A development build
A falling-sand colony sim. You dig and build underground, and every material follows its weight.
Concept illustration, not gameplay — not a screenshot of the game.
Molehill is a falling-sand platformer and colony sim, written in Rust and Bevy. You dig tunnels, place supports, and furnish rooms. Sand slides, water finds its level, and stone fails when a span is too wide. Light has to be placed; a tunnel stays dark until you bring a lamp, a torch, or a material that already glows.
This page is a look at the work. There is no game to play in the browser, and downloads will come later.
The ground
You cut a round bite through dirt and stone, then run, cling, and wall-jump through the space you made. What you leave behind has to carry its own weight. A short span of dirt holds; a wide hall needs pillars. Brick and iron are ordinary cells, judged by the same numbers as the rock.
You start in a small burrow and dig outward. Shallower ground is softer and wetter. Deeper ground is harder and richer in ore.
Physics
Every cell is a material with density and strength. Sand slides. Water levels out. Lava creeps, and where it meets water it quenches to loose scoria. A charge is a pressure wave: it travels down a tunnel, fades across a cave, and breaks dirt long before granite. When stone cracks, it crumbles in the falling-sand simulation, and the next span takes the load.
There is no day cycle and no sky light. A tunnel stays dark until you place a light or stand near a glowing material.
Play
You can furnish rooms with tables, nests, rugs, carved pillars, and painted stone, and light them with lamps you place.
New Holt asks which mode to use. Survival starts with a small kit. You dig with the tools you own, find food, and burn fuel for lamps and torches. When you fall, the pack stays where you died. Creative has every item, and nothing hurts.
The Deepholt
We dig in an endless body of earth. There is no sky and no surface. Nobody has found a top or a bottom.
A Delver makes a holt: a home to prop, furnish, and keep lit. The work is to dig out, bring things home, and light another stretch of wall.
Older marks in the rock seem to point upward, toward a story of open air called the Lid. They prove nothing. The Lid remains a myth.
Nothing here is magic. Sand pours because it is loose. Water finds its level because it is water.
