What Voxamine is

You are stranded with rocks, wood, water, and air. Everything else — every metal, every acid, every material — you take apart and put back together yourself using real chemistry, and then build a factory that does it for you before the by-products kill you.

That is the whole game. This page explains what that commits the design to.

Three substitutions

Voxamine keeps the loop of a voxel builder — mine, make, place, automate — and replaces the three things underneath it that are usually authored by fiat.

A block game gives you	Voxamine gives you
Recipes you memorise or look up	Reactions you discover by experiment and record
A tier ladder — wood, stone, iron, diamond	A capability ladder — the temperature, atmosphere, and voltage you can reach and hold
A crafting grid, which is a lookup table	Apparatus applying real conditions to a real charge of matter
Ore block → one ingot	An ore body at a grade → beneficiation → reduction → metal, with slag and off-gas
Mobs are the threat	Your own plant is the threat
Items appear from nothing	Conservation of mass: every atom came from somewhere

The ratios are not a balance spreadsheet. When you reduce tenorite with carbon:

2 CuO + C  ->  2 Cu + CO2

that balanced equation is the theoretical demand — two moles of tenorite per mole of carbon, at 79.55 and 12.01 g/mol. Ore grade, competing CO/CO₂ equilibria, incomplete conversion, heat loss, and transport then stand between that number and the metal you actually pour. The journal shows both, side by side, on purpose.

The pillars

These are binding. A feature that breaks one is redesigned or cut — never shipped with a caveat.

1. Conservation accounting is absolute. Every element’s nuclei and net charge are conserved through failures, spills, leaks, and explosions. Nothing appears or disappears without a named source, sink, or energy conversion.
2. Electromagnetism is the force. Bonding, redox, electrode potentials, electrolysis, batteries, plating, and motors are one continuous subject, tied together by ΔG = −nFE. The real arc is learning to command electrons — first through heat and carbon, then directly through applied potential.
3. Progression is knowledge and capability, never unlocks. No research menu, no XP, no tech-tree node to buy. You are limited by what you know, what your apparatus survives, and what conditions you can hold.
4. Trial and error is the intended verb. You may always heat the unknown rock and see. The engine resolves it honestly; the notebook records what happened. Being wrong is informative, not punished with a locked door.
5. The lab is the monster. The primary threat is carbon monoxide, not a skeleton. Danger scales with your own competence and ambition, and every avoidable lethal scenario has a fair warning path.
6. Automate what you understand. Manual operation stays viable through every tier where human speed is physically enough. Automation is an amplifier you earn by understanding a process, not a gate on reaching a material — until reality itself makes hand operation impossible, and the game says why.
7. Honesty about the model. This is a curated, approximated subset of real physical chemistry with its simplifications written down. It never claims research-grade validity, and presentation never invents a reaction the simulation did not resolve.

Where to go next

• The playthrough walks the arc from the first fire to a bronze-age workshop — the MVP boundary — and the science at each step.
• The journal covers how knowledge is gated and recorded without a tech tree.
• Chemistry foundations is the simulation contract underneath all of it.