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. In dig mode the block you tapped disappears. In build mode a new block appears against the face you tapped, in whichever material is highlighted in the strip under the island. Switch modes with the button in the top bar, or press D and B on a keyboard. Pick a material from the strip or with the number keys, and undo in the same strip walks back your last 40 changes. Everything saves itself, undo trail included, so you can close the tab halfway up a tower.

Tips

• Bury ember blocks inside a wall, the light spills onto everything nearby.
• Glass passes that light through, so a glass roof over an ember floor lights the whole room.
• Dig into the underside of the island, there is more rock down there than you think.
• 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. Five materials, five different sounds, and nothing at all to lose.

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