Athanor
Sift ash, forge vessels, and climb the ladder from salt to gold. Transmutation is resource conversion, so the whole economy was provable: a potential function certifies that no loop of reactions can mint value, and bot alchemists lived whole lifetimes so the pacing curve was tuned before any human waited on it. Returns compute your exact absence, tick for tick.
TypeScript · certified economy · deterministic offline progress
saves in your browser · returns compute your exact absence, tick for tick · play full screen ↗
How to play
- tap the hearth to sift ash
- forge vessels to run reactions; they cook on their own
- the damper stills a vessel bank so you can save its inputs
- putrefaction is a rite: performed by hand, never automated
- the Great Work dissolves everything for prima, and the fire remembers
- tap the prima counter to open the arcana: what survives the dissolution
Changelog
- 2026-07-19·Full screen on your phone: the workshop now lives at /play/athanor with no site chrome. Install it to your home screen for the app feel (landscape-locked on Android, chrome-less everywhere), use the fullscreen button where the browser allows one, and upright phones get a polite request to turn sideways. The slow fire keeps cooking while the page is closed, which is the whole point of an athanor.
- 2026-07-19·The game admitted it wasn't fun, and got rebuilt. Income now compounds: an apprentice doubling ladder (education that survives every Great Work), greater vessels that double batches, and speed that follows lifetime prima, so the numbers finally explode. And the crucible: marry two substances in an experiment station, discover the five recipes hiding among the ten pairs, and brew what you find, from caustic lye to Azoth itself. Knowledge survives every dissolution. Certified by a new instrument, the boredom detector: bot lifetimes now fail certification if the gap between decisions ever exceeds twelve minutes early or ninety-five late. Before the rebuild the worst gap was four silent hours; now it is under seven minutes across thirty.
- 2026-07-19·The ledger: the workshop keeps everything it says. Messages queue instead of talking over each other, and a ledger button in the top bar reopens the last forty, timestamped, including homecoming reports, so nothing is lost to a busy thumb.
- 2026-07-19·The arcana: six permanent inscriptions bought with prima, opened from the prima counter. Fan a cooking vessel by hand, keep a vessel and an apprentice through each dissolution, bend Conjunction's recipe, teach your apprentices to make salt, hold a full day of absence, and see the true rate of every flow. The Great Work now pays for ambition: hoard gold past the gate and the dissolution grants more prima. Certified the honest way: the bent recipe re-passed both pump proofs, and bot alchemists with arcana beat the bare curve six Works to five over thirty hours.
- 2026-07-19·The workshop opens: five substances, four vessels, catalysts, apprentices, the rite, and the Great Work. The economy certified pump-free by two independent proofs before the first pixel.