Last updated on January 4th, 2026 at 09:03 am
Idle Acorns – Simulation Game Review
Idle Acorns is a Simulation/Casual game from aleros.io LLC, first launched in 23rd March 2021.
It’s rated 4+ and currently has 1,189+ ratings on the App Store.
What Makes Idle Acorns Stand Out
Inspired by the classics, Idle Acorns is a fun mobile clicker game that features no advertisements, no in-app purchases, and no data-mining.
Inspired by the clicker games of the old internet, Idle Acorns brings a fun narrative to the mobile clicker arena but without getting weighed down by advertisements, in-app purchases or data mining. Explore the forest and ocean with Benny the squirrel and enjoy everything from fishing, to gardening. Unlock the campfire to invite new characters, collect resources, and craft items. Featuring 4 mini-games, iCloud backup support, Game Center support, iMessage sticker pack, and more!
Like classic Idle games, Idle Acorns respects time travel. Please note that time travel will disable Game Center features.
Shake the tree to gather acorns. Purchase upgrades and enlist scavengers to collect acorns while you are away!
Sell your acorns, and unlock new areas in the shop. Speak with Benny the squirrel to navigate your adventure.
Cast your line, and catch fish in the ocean. Open the map to visit your acres of land, or upgrade your offline collection.
Unlock the campfire and invite all new characters. Trade resources and buy recipes to craft over 24 new items.
- Forge diamonds and buy upgrades
- Go fishing and cook fish
- Buy land and grow trees
- Unlock the campfire and trade resources
- Buy recipes and craft items
- 4 Mini-Games
- Share resources with friends
- Lots of character dialogue
- Seasonal events
- iCloud backup support
- Game Center leaderboards and achievements
- iMessage sticker pack
IMPORTANT: iPhone SE (2016 First Generation) and iPod touch are not supported.
This Simulation game offers engaging gameplay and regular updates for mobile players.
Player Feedback
As a newer release, Idle Acorns is building its player community. Early feedback suggests .
Recent Updates & Development
Latest Update: 22nd July 2024
Recent improvements include:
Acorn AI and Bug Fixes!
Introducing Acorn AI! A new way to experience the forest by providing an authentic experience for what it is like to actually talk to an Acorn.
New Features:
- Acorn AI
Bug Fixes:
- Fixed issue where Benny Orders a Box becomes impossible to collect.
- Fixed Game Center Disabled Bug and added the ability to re-enable Game Center once.
- Other small bug fixes
Download & Availability
Idle Acorns is available through the official App Store for iOS devices.
Requirements: Requires iPhone 5s / iPad Air / iPad Air (Cellular) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina) / iPad Mini 2 (Retina, Cellular) / iPhone 6 / iPhone 6 Plus / iPad Air 2 / iPad Air 2 (Cellular) / iPad Mini 3 or later.
Compatible with iPhone and iPad devices.
Player Experience Highlights
Community Insight:
This is the best game ever all we ask is that you update it more. Oh and anybody that are considering get the game, do you get the game, Its really good. Or in our opinion, it is.
Ive basically stopped using the app store. We only found this game after asking AI for something cute and idle without ads or IAPs. Idk why 2$ for a cute little game is like unfeasible for them to sell to us now but Im glad this exists.
Truly its everything it promises. The idle game with no ads. We wish it moved a bit swifter, more fast paced but there is nothing wrong with the game as it is (hence our score.) If you like idle games, and you know you do, this one is a value.
Its slow paced and the kind of game you can play 5-10 minutes every few hours. Its pretty fun but if you play it for more than that each day you can get burnt out pretty easy. With that being said for the 3 dollar price tag its definitely worth it.
This is a very relaxing game to us. The sounds for each button is pleasing to our ears and the ui is bright but doesnt hurt our eyes. We think this is the perfect game to play if youre looking for something simple but cute to play, but Ill you decide that for yourself.
Theres a game breaking bug. After you have bought the 3 feathers, the bat doesnt recognize that youve bought them. This doesnt let you progress in the game.
Can we have a way to not have to do the fishing mini game or the others? We are tired of doing those but we want to continue playing. Overall, great job! We love what you have done.
Only thing holding this game back is the very bright UI. Love it during the day, but at night our eyes are not happy. Our favorite idle game to come back to.
Its very fun initially and gets genuinely horrible after like a few hours, we lowkey wish there were adds.
We enjoyed the first part of this game, but by the end everything is arbitrary, dissatisfying and a little buggy.
Grinding is not much of an issue with us as long as it gives a sense of accomplishment. This game does not. You can grind for hours in this game and get nowhere basically and when you do hit that incremental step it takes days to hit another one.
Barely adapted for non-touchscreen play. Campground crafting is poorly explained and anticlimactic. Costly recipes (super fertilizer, fishing net, etc.) that seem like they would improve the gameplay only work for a single use, making them extremely uneconomical and pointless.
For a paid clicker game, we expect a lot more. Ive played plenty of free clicker games which can be relaxing, but incredibly complex with the methods to optimize production at the same time. Of course you can do some of that here, but its incredibly limited. Most of the game is just artificially dragged out with long timers and high upgrade costs that require you to manually tap for hours, or just collect what is automatically gained for 4 days till you can buy something. Progress shouldnt be too easy, but you never really feel like youve achieved a high production rate. On top of that, the main acorn currency becomes almost useless after a certain point, so you just wait 6-12 hours for diamond trees to grow and for fish from the simple mini-game to cook so you can sell them for diamonds. At least the art styles pleasant though.
We realize that arbitrary delay may sound unfair since that is sort of the entire premise of an idle game. But what ive never encountered in any idle game is an arbitrary delay in the time you can take actions such as tapping or accessing menus. Forgetting that it takes 20h for a tree to grow 60m acorns and you need 2.5b acorns to get a feather (in late game you need multiple feathers to progress), forgetting that you have to wait ten seconds in between catching fish and casting a new line, even forgetting that whales never appear to boost your acorn production, you are rate limited not only in the tapping gimmick (to maybe 3 taps per second), but also rate limited in how fast you can navigate various menus and ui elements. Getting enough acorns to get a seed to get one of 2-5 feathers is not a fun slog. Without boosts, thats five days per feather. Of course there are the boosts, but the boost minigame is, you guessed it! Rate limited with arbitrary and unnecessary delays. Overall the game starts as a chill and enjoyable experience but by late game turns into frustration generated by poor design choices.
Ive played so many idle games, all of them have p2w ads and iaps. Finally, a game that doesnt exploit with money.
We can tell you from starting this game, the gains are trash for a long time. You will basically build up to a point of about a million acorns per hour of offline gains. And thats that, you will have a single moment to purchase a single upgrade, and thats a wrap. You will spend less than 5 mins per hour collecting offline gains and maybe you can afford 1 upgrade and maybe this is the hour to collect the premium currency you cooked up. And on that note, there isnt even a premium or iap store. Not sure where the dev is going with this game but they better get on it, things dont gain slow traction in this world anymore, they live and they die. Better get with the times on this one.
No ads, no in app purchases. Just pay $2 and get the FULL GAME with no scummy anything. Pure actual enjoyment. But it is VERY slow.
Its the simplicity and the music for us. We cant say enough about this game. Im surprised we got hooked on it. It takes the resource building thing in a lot of games these days, adds one song, a couple of mini games, and the simplest graphics youve never seen then makes one of the most addictive and refreshing games Ive played. No cash grab annoyances here, its freeee! (The refreshing part). At least try it, you may hate it or it might become your next favorite.
We have stopped playing a lot of idle games bc the new trend is produce a lot of easy boring and covered in add games. But this one is good. We're a happy customer and cant ask for more.
This has become the nicotine patch of idle games for us. Some other reviews have complained about its slow burn, or that you cant speed it up much through a bunch of manual interaction, but that has become one of the things we appreciate the most. It doesnt cause us to get into the usual idle game cycle of getting addicted, spending way to much time on it, and eventually deleting it in a moment of sobering self reflection. It doesnt give that massive dopamine rush like other games, but thank goodness for that. It is fun, deeper than it first appears, and completely supports checking in from time to time and then leaving without a nagging tug to go back right away.
Its so relaxing, no ads or flashes in your face. No trying to sell in app purchases. Just a great game with chill music. We turned off the sound fx have only the music playing so we would recommend that if the clicking sounds get annoying.
Love this game, Ive been playing it like every day for a month. Im kind of in the end game now which means the progress is a bit slower than before, but honestly thats probably good for us lol. We love that it doesnt have any ads or in-app purchases! So satisfying. Thanks for making this game! Feedback: we would love if we could upgrade the tree (with water and sunlight) and the scavengers a bit more in the endgame phase (once Ive finished the game).
The pacing to buy your first land is a slog to get 50 diamonds. Meanwhile you cap the upgrades on getting acorns so it takes forever to upgrade the furnace and cabins.
We have been playing this game for a couple months now. Its fun, relaxing, and pleasant to look at. It seems self explanatory at first. But there is a lot of hidden mess and cryptic understanding on what your suppose to do next especially as you unlock the camp ground. We dont know what each animal does before hand and its hard to know how to plan crafting when we dont fully know what Im getting. Even with the in game guide its not always clear what you are suppose to do or how things work. We get its an idle game without a paywall and we really appreciate that, but eventually your gonna be waiting days to unlock things in the late game. All in all, its still enjoyable and relaxing. We definitely will continue to play . But more clarity would be nice.
We like that there are no ads or in app purchases but you get to a point where you have to collect acorns for multiple minutes before you are able to buy an upgrade and that it just seems like a waste of time. We still love this game.
Fun game and definitely worth the money, no in app purchases creates a more genuine experience. Multiple layers of worlds to unlock that will take many days on end. Definitely a good amount of idle automation and activities in game to manage. Fairly simple game, but maybe thats what makes it enjoyable and a balanced casual experience. Check in from time to time and you might be surprised what you discover. 4/5 stars because its more on the casual end and could use a few updates with more achievements and so on. Definitely worth a play though.
One of the best idle games Ive played. Definitely more of a slow burn than most. The art style is simple and refreshing with nice use of color. Tap registration on moving items (fish, spiders, etc.) is very poor and Ill often have to tap the same thing multiple times (and sometimes still miss it, you dont have much time). This stands out as being the only frustrating thing here. Otherwise we really like it.
So this game is pretty great all around, but it gets the clicking very wrong. There's a button to click to get acorns (your main currency), and it does some very wrong things with it. It doesn't register clicks as fast as you can tap it. There's apparently a cap to how fast they want you to click and collect acorns. Dumb, but it would be acceptable IF clicking too fast didn't also cause the game to not recognize the majority of your clicks (98%… It's almost as good as not clicking at all). You will collect MORE acorns by tapping slower. This might sound like a good thing, but the problem is that there's no good indication of where the line is between "optimal collection speed" and "oops you're going too fast so we're only registering one click every few seconds". We have to go way slower than we need to just to make sure we don't cross that line. Either they need to show an "acorns per second" thing so you can tell when you're going too fast that guess from 500aps to 25aps, or preferably, they need to reprogram it so that it can register every click – even if they cap the collection speed, but having it be where clicking too fast is as good as not clicking at all is really bad. Five stars if they fix that.
The game is fun, but we dont accrue acorns when the app is in the background. What am we missing.
We feel like there are some strange design choices in this game that make it feel very imbalanced for a idle clicker. True out-of-app idle resource gathering is apparently nonexistent, or so slow as to be useless, in early game, but at the same time there are mandatory hours-long waiting periods to progress.
Maybe 6 hours worth of content, but it takes forever to get anywhere. Several mechanics are unexplainable and need to be understood through trial and error or a Reddit search. And once you understand what you should be doing, none of it is particularly fun or engaging. Only time consuming. Might be worth $2, but definitely not worth your time.
We really, really want to like this game. Unfortunately the progression system is way too slow to be enjoyable.
We like the theme and aesthetics. The game requires too much interaction though. No offline progress until several hours of play. Not truly idle.
Idle? Sure. Little to do other than watch long timers count down? Sure. Meh.
Just wanted to report that the tree disappeared. Only acorns showing, but no tree.
Our tree keeps disappearing so you only see the sky color and acorns… We tried to uninstall and reinstall which fixed the tree but lost our progress. If we're collecting acorns from the tree we should always be able to see the tree.
Theres a game breaking bug. After you have bought the 3 feathers, the bat doesnt recognize that youve bought them. This doesnt let you progress in the game.
We were excited for the big new update, but unfortunately we havent been able to play any of it, instead getting the message Here is our text field, if you are seeing this we probably have an error. Hopefully this will be fixed in the next update.
Love this game and play it daily. Have recommended it to several people who love it too. There is a (visual only?) glitch of a present on the Benny screen that says "button" next to it. That doesn't seem right. ;) Every so often on our iPhone 12 Max Pro, the game comes to an absolute crawl. We tap anything and it takes a long time (5-10 seconds?) for the game to respond. Nothing else seems to be experiencing this on our phone when this slow down happens, so we think it is the game. Restarting the game doesn't fix it. Restarting the phone does fix, but that's no bueno.
Our eyes burn and strain easily we cant play the game for longer than 10 mins.
We havent realized how satisfying it can be actually having to play a mobile game and not feeling at a disadvantage because theres some in app purchase that if we just used we could speed up our progress that much faster. Having no way but to progress through the game gives you such a feeling of accomplishment. Despite this being just an idle clicker it has brought us more satisfaction than most games with much more content that contain in app purchases. On one note there is one small bug we have found when using the swipe function to change menus if done so on the shake acorns button the button remains pressed regardless of player interaction. Id assume this isnt an intended feature. Other than that this game is great and definitely worth those 2 dollars.
Our favorite idle game and Ive played nearly every one on the AppStore. The pacing is perfect and the aesthetic is charming. Best $2 Ive spent on any app.
We have absolutely no problems with this game!!! Worth the price.
Sometimes progressions is painfully slow though.
First off, we love the game. We enjoy the concept and everything involved. Our biggest quarrels are the pacing after you start buying land. Introducing time skips is great, but 20 hours is a bit much in our opinion. Our other quarrel is the navigation is extremely tedious. We feel it could be condensed down to make it easier. Keep up the good work.
This game is pretty good, but its just like every idle game theres nothing new or special about this one.
Our zoom isnt on and Im still zoomed in overall good game.
Im still fairly early in to the game and it feels like an idle game with training wheels. The upgrades for the first screen max out before it ever feels like your getting a satisfying amount of resource generation. Even if it expands later in the game, time gates are the worst mechanic found in idle games and it seems like that it the only gimmick this game chose to utilize. Minimal content that just takes ages to get through doesnt make for a satisfying experience. Ill update as we progress but so far Im not impressed.
Even though it says so in the app info and didnt mention it until after we paid and downloaded it on said device? Probably should fix your app description.
Was hit with 6 and 12 hour time walls at very start. Not much explanation of what to do. Ill try it for a little bit more and see if it gets better.
User feedback from Apple App Store
App Details
- Version: 2.1.9
- Size: 148.93 MB
- iOS: 13.1 or later
- Languages: EN
- Content Advisory:
- Developer: aleros.io LLC
Last updated: 22nd July 2024 | Genre: Simulation, Casual | Developer: aleros.io LLC