Nail Maker is an incremental game. You begin with $25, 100 grams of iron and nothing else, and you grow that into a self-running industrial economy by making nails and selling them. Everything in the game feeds back into the same loop: iron becomes nails, nails become money (or become ammunition for mining), money and mined metal become machines, and machines make more nails.
On top of that basic economy sit two longer-term layers that give the game its shape:
Once you have reincarnated, the resonance bench (section 12) lets you earn tao by keeping a small wave lined up by hand.
There is no single fixed ending. Your score for a life is the total number of nails you made in it. That score goes on the leaderboard when you end a life. You can pursue a high score, pursue Nirvana, or explore the nailbomb path, and the game lets you choose.
Panels appear as you demonstrate that you understand what they are about. You never need to hunt for hidden requirements: each section below tells you exactly what unlocks it.
The large counter at the top-left shows nails, the total number of nails you have made in this life. It is also shown in the browser tab title. Under it are four buttons: save and load (local browser saving), end run (end this life for good, see section 16) and more, which opens a small menu with the guide (this page), achievements (it appears once you have earned your first one) and players (it appears once you are logged in).
Most of these panels are hidden at the start and appear when you earn them, so a fresh game shows only the business panel and the make nail button.
Large numbers are written out in words once they pass a thousand ("14.4 million", "3.20 billion", and so on up through duodecillions). Weights switch units automatically: grams, kilograms, tonnes (t), megatonnes (Mt) and gigatonnes (Gt). Money is shown with more decimal places when it is very small, because early nails sell for fractions of a cent.
Three things are always in play at the start:
The make nail button spends 1 g of iron, adds one nail to your unsold inventory and adds one to your lifetime total. It is disabled when you have less than 1 g of iron. Your 100 g starting stock is therefore exactly 100 hand-made nails.
The buy iron button costs $1.00 and gives 100 g, which is another 100 nails. This is how you keep going by hand. It is also, at the very beginning, the entire reason money matters: money turns into iron, iron turns into nails, nails turn back into money.
Once you have made 250 nails in total, the machinery panel appears and the game stops being a clicking game. From there, the sections below describe each system in the order you meet it.
You do not choose when to sell. The public buys nails continuously at a rate that depends on your price and your marketing, and your unsold inventory shrinks as they do. What you control is how attractive your product is.
The price control sits in the business panel with a − and a + button. Each press moves the price by $0.01, and the price cannot go below $0.01. You start at $0.08. If you hold a button down it repeats faster over time; after ten seconds, the number of cents changed per repeat doubles every two seconds. You can also type a price directly into the field at any time.
The number labelled public demand (%) is calculated like this:
demand = 1.4marketing level × (0.8 ÷ price) × (1 + 0.1 × tao + nailbomb scar) × fever × panic
Reading it from left to right: each marketing level multiplies demand by 1.4; a lower price raises demand in exact inverse proportion (halve the price and demand doubles); every tao point you currently hold adds 10%; the permanent nailbomb scar adds another +50% per bomb (section 15) and adds to the tao bonus rather than multiplying it, so the small percentage next to the demand figure is simply the total of both; and fever and panic are temporary nailbomb spikes that multiply on top. Because the price term is 0.8 ÷ price, a price of $0.80 gives a demand of exactly 1% with no marketing, and $0.08 gives 10%.
Demand is not a count of nails; it is turned into nails sold per second by this curve (borrowed from Universal Paperclips):
nails sold per second = min(1, demand ÷ 100) × 7 × demand1.6
The key property is that it is steeply super-linear. At the starting price of $0.08 and no marketing, demand is 10 and the market would take about 28 nails per second. At $0.04 demand is 20 and the market would take about 169 nails per second. Small price cuts therefore produce huge jumps in how many nails the public will take, and a sharp cut can trigger a genuine mass sell-off of your inventory.
Cutting the price always raises the number of nails the public is willing to buy, and in this formula it also always raises the theoretical revenue. But the public can only buy nails you actually have. The right way to think about price is therefore: find the highest price at which you still sell everything you produce. Any demand beyond your production is wasted, and any price lower than needed gives away revenue for nothing. When your nail inventory is piling up, your price is too high or your marketing too low; when your inventory sits at zero and sales are limited by production, you can raise the price.
The buy marketing button costs $25 for the first level and doubles with every level you own ($25, $50, $100, $200 …). Each level multiplies public demand by 1.4, up to a maximum of level 100 (after which the button reads max level). Marketing is the other lever on demand besides price, and it is the one that does not cost you per-nail revenue.
avg revenue/s is the sales rate (demand-driven) capped at your theoretical production, multiplied by the price: it is the revenue you could sustain, not a bursty reading. avg nails/s is what your makers are really making. While there is iron on hand that is their full speed. If your makers use iron faster than your breakers supply it, the iron runs down to zero and stays there, and the makers can only turn out what arrives, so the figure drops to your actual rate. It climbs back to full speed once your breakers supply at least as much iron as your makers use.
A nail maker is a machine that turns iron into nails with no clicking. It costs a flat $5, forever (the price never rises), with a one-second pause between purchases. Each one produces 1 nail per second and consumes 1 g of iron per second while doing so.
If your iron runs out, your makers stall: they can only make as many nails as your iron stock allows. This is the central tension of the early game, because iron has to come from somewhere. You can buy it for money, or you can mine it, which brings in nail breakers.
The machinery panel shows, under the nail maker line, how much iron per second your makers consume and how many nails per second they produce at full speed. These are the numbers the swarm and yin & yang compare against what your breakers bring in, so they update instantly when you buy a machine and never lag. They stay at full speed even when your iron has run dry; the avg nails/s in the business panel is where you see what is really being made. Both figures include the tao bonus (section 10).
A nail breaker is the opposite of a nail maker. It costs $75 with a one-second pause between purchases. Each breaker fires 1 nail per second from your unsold inventory into the ground, and what comes back is iron and copper. Buying your first breaker reveals the extraction map and the copper and factory controls.
The map is a grid of 10 rows by 21 columns. A player with no karma gets 15 deposits per map, each randomly iron or copper (about half and half). Karma does not change this: the only way to get more deposits is the deposit cards (see Cards), up to a maximum of 60. The extra deposits are added to the same layout, so the original 15 stay where they were. One nail hits every active deposit once. Each hit removes 1 g from that deposit and hands you 1 g of that deposit's material. So if the map currently has 8 iron deposits and 7 copper deposits, one nail returns 8 g of iron and 7 g of copper. A nail costs you one nail and returns a lot more material than that, which is why breakers are so powerful. More deposits means more material from every single nail, so deposit cards make mining directly more productive.
Since every nail hits every deposit equally, all the deposits on a map drain together and run out at the same moment. Map 1's deposits hold 2,000 g each, so 2,000 nails of ammunition clear the entire map.
The bar under the map shows the total weight left on the map against what it started with, and a line below it breaks down how much iron and how much copper remains.
When the last deposit is drained, the next map generates automatically. Map n has deposits of 2,000 g × 1.2(n − 1) each, so every map holds 20% more than the last. Each map number always generates the same layout.
Breakers eat from the same unsold inventory that the public buys from. Each time sales and mining are settled, breakers take their ammunition first and the public buys from what is left. If breakers are taking more nails than you produce, there is nothing left to sell. This is a real trade-off between revenue now and iron and copper later.
Production flows in smoothly every moment, but breaking and selling are settled in chunks. The settling interval is 1 ÷ (number of breakers) seconds, but never faster than 20 times a second. One breaker settles once a second; ten settle ten times a second with each chunk a tenth the size. The total output is identical either way: the interval just keeps the numbers moving smoothly as you grow.
Copper comes only from the map, via your breakers. The copper line sits in the machinery panel beside a sell copper button, which sells all of it at once for $0.05 per gram ($50 per kilogram).
Copper has one real job: building machines (factories spend it every cycle). Selling it is possible but usually a worse use than feeding factories. The game's design is that iron has one job (becoming nails) and copper has one job (becoming machines).
A factory automates the buying of machines. You pay for a factory once with funds, and from then on it builds nail makers or nail breakers for you out of copper alone. Factories are the engine of long-term growth.
The first factory costs $1,000. Each factory you own multiplies the price of the next by 1.4, so the price is $1,000 × 1.4factories owned.
Each factory completes one cycle per second. Production is a continuous stream: with 1 factory you get a machine about every second, with 10 you get about ten a second spread evenly, and with 1,000 it becomes a rapid flood, not a single batch landing once a second. Every cycle spends copper and produces exactly one machine, either a nail maker or a nail breaker. If you lack copper, finished cycles wait (up to one per factory) and are built as soon as you have enough, so a copper shortage pauses factories rather than breaking anything. The machinery panel shows how much copper per second your factories are consuming and exactly how many nail makers and nail breakers they are building per second. That figure follows the balance slider's split and includes any extra machines your factory floor's dies add; if copper has run short it shows what is really being built instead of what the factories could do.
Once you own a factory, a slider appears. It controls what factories build, from 0 (all nail breakers, black) to 100 (all nail makers, white), in steps of 5. Your first factory starts at 90% nail makers and 10% nail breakers. The two percentages above the bar show the current split: the breaker share on the black side, the maker share on the white side. The split is exact over time, not just on average: a factory set to 90% makers produces nine makers for every breaker.
A breaker is heavy mining equipment and a maker is a light machine, so they cost different amounts of copper. Per cycle, a factory spends 1,000 g × (breaker share) + 100 g × (maker share). All breakers costs 1,000 g per machine, all makers costs 100 g per machine, and the midpoint of 50/50 costs 550 g per cycle on average. Copper is the only material factories use. They never need iron or funds beyond the purchase price. Copper presses on the factory floor lower what a cycle costs.
Choosing the slider is therefore both a balance decision (section 9) and a speed decision: building makers is ten times cheaper in copper, but a pile of makers with no iron supply simply stalls.
Once you own 10 factories an artificial intelligence panel appears with a motherboard button. The floor is a small grid (5 × 5 to begin with) and you fill it with modules, each taking up a rectangle of cells. Buy a module, hold it from your stock, tap a cell to place it (its top-left corner lands there), and use rotate to turn it. Tap a placed module to select it: you can move it (free), pick it up back into stock, or sell it for 75% of what you paid.
Each module attacks a different limit on your factories. Time: a battery (2 × 2) makes factories work 8% faster. Copper: a copper press (1 × 2) cuts the copper each cycle costs by 6%. Money: a blueprint table (2 × 1) makes new factories cost 4% less. A maker die and a breaker die (both 1 × 3) each give 10% extra nail makers or nail breakers from the cycles that build them; the extra is carried between cycles, so nothing is lost to rounding. A cooler (1 × 1) does nothing alone, but each cooler touching a battery or a copper press adds half of that module's bonus again (up to two coolers each).
Bonuses of the same kind add together, and each kind has a ceiling (speed +300%, copper −60%, factory price −50%, yields +500%). Space is the real limit, so what you fit and where the coolers go is the build. Every module you own makes the next one of its type 1.5× dearer. Which module helps depends on what is holding you back: speed does nothing if you are short of copper, and a discount does nothing if you can already afford factories.
You can expand the floor: Mk2 (6 × 6) costs $500 million and 10 million unsold nails; Mk3 (7 × 7) costs $20 billion, 1 billion unsold nails and 100 tonnes of copper. Modules are lost when a life ends, but the button stays, so you can start rebuilding your floor straight away.
Balance is the idea the whole late game is built on, so it is worth defining exactly. Your economy has two sides, and they are measured in iron per second:
makers × maker rate × 1 g.breakers × breaker rate × number of active iron deposits.The balance reading is (demand − supply) ÷ (demand + supply), a number from −1 to +1. Zero means perfect balance: what your makers can consume equals what your breakers can supply. Positive means making outruns breaking (yang). Negative means breaking outruns making (yin).
This is a structural measurement. It looks at the capacity your current build represents, not at the moment-to-moment flow, which would throttle itself the instant your iron stock ran dry. It therefore changes only when you change your build or when the map changes (a new map can have a different number of iron deposits, which changes your supply). The tao bonus raises makers and breakers by the same percentage, so it does not disturb balance.
A player who has built nothing yet is not "balanced" and not "unbalanced" either: with no makers and no breakers there is simply nothing to measure, and the game treats that state as not started.
The yin & yang panel appears when you own at least one nail maker and at least one nail breaker. It is not about stockpiles: it is about the relationship between making and breaking existing at all.
There are two bars, yin (breaking) and yang (making), each running from 0 to the size shown beside it (100 for your first tao, more after that: see The cost of tao below). Once per real second, exactly one of them rises by 1:
The slider in the panel shows the gap between the two bars as a position between yin and yang, and a status label reads BALANCED, YANG-LEANING or YIN-LEANING. It reads balanced when the smaller bar is at least 90% of the larger. Whichever side is ahead right now, the one whose bar is the one ticking, has its name and number shown in bold.
When both bars are full (100 for your first tao), you earn 1 tao (white cards can add extra tao to every cycle) and both bars reset to zero. Because only one bar can tick at a time, this cannot be achieved by sitting still: you have to spend time on the yang side and time on the yin side. The only way to fill both is to genuinely cross back and forth over true balance as your build changes, which is exactly the point.
The word "held" matters. These bonuses depend on the tao you hold right now, so spending or losing tao removes the bonus immediately. Reincarnation (next section) converts tao into karma, which is permanent, but your new life only starts with the small tao award described there.
There is no limit on how much tao you can hold, but every tao you hold makes the next one a little dearer. The bars have to reach 100 for your first tao and 10 more for each tao you hold: 110 for your second, 120 for your third, and so on, so with 8 tao they need 180 (and 400 at 30). Extra tao counts like any other: if a cycle gives you 2, the bars grow by 20. The numbers beside the bars show the size they have to reach. The resonance bench's tao ring grows in the same proportion (100 for the first tao, 110 for the second...), so it cannot hand you tao for free once the bars have got dear. Spending or losing tao (nailbombs do this) makes the bars smaller again, and negative tao counts as none.
The white cards (section 11) ease this: faster bars, a faster resonance bar, a bigger alignment window and a calmer bench, cards that make the requirement grow more slowly, and cards that give extra tao every cycle.
Reincarnation lets you end a life and carry something real into the next. It lives at the bottom of the yin & yang panel, with a karma counter above it.
Every 3 tao becomes 1 karma, calculated at the moment you reincarnate (leftover tao that does not make a full 3 is simply lost with the life). The button stays disabled until you hold at least 3 tao. Karma is capped at 100: once you are there further reincarnations add none (the button then just reads reincarnate). Karma never goes away: it is not spent, it is added to a permanent total that follows you through every future life, and every karma is also one hand of cards to choose from when you reincarnate (see Cards below).
After you confirm, a wall of flickering characters fills the screen. It fills in, flickers for a while, and then settles into your cards. Open your packs, fill your slots, then press begin new life. The cards only appear here, at the moment you reincarnate.
You are reborn at the very beginning, like a brand new player: no machines, no money, nothing already unlocked, a fresh map 1 and the usual first price. Nothing is handed to you. What you earned is what comes with you (see below), and the cards in your slots are what make the new life different.
First you are shown two cards, one black and one white, and the words choose your path wisely. Black is the path of greed: the machine, with cheaper machines and marketing, cheaper and slower-compounding factories, more demand, better prices, faster makers and breakers, a shorter wait between buying machines, more ore, and a faster slot machine with a bigger jackpot. White is the path of enlightenment: tao and karma, with faster yin & yang, stronger tao, a resonance bar that makes tao (and extra tao for each full bar), a tao requirement that grows more slowly, and extra tao every cycle. Taking one adds it to your collection and sets your path for this rebirth. Neither path has a drawback: they are just two ways to play, a simple spiritual life or a fast industrial one.
Next come your packs: every karma you hold (your total) is one pack of five cards, all of your path's colour apart from the odd one of the other. You open them one at a time. Cards are common, uncommon, rare or, very occasionally, legendary: a legendary card has a heavy outline, a glow, and two effects, the first stronger than any rare card. More karma makes the better ones likelier. The cards are generated rather than written, so there is always something new to find.
Nothing you leave behind comes back. Click a card to take it: it goes into your deck, or into your collection if the deck is full. Whatever you do not take is gone the moment you open the next pack, so every pack is a choice. Your deck and your collection (12 places) are both kept from life to life; only ending a run wipes them. Click a card in your deck to move it to the collection, click a card in the collection to move it to the deck, and press discard on any card to get rid of it. If both are full you have to discard something before you can take more.
With a lot of karma, press open all: the packs open one after another in a quick run and the game chooses for you. Legendary cards go to your collection, then to your deck if the collection is full, and are lost if both are full. The best of the rest fill your deck and replace weaker cards (the old card goes to the collection if there is room), and a final equip best picks the strongest deck from your deck and collection.
Your deck has 2 + 1.5 × √karma slots, at most 10 (3 at 1 karma, 5 at 4, 6 at 9, 8 at 16, 10 at 36). The black-or-white card you choose first is a free pick. Equip best picks the strongest deck from your deck and collection: it prefers rarer cards, your own colour, and effects your deck does not have yet. The deck lists what it adds up to as you build it. Cards add up. Cards on the same stat add together (three +30% cards are +90%), and different stats multiply each other, so a spread-out deck is strong and a one-note deck is stronger but never runs away: past +300% on one stat each further point counts half. A cost card is worth the extra buying power it gives, added together too. “Machines” means nail makers, nail breakers and factories.
Two things are kept in check. The cards that make factory prices compound less, and the tao requirement grow more slowly, are rarer, and can never remove the cost: factories always cost at least 1.2× the last, and each tao always adds at least +5 to the bars (the usual +10 at best halved). The cards that give extra tao every cycle are rare or legendary only. And the game watches your makers and breakers: a breaker takes iron from every deposit, so breaker-speed and deposit cards both make breakers stronger, while maker-speed cards stand alone. If your deck leans too far to one side, a warning says so, and equip best will not push it further out of step.
Now and then a pack holds one card of the opposite colour: a good person with a little bad in them, or the other way round. Your deck holds one colour only, the colour of your path, so that card cannot go in the deck, but your collection can hold either colour. Resonance and its cards are white; black cards cover the machine and the slot machine, and you cannot have both colours in a deck. If you change path, your deck cards move to the collection (12 places; any that do not fit are discarded).
Your deck and collection stay with you from life to life. Nothing is handed over when a card is in your deck: costs, rates and prices are simply worked out with it applied, so it works from the first second of your new life. The packs are fixed for each life, so reloading the page does not change them.
Nirvana is not left to luck: it is the rebirth you get when your karma reaches 100, and until then it cannot happen.
Nirvana is a permanent achievement. Once reached, it survives everything, including ending a run and losing your karma. It is the game's closest thing to a victory, but it does not stop you: you can keep playing.
Reincarnating submits your final nail count to the leaderboard and deletes your old saves, so you cannot load your way back. You are asked to confirm first, because it cannot be undone.
The resonance panel, beneath yin & yang, appears once you have reincarnated and hold 1 tao (earned again in each life). It is a small oscilloscope with two sliders. Black and white both have it, and it makes tao.
The swarm panel appears when you hold at least 1 tao and own at least one factory. Getting to 1 tao already proves you can balance; the factory proves you have an automated economy for the swarm to correct.
The swarm is 30 dots drifting around a small field. It is a live picture of your economy: the proportion of white dots is the makers' share of your iron rate, and the proportion of black dots is the breakers' share. Fifteen white and fifteen black means the two sides are close. Mostly white means making outweighs breaking; mostly black means the reverse. The split is a compressed picture, so it can read 15 and 15 while one side is still a hair ahead: the status line below is the exact answer.
A status line above the field says which side is ahead: makers > breakers or makers < breakers. It compares the two iron numbers shown under nail makers and nail breakers, how much iron your makers can use per second against how much your breakers bring in, and it flips exactly where those two numbers cross. A tie reads makers > breakers. There is no balanced state: it is always one or the other. Under the field it counts the balls (for example 18 white and 12 black), shows how much iron your breakers make and your makers use per second, and your maker and breaker counts. A message line at the bottom reports what a click did, or why it could not.
The dots are a deliberately compressed picture. They follow a log scale of demand to supply, so it takes an enormous imbalance, about 50 makers' worth against 1 breaker's, before only 3 balls of one color remain (and never fewer). The collapse line of 3-to-1 shows up as roughly 18 balls against 12.
The dots also shy away from your cursor when you get near them. The more imbalanced your economy, the harder they dodge and the faster every dot moves (up to 1.5× at the collapse line); the closer your two sides are, the slower they drift and the less they react. After you land a click, that dot is briefly stunned so you can chain hits fairly.
Clicking a dot flips its colour by converting machines of one type into the other, so that your real iron rates match the new dot split. In practice: if you have too much of one colour, click a dot of that colour. A click on a black dot makes it white: breakers are converted into makers. A click on a white dot makes it black: makers are converted into breakers. The number converted is the smallest that moves the split by one dot, which at large scale can be a lot of machines.
The exchange rate is the factory's own: a breaker costs a factory 1,000 g of copper and a maker 100 g, so 1 breaker is worth 10 makers, and nothing is lost in the conversion: 10 breakers become 100 makers, and 10 makers become 1 breaker. Flipping costs no copper. If the conversion isn't possible (for instance you would have to convert your last machine of a type), the ball is flung away from your click and the message line says why. A click that would make the split more lopsided than the swarm can show is ignored. Clicks have a quarter-second cooldown.
This makes the swarm a balancing tool, not a growth engine: it turns the machines you have into the machines you need, which is useful for earning tao. New machines only come from factories.
If you push your economy far enough out of balance and leave it there, the swarm collapses.
If the imbalance dips back under the line, the timer does not reset to zero; it drains at twice the speed it filled. A single momentary dip does not erase your progress, but a sustained correction does.
The swarm collapses. The game destroys enough of the over-represented machine type to bring your real iron rates back to true balance (as close as whole machines allow), banks one unstable core, and unlocks the skyline panel the first time it happens (after a reincarnation the skyline is already open). The destruction is real: those machines are gone.
Unstable cores have exactly one use: they are the key ingredient for nailbombs.
The skyline panel appears the first time the swarm collapses. It is a slowly scrolling city that is a direct picture of your economy: buildings for nail makers, nail breakers and factories are generated in proportion to your real counts, so too many breakers (or makers, or factories) shows up as a skyline dominated by that kind of building. Pedestrians walk the ground and run when something terrible happens.
Under the skyline is the foundry core, which shows what the next nailbomb needs:
50,000 × 2.3bombs already dropped nails.When both bars are full, the launch nailbomb button works. Its hint line says what is going to happen.
You can type a price directly into the price box in the business panel at any time (the + and − buttons still step it). The Skyline's set optimal price button (it appears with the Skyline panel, no bomb needed) estimates a price that sells about 90% of your current nail production, leaving a small surplus in inventory. It is disabled when you have no active nail production.
The bomb falls in from above the entire page onto the middle of the skyline, and the whole page shakes. Then:
1 + 0.6 × bombs dropped building-widths of the target lose units, and the share destroyed is 0.5 + 0.18 × bombs dropped at ground zero, fading with distance. This removes your real machinery.The skyline's status line tells you what is currently active: the street panicking, the temporary demand bonus, and the permanent scar.
Nailbombing is the opposite bargain from balance. You dig yourself a tao hole, and with it a stretch of life where you cannot reincarnate, in return for huge demand that only ever grows. The hole is not permanent: yin and yang laps still earn +1 tao each, so you can work your way back up to 3 tao and reincarnate again, but every further bomb digs it deeper.
| Path | How | What you keep | What you lose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Reincarnate | Hold 3 or more tao, press reincarnate. | All karma (plus the new karma), Nirvana, panel unlocks, yin and yang bars, and a rolled starting package including 1 to 3 tao. | The economy of the life you are leaving. Not available while your tao is negative (for example after nailbombing). |
| End run | Press end run at the top of the page. | Only Nirvana, if you ever reached it. Your score is banked on the leaderboard. | Everything else, including all karma. You start exactly like a brand new player. |
| Nailbomb | Drop a nailbomb. | You keep playing this life with permanently higher demand. | Tao drops by 3 or more per bomb and can go negative, which blocks reincarnation until you earn it back above 3. |
Both ending options ask you to confirm. Both submit the life's nail count to the leaderboard (if you are logged in) and delete your local and cloud saves so the old life cannot be reloaded. Ending a run with karma in the bank warns you plainly that the karma will be lost.
Whenever a life ends, by reincarnation or by ending the run, an end screen summarizes it: your final nail count, time lived, money earned, the machines you ended with, marketing level, map reached, swarm collapses, nailbombs dropped and tao, plus totals across all your lives. A reincarnation also shows the karma you gained. The NIRVANA message appears here too.
Each reincarnation adds that life to your past lives log, opened with the past lives button at the bottom of the yin & yang panel. The log is saved with your game and follows you from life to life. Ending a run erases it, along with your karma.
The save button stores your game in your browser. The load button restores it. Old saves are upgraded automatically when loaded. Clearing your browser's data, or playing in a different browser, means the local save is not there.
Use the button at the bottom-right to sign up or log in. An account is just a username (at least 3 characters) and a password (at least 6). When you are logged in:
The achievements button in the more menu opens your lifetime record: runs ended, lives lived, total nails, best life and best run, nailbombs, highest karma and tao, and more, including the life you are currently playing. A run is a chain of lives that finishes when you end the run; reincarnating continues the same run. Unlike your karma and the past lives log, these stats are not erased when you end a run. Below them are the achievements: each unlocks once, shows a notification, and is remembered permanently. Logged in, they sync to your account; logged out, they are saved in this browser only.
Your score is your lifetime nail count for the life you just ended, and it is submitted when you end a run or reincarnate. Leaderboards are for players with an account: without one, the panel just invites you to sign up and nothing is posted. Logged in, it is a global list with one row per player showing their personal best (the top 500 are shown). A new run only replaces your global entry if it beats your previous best. The panel can be hidden if it is in your way.
The leaderboard has two tabs. This week is a board that resets every Monday at 00:00 UTC (the panel shows a countdown). It holds each player's best finished life of the week, and, like the rest of the leaderboard, it is shown to logged-in players. All time is the board described above. A player who finished a life with karma in the bank has it shown beside their score, since a head-started life is not the same as a fresh one. A life counts for the week it ends in. Every player with an account is listed: anyone who hasn't ended a run or reincarnated yet simply shows as 0 nails. A small green dot beside a name means that player is online right now (they have had the game open in the last few minutes).
The leaderboard panel has a third tab, chat: a global chat for logged-in players. It shows the latest 50 messages live while the tab is open (it switches off when you leave the tab). Messages are plain text up to 200 characters, with a few seconds between them. The chat tab shows a count of unread messages while you are on another tab. Click a name to see that player's profile; a green dot means they are online. Players who have been kicked off the leaderboards can't chat either. Be kind: messages can be deleted and players removed.
When a week ends, the top three players on that week's board earn a gold, silver or bronze medallion. They are awarded by hand after the board has been checked, so they may arrive a little after the week closes. You get a notice the next time you log in, and medallions are listed on your profile. The admin can also hand one out for something special. Anyone who holds a medallion has a small gold dot beside their name on the leaderboard.
Once you have an account and have unlocked the skyline, a small headline strip scrolls along the very top of the page whenever there is news to share. It runs across the full width of the screen. Hover over it to pause it.
Every logged-in player has a public profile: when they joined, their records (most nails in one life, total nails, best run, karma, time played and more) and the achievements they have earned. The players button opens a search by name, and clicking a name on either leaderboard opens that player's profile. My profile shows your own. Profile stats update when a life ends, so the life in progress is not counted until it finishes.
| Thing | Value |
|---|---|
| Starting funds / iron / price | $25.00 / 100 g / $0.08 |
| Iron per nail | 1 g |
| Buy iron | $1.00 for 100 g |
| Machinery unlocks | 250 lifetime nails |
| Marketing | $25 × 2level; each level ×1.4 demand; maximum level 100 |
| Nail maker | $5 flat; 1 nail/s; 1 g iron/s; 1 s between buys |
| Nail breaker | $75 flat; 1 nail/s ammo; 1 s between buys |
| Map | 10 × 21; 15 deposits (more only from deposit cards, max 60); map 1 deposits are 2,000 g; ×1.2 per map |
| Copper sells for | $0.05 per gram |
| Factory | $1,000 × 1.4owned; 1 s cycle; 100 g copper per maker, 1,000 g per breaker |
| Yin & yang | Unlocks with 1 maker + 1 breaker; one bar +1 per second; both full = 1 tao (+ any extra from white cards); the bars are 100 for the first tao and +10 for every tao held (8 tao: 180) |
| Each held tao | +50% maker and breaker rate, +10% public demand |
| Karma | 1 per 3 tao at reincarnation; every 3 tao below zero is −1 on the counter |
| Resonance | Needs a chosen path and 1 tao, earned each life; frequency and phase only; bar is always 100, fills at 1 a second x alignment, 1 tao per full bar; even iron (up to 14 : 16) drifts slowly, lopsided iron (12 : 18 and worse) up to 10x faster; white window x1.4 and drift x0.7, black window x0.9 and drift x1.1 |
| Cost of tao | No cap; the yin & yang bars are 100 + 10 per tao held (100, 110, 120, ... 8 tao: 180); the resonance bar is always 100; white cards ease it |
| Karma cap | 100; Nirvana is reached when karma gets to 100 |
| Tao at the start of a new life | 1 (2 from 13 karma, 3 for Nirvana) |
| Cards | A black-or-white fork first, then a pack of 5 per karma you hold, opened one at a time (cards you leave are gone); the deck has 2 + 1.5 × √karma slots (max 10), the deck holds one colour only; the collection has 12 places and holds any; the deck and collection are kept from life to life; black = greed, white = enlightenment; cards are common, uncommon, rare or legendary and add up (diminishing returns past +300% on one stat) |
| Factory floor | Unlocks at 10 factories; 5×5, Mk2 6×6 ($500M + 10M nails), Mk3 7×7 ($20B + 1B nails + 100 t copper); modules 1.5× dearer each; sell for 75%; prices start at battery $800,000, copper press $2M, blueprint table $5M, maker or breaker die $10M, cooler $1.5M |
| Swarm flip | Converts machines at 1 breaker = 10 makers, no loss; no copper; 0.25 s cooldown |
| Collapse | Imbalance ≥ 0.5 (3-to-1) for 1.5 s; yields 1 unstable core; unlocks the skyline |
| Nailbomb nails | 50,000 × 2.3bombs dropped, plus (bomb number) unstable cores |
| Nailbomb permanent scar | +50% demand per bomb (added to the tao bonus), capped at +1000% |
| Nailbomb tao drain | round(6 × bomb power): 3 for the first bomb, rising with each bigger one |
| Fever / panic | +35% demand per fever point (half-life 40 s) / up to +50% (half-life 5 s) |
| Cloud autosave | Every 30 seconds while logged in |
| Chat | Latest 50 messages; 200 characters; a few seconds between messages |