Player wiki

The four acts

CRANKWORKS is not one game with bigger numbers. It is 4 games in one box, and each eats what the last one made.

The rule that governs all of it

What one act produces becomes what the next act consumes.

That is the only honest way to make a fresh start feel like progress rather than repetition. Your old resource is demoted to raw material, and you start counting in a new unit.

At every crossing three things change at once: the main screen is replaced, not reorganised; the counter at the top changes unit; and the verbs change — you stop cranking and start supplying, you stop supplying and start delegating. Three things deliberately do not change, or you would start over lost rather than better equipped: the meta crosses everything (cores, patents, the office, commissions, records — those are the better tools), the interface grammar stays the same, and the previous act keeps running underneath. Your act I machines are still making the energy act II burns.

Act II — The network

You stop turning anything. You own workshops, and each is the whole of act I reduced to one line. What you used to sell becomes what you burn. New resource: units. Energy is now an input. A site costs capital, eats energy per second, and ships units per second. Starved, it slows in proportion — it never stops.

Demand is global and it saturates: the more you ship into a region, the less the next one pays. That is what stops "place a hundred sites" from being the answer, and what makes choosing a region interesting.

The act's gesture is a balance: energy available, capacity installed, demand left. Too many sites starve the grid; too few leave demand on the table. Act II has its own dial and its own lab — the grammar is the same, the nouns are new.

Act III — The swarm

Your sites build sites. Units become the input, and you stop placing anything by hand: you write a doctrine and you watch it apply.

This is the act you can lose. A swarm that grows past its intake goes into strain, and past 12 it collapses, shedding 4.5 % at a time. Pulling one back from the edge instead of watching it fall is its own achievement — BACK FROM THE BRINK. The finish line is a swarm of 200K. Opening new ground costs 200K and gets ×1.45 dearer each time, and each ground holds 12.0K.

Act IV — The great movement

Everything you have built becomes the parts of a single mechanism — and you take the crank back. One turn costs hours of the swarm's production. It is exactly the gesture of the first minute, and it does not mean remotely the same thing. The movement needs 26 turns. The first charge costs 6.50K and each one after is ×1.16 more. Turning by hand pays 60 — ×4 inside the band, ×0.9 outside it, which is the whole skill of the act.

The loop closing is not a flourish. It is what makes a player remember their first minute at the last one — and on this console, finishing a game by turning a crank is the only ending that could be right.