CRANKWORKS
No batteries. Just your arm, and a crank that turns the world.
You start with one arm and one machine. Turn, and energy appears. Stop, and the factory carries on without you — which is where the real game begins.
The crank is not a menu control. It is the power supply.
Speed matters more than effort, and a steady hand is worth up to half again as much output as a jerky one. Push into the red and the whole factory speeds up with you — until the heat gauge decides otherwise. Crank backwards and you make nothing at all: you open the vent instead.
What a run looks like
Four acts, and each one eats the last
It is not one game with bigger numbers. What one act produces becomes what the next one burns — and your old resource is demoted to raw material.
ACT I : THE WORKSHOP
Your arm, one machine, a number that climbs when you turn. Everything fits in one hand.
ACT II : THE NETWORK
You stop turning. You own workshops instead, and each one is the whole of act I shrunk to a single line.
ACT III : THE AUTOMATON
Your factories build factories. You place nothing by hand any more: you write a doctrine and you watch. This is the act you can lose.
ACT IV : THE GREAT MOVEMENT
Everything you built becomes the parts of one mechanism — and you take the crank back. One turn costs hours of the swarm's work.
The player wiki: every number the game has
Seventeen pages in six languages, with the game's own icons and screenshots. Not a page of it is typed by hand: every figure is exported from the game's tables, so the wiki cannot claim a number the game does not have.
- The seven crank zones, measured with the game's own code
- All the machines, technologies, events and achievements, with their icons
- Acts II, III and IV — the network, the swarm, the great movement
Achievements that teach the game
None of them measures patience. Not one asks you to play a hundred runs — they ask you to catch a buyer at twice the going rate, or to bring a collapsing swarm back from the edge.
Getting the game
CRANKWORKS is a sideloaded Playdate game. Two ways in, both take a minute.
Upload the zip at play.date, then Settings → Games on the console and download it.
Put the Playdate in data disk mode, drop the .pdx folder into Games/, eject.
Install the same way every time: the two methods use different save folders, and they cannot see each other.