Touch: a virtual stick at the bottom left steers the pod: down drills, left and right tunnel, up flies; you can switch the stick to follow your thumb wherever you touch; the round buttons at the bottom right use your tools; stop at a building (or tap its Enter button) to go in; pause and sound buttons are top right · Keyboard: Arrow keys or WASD steer (Down drills, Up or Space flies); 1 to 5 use tools; Enter or E goes into the building you are parked at; P or Esc pauses; M mutes
About:
An action digging game in the spirit of the 2000s Flash classics, made in-house for Leetdom. The Great Lamp of Thimblecombe has gone dark, and the old songs say its fire came from the Ember Heart, more than a kilometre down in a chamber of heartrock. You drive a little brass mole-pod. Push down to drill, push sideways to tunnel and push up to fly on the pod's rotor. You can only drill while you are standing on something.
The ground changes as you go down, from loam and red clay through shale, slate and basalt to emberrock and deepcore. Each layer is slower to drill, and each holds better ore: tin and copper near the top, then quartz, silver, gold, garnets, emeralds and sapphires, and rubies, moonpearls and starstones at the bottom. Your cargo hod only holds so much. Oil burns while you dig and fly, and a little house on the oil gauge shows roughly what the flight home will cost, so you know when to turn back. A long fall, a hidden gas pocket (look for faint bubbles) or a lava seam all crack the hull, and below about 500 metres the heat eats your oil unless you have fitted cooling fins. Boulders cannot be drilled, but a Blast Cap will break them. Now and then you dig up a buried relic that pays out straight away.
Up in the village you sell at the Gem Trader, refuel at the Oil Pump, repair and upgrade at the Tinker's Forge and buy tools at the General Store. There are six upgrade lines of five levels each (drill, hull, oil tank, cargo hod, engine and cooling fins), and five tools: Patch Kit, Oil Can, Blast Cap, Thunder Cap and Homeward Bell. When your drill is strong enough to cut heartrock, you dig down to the chamber and carry the Heart back up to the Lamp while the ground shakes around you. If you run out of oil or the pod breaks, the tow-moles always come to haul you home. You lose that load and a small fee, never your upgrades. Your progress, including every tunnel you have dug, is saved on your device. All of the art and sound is drawn and synthesised in code, with no image or audio files.
Credits:
Made by Leetdom, 2026. Written for Leetdom, and it lives here.
Phone check: 2026-09-30: real CDP touch on phone profiles (844x390 landscape and 390x844 portrait): the fixed stick drills down, tunnels and flies, the follow-your-thumb stick drives from anywhere on screen, and the tool buttons fire (a Blast Cap opened a 3x3 hole and a Patch Kit mended the hull). The shops, the out-of-oil tow, the wreck-and-retry screen, delivering the Heart and the win screen all work, the game pauses when the tab is hidden, a reload restores the saved burrow, and there were no console errors or network requests. Desktop 1280x720 keyboard run: dug down, flew home up the shaft, drove to the Gem Trader and it opened. Balance comes from a headless bot with a 250 ms reaction time that plans routes like a player and plays the real game core at 60 Hz. Across 8 worlds it could afford its first upgrade on trip 2 to 4 (2 to 5 minutes in) and brought the Heart home in 32 to 53 minutes (median about 41). A slower 400 ms bot that buys every upgrade before going for the Heart takes 59 to 81 minutes. Running out of oil never soft-locks: a tow is always offered, and a broke player gets a free fill to 60% at the pump. 2026-10-03 independent QA (pi-fleet): real CDP touch on 390x844 and 844x390, desktop 1280x800 keyboard and mouse, blocked localStorage, tab-hidden pause and the leetdom full-screen wrapper all pass with no console errors or network requests. Fixed: old shaft mouths in the village road are now boarded over (driving between shops used to drop you down your own shaft for half a starter hull), landings on the village green no longer cost hull, long hints wrap instead of squashing on phones, and the mix was re-measured offline: drill loop no longer drones, music 14.8 dB under the effects, peak -4.4 dBFS in play and -3.0 dBFS with twelve blasts stacked behind a limiter, true silence between sounds.
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