Alembic

Charge the vessel. Let go. Watch what the glass decides.

A paint-and-watch falling-sand toy dressed as an alchemist's retort. There is no score. The garden runs whether you touch it or not. New reagents are transmuted, not picked from a warehouse palette. A few doors only open if you build them.

480×270 grains, stepped in TypeScript, drawn through a Three.js nearest-neighbour upscale — heat haze, water caustics, gold spark, blast shake, Magnum Opus aurora.

Play

Play Alembic in your browser — no account or installation needed.

Try Alembic v2 — the next iteration, shipped alongside the original:

• Velocity-based grain physics, so pours, flings and splashes carry momentum.
• Per-material feel: powders, liquids and gases each move and settle differently.
• Storms and visitors that stir the vessel on their own.
• Simulation runs in a worker, with touch pour and two-finger pinch/pan.
• Phone controls stay compact: swipe materials, pause, cycle brush size, or open More for tools, speed, saves, sound, and reset.
• Rotate for a wider vessel. Fullscreen expands the canvas with an overlay toolbar; browsers without native fullscreen use the same immersive layout. Tap exit screen to return. The world and discoveries survive rotation.

To run it locally:

npm install
npm run dev      # http://localhost:5173/
npm test
npm run typecheck

The vessel draws at 480×270 grains. Chrome nearest-neighbour upscales that buffer — it should not shade a 4K framebuffer for a pixel grid. In Chrome: ⋮ → Cast, save, and share → Install page as app, or More tools → Create shortcut → Open as window. That is the standalone window; no Electron.

The vessel boots charged: dunes that crawl if you wait, a trough with a silver thought, ice, a glass cup of lava, two red casks by the wood, and an unlit obsidian frame in the sky. Don't sneeze.

Hand	Work
Hold / drag left	Pour. A still hold keeps dripping.
Right-click	Name the grain under the cursor.
Hold right + drag	Pan once zoomed.
Scroll	Zoom toward the cursor. Double-click resets.
Alt-click	Sample that grain onto the brush (and unlock it).
Space	The vessel holds.
[ ]	Brush size. 1–0 the first ten reagents.
½× / 1× / 2×	Clock.

Clear empties the glass. Reset restores the opening scene. Discoveries stay.

The Work

Start with sand, water, stone, seed, oil, fire, air, ice, wood, salt, lava, acid, lead, and tnt. Everything else is earned in the vessel.

• Seed + water (or mud) → plant. Wet thickets drop more seed. Ash is bone-meal.
• Fire + sand → glass. Fire without fuel → ash. Fire + water → steam.
• Ash + water → mud. Mud + fire → brick. Moss creeps along wet stone.
• Oil floats and burns. Salt drinks and becomes brine; hot brine leaves crystal.
• Ice freezes water; fire and ember melt ice. Crystal hanging over air, beside ice, drips.
• Heat is a field: T' = T + (α/32)∇²T, Newton's cooling, latent heat on phase change. Metals conduct; glass and wood hold still. Hot water rises. Warm sand reads amber.
• Wood throws ember. An ember melts ice even in a wet pool, then quenches to steam. Lava quenches in water as obsidian + steam.
• Steam + crystal → aether. Acid + lead → mercury. Mercury + lead + fire → gold.
• Gold + aether + crystal → azoth. Azoth turns nearby lead to gold without the fire.
• Salt + ash → powder, a fuse that burns one hop a tick.
• Fire boxed in eight obsidian → void. It spreads through living stuff; azoth keeps it back.
• Acid eating stone sometimes yields lead, rarely gold.
• Sand that settles on brine petrifies. Sand falling into a pool splashes.
• A gold column six high, kissed by aether at the tip, strikes fire at the base.
• An obsidian frame (inner hole at least 2×2) lit with fire becomes a rift. What touches it forgets its name.
• Tnt on the bench. Fire, ember, lava, or a fuse. Obsidian / azoth / rifts hold. Nearby casks chain. Sand gets thrown.
• Oil + powder → nitro. Meaner hole.
• The dune keeps mites. They graze plant and bloom, flee heat, and steal gold grain by grain — a laden mite walks the colour of the king. Mud against plant hatches more. They are not on the bench; they were already here.
• The trough keeps minnows. They school, eat a mite that touches the water, and die in oil. Beside crystal they sometimes leave a pearl.
• A wet thicket opens bloom. Steam that gathers as a cloud against the ceiling falls as dew.

There are rites. The name on the page can be struck. Old sequences still work. A few words from the art, typed into the dark, are answered.

Layout

File	Role
src/grid.ts	Cell ids, shade, occupancy, line stamps.
src/materials.ts	Palette, colour, density, kind.
src/sim.ts	Motion, reactions, blast kick.
src/secrets.ts	Title strikes, konami, named rites.
src/codex.ts	Whispered lines on first sight.
src/feel.ts	Boom and chime.
src/render.ts	blitGrid, flicker, sparkle, occlusion.
src/stage.ts	Three.js DataTexture quad + 2d fallback.
src/view.ts	Zoom / pan math.
src/world.ts	Size, brushes, opening scene.
src/main.ts	Hands, HUD, curtain, RAF.
src/rng.ts	Seedable PRNG.