every airframe class pays a bonus at 10, 25, 50, 100, 150, 200, 300, 400, 500, 750 and 1,000 units owned. Two separate upgrades exist purely to make those milestone bonuses larger, which is what makes deep single-class buying worth doing.
Autobuyers
Unlockable, and deliberately constrained: an autobuyer may never spend the last 15% of your scrip, so automation cannot leave you unable to react to an event.
Offline
Time away credits a capped fraction of current income and reports it in a welcome-back summary. Buffs expire rather than being credited, so you cannot bank a good weather window by closing the tab.
On This Site
Wired to the Arcade SDK through a bridge that only reads the game: the leaderboard tracks lifetime gross scrip, which survives both prestige layers so a reset can never cost you your rank. Cloud save holds the game's own save file and is merged in before the SIGN ON gate releases, so the browser copy and the account copy cannot overwrite each other. Eight of the game's internal awards are mirrored to site achievements.
AIRFRAMES
Base price and base parcels per second per unit, before upgrades, milestones and prestige. Each unit costs 1.15× the last.
| Airframe | Class | Base cost | Parcels/sec each |
|---|
| SPARROW-C | Consumer quadrotor | 10 | 0.2 |
| VESPER-2 | Courier quadrotor | 80 | 1 |
| DRAY-7 | Heavy-lift hexrotor | 1.15K | 8 |
| PYLON-4 | Captive relay platform | 26.0K | 46 |
| SEXTON | Autonomous night courier | 550K | 265 |
| CHOIR | Distributed micro-swarm | 15.0M | 1,500 |
| BULWARK | Armoured convoy lifter | 700M | 8,600 |
| CATHEDRAL | Stratospheric distribution platform | 120B | 50,000 |
| SPIRE | Vertical launch hive | 15.0T | 290,000 |
| LATTICE | Municipal delivery lattice | 2.50Qa | 1.75M |
THE REGISTER
Consignment tiers. Rate is the scrip-per-parcel multiplier; hazard is what it costs you in airframes to carry it.
| Tier | Rate | Hazard | Parcels required |
|---|
| MUNICIPAL RELIEF | ×1 | 0 | 0 |
| RETAIL SUNDRIES | ×2.4 | 13 | 250 |
| CLINICAL — SCHEDULE II | ×6 | 30 | 9,000 |
| PRIVATE SECURITY RESUPPLY | ×15 | 64 | 350K |
| BIOLOGICAL — UNCLASSIFIED | ×38 | 120 | 20.0M |
| MUNICIPAL COMPLIANCE HARDWARE | ×95 | 206 | 1.50B |
| ORDNANCE — DEFENSIVE | ×240 | 327 | 200B |
| PERSONNEL — NON-CONSENTING | ×620 | 499 | 40.0T |
| MANIFEST SEALED | ×1600 | 740 | 12.0Qa |
VERSION HISTORY
VERSION G2026-09-23
- Its two fonts (Oswald and JetBrains Mono) now load from the arcade itself instead of Google Fonts. Same look, no request to a third party, and the terminal still reads right on a network that blocks Google.
VERSION F2026-09-13
- THE LEADERBOARD SCORE CHANGED. It was raw lifetime scrip, which crosses the site's 1e12 plausibility ceiling within a serious week; every submission after that was silently rejected and the board froze. The board now ranks SCRIP POWER, 1000 points per factor of ten — same ordering, and it never saturates.
- Scores submit once a minute rather than once every ten seconds, and are forced through on leaving the page alongside the cloud save.
VERSION E2026-09-13
- Fits the portal frame. The game was authored to own a whole browser window (#app at 100vh, the HUD absolutely anchored inside a stage sized off vh). In the site's letterboxed box that stage collapsed to about 106px while the HUD still wanted 319px, so the HUD showed a quarter of itself, the skyline vanished behind the console and panels rendered hundreds of pixels below the frame edge. A portal layout layer now fills the box instead of the window, and nothing in the simulation was touched.
- The status strip becomes one compact row on short or narrow boxes, shedding the weather and clock readouts before the numbers you play by (scrip, rate, parcels/s, airframes). It is not a scroll container, so the stat tooltips still open over the console.
- Frame aspect changed from 16:9 to 3:2. The frame's height is capped at the viewport height minus the page chrome either way, so a taller ratio only made the game narrower; 3:2 buys the console about 60px more height at the same width.
- The sign-on gate no longer scrolls at short heights, and gets a clear band of sky above the console on desktop, where the skyline canvas is fixed behind the whole shell.
- Renamed the player-visible branding from LAST MILE to DRONE DELIVERY, on the boot screen, the page title and the meta description. The old wordmark collided with the site's separate Last Mile game. Corvid Line remains the in-fiction operator, and the consignment class called THE LAST MILE keeps its name, being ordinary freight jargon.
- New thumbnail. The old one was the uploaded build's own art and read LAST MILE / CORVID LINE, so the catalogue tile advertised the wrong game.
VERSION D2026-09-10
- Renamed to Drone Delivery Idle Game. The slug stays drone-idle: it has already moved twice and every change orphans the leaderboard rows and comments keyed to the old one.
- No change to the simulation or the bridge.
VERSION C2026-09-08
- Renamed from Corvid Line to Drone Idle; slug corvid-line -> drone-idle. The simulation is still untouched.
- The Arcade bridge now pushes to the cloud once shortly after boot as well as on its 30-second interval — before this, a session shorter than thirty seconds never reached the cloud at all.
- Touch sizing injected from the bridge rather than edited into the game's own stylesheet: on a coarse pointer the terminal's tab strip and mute control are raised to 44px, which they were not in phone landscape.
- Cross-device save verified in both directions: a newer cloud save primes local storage before the SIGN ON gate releases, and a newer local save is left alone.
VERSION B2026-09-08
- Renamed from Last Mile to Corvid Line, after the carrier the game is already branded around, and the slug moved from last-mile to corvid-line. The name Last Mile now belongs to a different game in the catalogue; nothing about this simulation changed.
- Verified clean at desktop and phone width: no console errors, no horizontal overflow, all eight terminal tabs render, 49-60 fps, and the Google Fonts faces fall back cleanly when blocked.
VERSION A2026-09-08
- First catalogued version. Brought onto the site as-is — the simulation is untouched.
- Added an Arcade bridge (99-arcade.js) that reads the game only through its window.__LM tap and its own save file, so nothing portal-shaped can reach the economy.
- Leaderboard submits lifetime gross scrip, which survives a liquidation and a charter surrender; submissions are skipped when the value has not moved.
- Cloud save wraps the game's own serialized state and is merged in — newest wins on meta.lastSave — before the SIGN ON gate releases, so an account save and a browser save cannot clobber each other.
- 'play' and 'high_score' token rules wired, each firing at most once per session.
- Eight of the game's internal awards mirrored to site achievements: the four service pins, the first fifty-a-second, the first write-off, the first liquidation and the first charter.