Chemistry you can pour, burn, shake, and blow up.
Alembic is a falling-sand sandbox where the sand is the real periodic table.
Every element carries its true properties — melting and boiling points, density,
electronegativity, valence — and the reactions aren't scripted gimmicks. They
emerge from that data, the same way they do in the real world.
Drop sodium in water and watch it fizz and ignite. Grind aluminium in the
mortar, dust it over rust, and strike a thermite burn hot enough to weld. Wire
two different metals into a galvanic cell and light a bulb. Pile up enough
uranium and it goes critical.
Your window is a lab flask
Hold Shift and **shake the actual game window**. The contents feel every jerk
and stop: powders slam into walls, leap for the lid, and fold into each other;
liquids slosh, surge, and swallow whatever you stirred up. It's
not a minigame. It's the mixing tool.
Liquids that actually behave
Water finds its level — through pipes, under walls, around corners, like real
communicating vessels. Trap gas under a diving bell and the sea compresses it;
crack the seal and it erupts. Mercury is so dense that nearly everything you
drop in it floats back out.
Two looks, one keypress
Alembic ships with two liquid render styles. Flow is soft and luminous — smooth surfaces, depth-lit pools, every droplet part of one living body of liquid. Classic is the raw falling-sand look, every cell exactly where the simulation says it is. Same physics underneath, down to the pixel. Tap F6 to toggle, whenever the mood strikes.
A living encyclopedia
Everything you make gets recorded in the Codex — a periodic table, a log of
every reaction you've triggered, the dramatic phenomena you've witnessed, and
the tools you've earned. You start with a handful of elements; the rest of the
table unlocks as you hit real chemical milestones. It's a discovery engine
disguised as a sandbox.
Challenges
Want direction? Take on challenges — goals that range from gentle to fiendish:
evaporate a sea to recover its salt, forge a foundry of distinct alloys, reclaim
metal from its ore, neutralise an acid, grow a forest and then wipe it off the
map with a nuclear blast. Each has Bronze, Silver and Gold tiers.
Real phenomena
Combustion, oxidation and rust
Thermite reduction and brilliant metal flares
Flame-test colours across the metals
Galvanic cells, electrolysis, arcing high-voltage circuits and plasma glow
Radioactive decay, radioluminescent glow and nuclear criticality
Communicating vessels, diving bells, buoyancy — sink iron in water, float it on mercury
Alloys, amalgams, acid–base chemistry, distillation, glass etching, plant growth
Build, or just play
Stamp beakers, boxes, batteries and freehand wires. Heat, cool, vacuum, and
pipette. Turn the whole world's temperature, oxygen and gravity up or down.
Prefer a blank cheque? Flip on Sandbox mode and the entire table is yours.
The falling-sand sandbox that's actually chemistry.