The journal

There is no research menu, no unlock graph, no skill tree, and no experience points. Any of those would replace the game’s subject with a progress bar. You are gated by four things, all diegetic:

1. Knowledge — do you know the reaction exists, and its conditions?
2. Capability — can your apparatus reach and hold those conditions and survive the charge?
3. Materials — do you have the atoms?
4. Access — can you physically reach, extract, and transport the source or the operating environment?

There is an extensive technology tree — but it is the dependency structure of physical reality, expressed as data in the reaction and material catalogues and checked at build time. It is never a screen you open. You reconstruct it in your own notebook by doing the chemistry.

The journal is the most important interface

It is a real scientific journal you fill in by working, built to the standard of a tool someone would actually want to use. It records only what you have observed — it is never a copy of the catalogue.

Section	Contents
Elements	A periodic table, blank at the start, filling in as you isolate each element
Substances	One page per species encountered, with measured properties only
Reactions	One page per confirmed reaction: equation, conditions, energetics
Runs	The experiment log — every process attempt, comparable across batches
Apparatus	Vessels and instruments built, with their real limits
Hazards	Encountered hazards, their signals, and what worked
Leads	Open anomalies not yet explained
Map	The reaction graph you have personally established

Every page is cross-linked — a substance links to every reaction it appears in, every run it featured in, and every place it was found. The journal is a graph, not a list, and all of it is searchable, filterable, and annotatable.

The periodic table fills in

The Elements section starts as an empty periodic table and fills in as you isolate each element in pure form. It is a progress bar, a collection, a genuine reference, and the clearest possible statement of what the game is about, all at once.

It also teaches by its gaps. You see the shape of what you have not reached, notice that a whole block of the table is missing, and eventually understand that those elements are missing because fire cannot reduce them — that is what the electrical rung of the ladder is for.

Read claims at their evidence level

The project distinguishes measured, calculated, inferred, and unknown, and so does the game. A substance page shows molar mass, density, or melting point only once you have measured it — each value stamped with the instrument and the date. An unidentified species is filed under a working name you choose — “the green rock” — until you identify it, and renaming it later preserves the history.

A run entry records inputs, conditions, and outputs with unknown fields kept unknown. A bigger batch is not evidence of a better process; the journal compares useful output per unit feed under comparable conditions.

Note

When the journal makes a causal claim — why a run proceeded, stopped, or failed, and where the matter and energy went — it is built from evidence you actually gathered and is labelled with its uncertainty and its source. It never fills in from solver ground truth you did not measure.

See also

• What Voxamine is — the pillars this follows from.
• Chemistry foundations — the simulation contract.
• Chemistry sources — where every shipped value comes from.