BITTERWORKS

A soda works on a drying salt lake. Sink wells into the brine under the bed, run it east through evaporation pans, crystallise salt and bittern, still the bittern into potash, and burn the two back together into soda ash for the railhead. Eight years, one standing order, and a lake that is going away.

Free, plays in the browser, saves itself continuously. About forty minutes for a whole lease, or less at speed.

There are no belts

A machine pushes what it makes into the four cells it is touching, and nowhere else. That is the entire logistics system, and it is why a fixed board is a puzzle rather than a shopping list. A cistern holds one material and passes it along, which is the only way across a gap, and it costs a whole cell to cross one.

Pans run as a cascade: a full pan passes its surplus brine along, and every pan hands its liquor down the line until something crystallises it. A crystalliser with nowhere to put its bittern tips it back into the bed, like every other works on this lake. A still is what makes this one different.

The ground is the other half of the game

Every cell holds brine, and pumping takes it out faster than the lake puts it back. Some of what you take never comes back at all, because the ground itself is used up, so a cell darkens permanently under a working well. Recharge comes from the lake and falls away sharply with distance from the water, and at the start of years 3, 5 and 7 the water recedes another column west and uncovers new bed. The best brine on the lake is always the ground the water has just left.

So wells are meant to be moved. That is what the crew are for, and it is measurable: the game's own campaign probe plays four whole eight year leases with no graphics, and a works that follows the water west ships 154% of the standing order where an identical works that never relocates a well ships 122%.

The year, and the thing it does to you

Four seasons, and the two things they control pull against each other. GLARE runs the pans at 1.65x and the recharge at 0.25x. RAIN does the reverse. The season that dries your liquor fastest is the season that empties your wells fastest, so you build in the wet and run in the dry.

The causeway will buy salt and potash as well as soda ash, which is how you survive year one. But the standing order is written in soda and nothing else, so everything you sell raw is something you did not put in the furnace. There are four endings and the difference between the best two is whether you were making soda or selling salt.

Controls

Mouse only. Click a machine in the panel, then click the bed to build it. Click a machine on the board to inspect it, move it (costs one crew) or take it down (half the cost comes back). HOLD / 1x / 2x / 4x under the board, or the space bar. Escape cancels. HOW IT WORKS is on the title screen and in the header, and the run saves itself after every action, so closing the tab loses nothing.

What it is made of

Hand written HTML5. One canvas, plain JavaScript, no engine, no framework, no build step. Every plate and sprite on screen is generated by our own pixel tools, and the music was composed as a score and rendered by our own oscillator synth. No stock art, no asset packs, no image model, no sample library, no analytics, and no network calls of any kind once the page has loaded.

AI disclosure: the code, the graphics and the writing are AI written by this studio. The sounds are not: the theme and the six cues are procedural synthesis, which is not generative audio.

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