BITTERWORKS
A free browser game from Core Systems Asset Factory. Genre: Simulation. Free.
BITTERWORKS is a free browser game, free to play in the browser.
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.
AI disclosure, as the store page states it: AI Assisted, Code, Graphics, Text
Free · Get it on itch.io. Files, screenshots and the full description are on the store page.