GASHOLDER

The day makes the gas. The night burns it.

GASHOLDER is a free gasworks incremental that plays in your browser. Your retorts cook coal into gas around the clock, and you can watch the holder's bell rise as it fills. At dusk the town lights its lamps and draws on the holder until dawn. A summer night is 7 hours. A winter night is 14. A works that coped in June runs dry in December, and when the holder is empty, whole streets go dark.

Three things that pull against each other

• The works. Each retort makes 30 gas a day and burns a ton of coal. The parish sends one free ton every morning, so the works never stops for good; buy more coal, sell the coke it leaves, raise the holder lift by lift, and later build a second one.
• The mains. Every street lies further down the main from the works, and gas loses pressure on the way. The far streets burn dim until you widen their main.
• The town. A street kept lit all night, brightly enough, builds up trade: its shops and inns stay open and its windows light up. Trade is paid every dawn, and it opens new streets, better burners and new contracts. A dark night loses it.

You choose who goes dark

When the holder runs dry, streets are shut off one at a time, the last in your lighting order first. Put the streets you care about first on the list, or build enough holder for the longest night of the year.

Lamps, lamplighters, burners

Each of six streets takes eight lamps. At first you light them yourself at every dusk; hire a lamplighter for a street and he walks it every evening. Fishtail burners give way to Argand burners and then incandescent mantles, which give far more light for less gas. When every street trades at 95%, the town holds its exhibition night. You can keep playing after it.

Nothing restarts

It saves as you go. While you are away the works keeps running, up to one season, and any street without a lamplighter stays dark until you come back.

Controls: tap or click the buttons. L lights the lamps, 1 to 3 change tabs, F toggles 3x speed, P pauses, H opens the help, M turns the sound off, Enter or Space presses the main button. Plays on desktop and phones; on an upright phone it switches to its own tall layout. About half an hour to the exhibition at normal speed.

Paid, from the same studio

• NIGHT PLOUGH ($5.99): clear every street of a snowbound village before dawn with one plough and one tank.
• GLASSWRIGHT ($9.99): run a medieval glassworks, where every window you complete is drawn by the game.
• MILLWRIGHT ($5.99): raise three windmills so every farm's cart has the shortest road.

Credits and disclosure. Made by Core Systems Asset Factory. Code and text were written with AI assistance. Every picture in the game is drawn by code written for it: the streets, the works, the holder and every lamp, plus two material plates from our procedural pixel engine. The cover is composed from the game's own renderer. The music and the sound effects are synthesised by code, with no generative audio model.

More free browser games: AFFINEUR, COMBWRIGHT, HALFLIGHT. Everything we make: csaf.itch.io.