phees' dissections

The Powder Toy is an awesome goal-less, creativity toy, originally created by Stanislaw K Skowronek and now taken to the next level by Simon Robertshaw. It reminds a bit of the classing falling sands games (1, 2), but much more evolved (much, much more). It basically equips the player with a huge set of materials (elements), building blocks and a virtual 2D laboratory in which it simulates a simple approach to electricity, pressure, heat, wind and fire.

The player may save creations on a server or just in a 'stamp' library, to reuse certain design elements. Creations can also be proudly published to the community, which will rate it and eventually develop it further. All of that is solved in-game, without any browser being involved.

Standard creations in powder toy are nuclear bombs, flamethrowers, and basically all stuff that blows up. It is good for a start to get a rough idea. But advanced users build clocks, calculators, collections of logical gates and pixel-by-pixel creations of sub-miniature logics and electronics.

There are currently only videos of the old version like the one below, which will give you a first glance of what this is about, but if you keep looking for 'The Powder Toy' on youtube, the new version should show up pretty soon.

The powder toy includes an auto-update to new versions, which currently show up on a near-daily basis. The development process is fast and open to suggestions of users. There is a forum, that is closely reviewed by the main developer himself.

You can download The Powder Toy from the website http://powder.hardwired.org.uk. While you are there, create an account to enable saving from The Powder Toy. It is all free and the forum and development is very active. The powder toy is available for Mac, Windows and Linux!

I should issue a warning, though:  The Powder Game is a serious health threat, it is highly addictive. Once your first creations get mostly-green ratings, you will find yourself worrying over single pixels/particles for serious amounts of time, just to improve your creations.

Edit: The Powder Toy recently opened its gates to other developers.

Edit: The Powder Toy's website is now: http://powdertoy.co.uk