Cinderlift

Cinderlift is a game prototype about building machines out of real pixel physics on a planet you are trying to leave. Heat, phase changes, fluids, conductors, and materials are the building vocabulary rather than background decoration.

Status

Playable systems prototype. The current work is about making the existing systems coherent and useful as a progression game: exploration, refining, automation, electricity, and eventually an escape machine.

Current prototype systems

• A scrolling chunked world with adaptive active margins, a brief grace period for recently visible chunks, and sealed rooms that can stay loaded.
• A player with collision, temperature damage, hotbar, inventory, equipment, crafting, a searchable creative inventory, saves, and sandbox play.
• Materials with solid, powder, liquid, gas, frozen, and molten behavior; thermal conduction and phase changes are simulated directly.
• Item logistics: chests, item pipes, pipe crossovers, spouts, drains, placers, miners, filters, and block-watching devices.
• Physical electrical pulses in conductors. Pulses branch, create heat, melt weak conductors, and clean up destructive overloads.
• Separate circuit wires for named integer signals, including material signals, virtual channels, and Constant, Arithmetic, and Decider Combinators.

Build and run

Run:

build.bat

Then launch build\cinderlift.exe.

For the player-facing distribution, build build\cinderlift-launcher.exe with build_launcher.bat. Players download the launcher once; it installs the latest tagged GitHub Release into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Cinderlift, verifies updates before replacing files, and can launch the installed version offline when GitHub is unavailable. See LAUNCHER.md for publishing and self-update details.

The left catalog has materials and devices. Tab opens the creative inventory, X enters Circuit Wire mode, F enters the one-cell copper wiring tool, and holding Q shows the brush footprint while also making the wheel adjust brush size. Ctrl+Z reverses the most recent build or dig stroke (materials, background walls, copper wiring, and placed devices), including its survival inventory cost or mining drops.

Multitools store energy and recharge continuously. Each installed module is a complete shot with its own energy cost and cadence; occupied module slots fire from left to right and wrap. A shot waits when the battery cannot pay its cost rather than skipping ahead. Bounce is cheap rapid suppression, Shot is the general beam, Blast trades charge and cadence for a crater, Homing is a slow expensive seeker, and Teleport moves its owner to the projectile's last safe point on impact. Quick-tap R cursor teleport remains available.

The window is resizable. The game keeps its native aspect ratio and letterboxes as needed so UI hit targets and the visible world remain stable. Press F11 to toggle borderless fullscreen. The pause menu has a persistent 80--120% UI scale setting for interface text and item artwork; 100% uses the compact 34-pixel icon baseline while leaving click targets comfortably sized.

powderlike

A second executable over the same simulation: the falling-sand toy with the game taken off it. No character, no camera, no minimap, no inventory -- one fixed screen, the material palette, and the physics.

build_powderlike.bat

Then launch build\powderlike.exe. mingw32-make powderlike does the same thing. It is not a release artefact: nothing in the launcher or the CI workflow builds it, and it has no version resource and no saving.

It links every src/*.cpp except main.cpp, plus its own src/powder/main.cpp -- the same shape the test suite uses. So it inherits simulation changes for free: a change to how sand piles or what titanium melts at lands in both programs the next time each is built. The material palette is shared through src/brushes.h for the same reason.

World size is the feature the game does not have. There is no camera, so a smaller cell does not zoom out -- it makes the world bigger. Normal is two pixels a cell and a 512x384 world, Half is one pixel and 1024x768, Quarter is half a pixel and 2048x1536 -- 3.15 million cells and 3,072 chunks, all of them live every frame. Changing it clears the world, because the walls that hold the material in move.

Drawing runs on the simulation's thread pool, so even Quarter draws in about 4 ms; the panel reports sim and draw milliseconds separately so you can see which half a slow frame is paying. tools/powderbench.cpp reproduces a water pour at Half headless, with a sampling profiler and a world hash for checking that an optimisation changed nothing.

Material also moves a fixed number of cells per frame, so at Quarter everything crosses the screen four times slower in seconds -- that is what the speed control is for.

Left button paints, right button erases, the wheel sizes the brush (or scrolls the palette when it is over it), Space pauses, . steps one frame, [ and ] size the brush, V cycles the view, C clears, 1/2/3 pick the world size, and Esc quits.

Documentation

• DESIGN.md - game direction, open decisions, and long-term risks.
• INTERNALS.md - simulation models and material behavior.
• CIRCUITS.md - circuit wires, signals, combinators, and circuit-controlled filters.
• LOGISTICS.md - chests, pipes, spouts, drains, and item flow.
• SPRITES.md - sprite conventions and phase language.

Relationship to powder

Cinderlift is a fork of powder, the finished falling-sand sandbox that supplied the simulation foundation. The projects now diverge: Cinderlift adds a scrolling world, player systems, machines, automation, and game progression.

powderlike above is that sandbox rebuilt as a Cinderlift derivative rather than kept as a separate project, so it tracks the simulation instead of drifting from it.