The playthrough

The game is one loop run over and over at rising energy density: trial and error → chemistry → discoveries → engineering, and back. This page walks the first turns of that loop. Everything below is resolved by the simulation, not scripted; the reactions and their energetics are sourced.

The energy ladder

Every tier is a higher energy density commanded with more precision, and electromagnetism is the tool at every rung.

Tier	Energy source	What you command
Fire	Chemical bonds	Heat, crudely
Furnace	Chemical + forced air	Temperature and atmosphere
Steam	Chemical → mechanical	Work
Electrical	Mechanical → electromagnetic	Electrons, directly
Electrochemical	Applied potential	Non-spontaneous reaction directions
Nuclear	Nuclear binding	Confinement

The MVP covers the first two rungs. The rest is post-MVP and none of it blocks the definition of done.

Hours 0–1 — Fire

Burn wood. Starve it of air and you get charcoal plus a hazardous off-gas mixture — pyrolysis, endothermic, driven by the fire you keep outside the pile. The opening teaches ventilation by letting you observe, prevent, or recover from a small incident. It never requires poisoning you to prove the point.

The keystone lurking here is the Boudouard equilibrium:

C + CO2  <->  2 CO        ΔH = +172.5 kJ/mol

Its direction is not special-cased. It emerges from the reaction quotient, the equilibrium constant, and temperature — hot and carbon-rich pushes toward carbon monoxide, which is both the reductant you will need and the thing that kills you.

Hours 1–4 — Heat

Build a kiln that holds a temperature. Calcine limestone:

CaCO3  ->  CaO + CO2      ΔH°298 ≈ +178.3 kJ/mol

The equilibrium depends on CO₂ partial pressure, so a kiln that vents beats one that does not. Slake the quicklime — violently, ΔH = −63.7 kJ/mol, the first real hazard — and get mortar. Mortar lets you build a better kiln. That is the first feedback loop: a product that improves the apparatus that made it.

Caution

Slaking is exothermic and fast. The steam and heat are a fair, visible warning — the game’s hazards are generated by your own ambition, and they signal before they bite.

Hours 4–10 — Metal

Recognise a green rock — malachite. Roast it to the oxide:

Cu2CO3(OH)2  ->  2 CuO + CO2 + H2O

Then reduce the oxide under forced air, with charcoal and the carbon monoxide your fire is now making on purpose:

CuO + CO   ->  Cu + CO2     ΔH = −127.0 kJ/mol
2 CuO + C  ->  2 Cu + CO2

Copper. This is the game’s first true summit, and from a real ore body at a real grade — you had to beneficiate it first. It has to feel like a summit.

Figure 1: The ceramic reduction crucible placed on a stone hearth in the live voxel world (c1p milestone verification). Targeting the vessel displays the HUD crosshair and slot inventory status.

Figure 2: The vessel heated past the blackbody incandescence threshold (T > 850 K). Surrounding rock voxels receive real-time dynamic emissive lighting from the glowing reaction vessel.

Hours 10–20 — Alloy and industry

Find cassiterite, reduce tin the same way (SnO2 + 2 CO -> Sn + 2 CO2), and alloy bronze — a genuine solution phase, Cu(l) + Sn(l) -> solution, not a compound. Doing all of this by hand is now tedious in a way that teaches, so you automate: crushers, screens, conveyors, a water wheel, a bellows battery. You size the copper line from the balanced equation and then measure how far actual yield falls short of it.

This is the MVP boundary. A player who has come this far has discovered fire, pyrolysis, calcination, and reduction by experiment; produced copper and bronze from real ores; met and handled a lethal hazard; automated the copper line; and can read their notebook back as a coherent record with an achievement on every genuine chemical first.

After the MVP

Glass opens aqueous chemistry because it is the first vessel that resists acid and lets you see the reaction. Acids and the first galvanic cell move you onto the electrical rung. Electrolysis reaches the metals fire cannot — aluminium, sodium, magnesium — plus chlorine, oxygen, and hydrogen. The ladder from there is electromagnetic, not thermal, and it ends at a mobile stellarator.