Pocket quarry

How to play Pocket quarry

Pocket quarry drops you next to a small floating island and leaves you alone with it. Drag to swing the camera around, pinch or scroll to zoom, then tap a block face to act on it. The toolbox under the island holds everything you can use: slot one is the pickaxe, so the block you tap disappears, and every other slot is a material that appears against the face you tapped. Tap a slot or press a number key, one to nine for the first nine slots and zero for the tenth. The building blocks come first: stone, dirt, wood, glass, ember, sand, ice and a sapling. Then the things that behave once they land: a block of water is a spring that runs seven blocks and finds the nearest way down, lava oozes three blocks and sets fire to wood, fire burns in the air beside anything that will take it, ivy creeps down whatever you hang it on. Sand drops until it lands and bakes into glass beside heat, ice melts near a flame and freezes the pond around it, and a sapling on dirt grows into a tree in under a minute. The island also gets visitors: a rabbit hops onto a decent lawn, a fish appears in a pond two deep, a bird perches on a post or a tree, a butterfly hangs over the grass, and each of them wanders off again after a while. Undo in the top bar walks back your last 40 changes. Everything saves itself, undo trail included, so you can close the tab halfway up a tower.

Tips

• Every block of water is a spring that runs seven blocks and heads for the nearest gap in the floor. Dig it back out and the stream drains with it.
• Lava is water on a slow burn: it runs three blocks, pours off edges, and lights any wood, leaves or ivy it passes. Run water into it and the lava sets to stone, which is a quick way to make a wall.
• A single block of water beside a flame puts it out, which is the only way to stop a fire early. A flame standing on an ember block is the exception: that one burns for good.
• Sand next to a flame on ember turns to glass in ten seconds or so. Pour lava over a bank of sand and you get a glass floor to build on.
• One block of ice in a pond freezes the whole pond over, one spring at a time. A fire on the bank thaws it just as slowly.
• Plant a sapling on dirt or grass with room above it and it grows into a tree of three to five trunk blocks and a crown of leaves. Chop the trunk out and the crown falls apart on its own.
• Bury ember blocks inside a wall, the light spills onto everything nearby.
• Glass, ice and leaves pass light through, so grass keeps growing under a glass roof or in the shade of your tree.
• Animals come to what you build. Six grass blocks in the open bring a rabbit, a pond two deep brings fish, a tree or a wooden post brings a bird. They leave when their spot goes, so digging under a rabbit or draining a pond sends them off.
• Birds are skittish: dig or build within two blocks of one and it flies away. Fire and lava clear the rabbits off too.
• Undo goes 40 changes deep and survives a reload, so a wrong tap is never permanent.

About Pocket quarry

Block-building sandboxes are one of the oldest ideas in games: hand someone a grid, let them take pieces out and put pieces back, and see what they do with it. There is no win state to chase, which is rather the point. People use them for shelters, sculptures, staircases to nowhere and small monuments to their own patience. Pocket quarry keeps that loop and shrinks it to something you can get a whole session out of on a phone. The island is deliberately bounded at 16 by 16 blocks and 12 high, so the whole thing fits in one glance and one small save file. What it adds is a world that keeps moving while you look at it: water finds its level, lava finds the wood, sand finds the floor, ice and fire argue over a pond, a sapling becomes a tree while you are busy somewhere else, and the green slowly takes over anything you leave alone. Leave it alone long enough and something small will turn up to live on it: a rabbit on the lawn, a fish in the pond, a bird on the fence post. None of them stay, which is what makes it worth looking up when one arrives.

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