About Delve
The boulder-and-diamond digging game, in the unworked seams below a Korthen deep-keep. You are a delver with a helmet lamp and a pick: dig through the earth, gather the cave's quota of crystals, and when the lift bell rings, step into the haul-lift before the cave's time runs out.
Everything loose obeys the old rules. Boulders and crystals fall into empty space, roll off each other and off stone walls, and kill whatever they land on; one resting on your head is harmless until you stop beneath it as it falls. Push a boulder sideways by leaning on it, or reach into the earth without stepping to bring one down where you want it. Seam-wicks and dust-moths drift along the walls and burst if they touch you, and a dust-moth crushed by a boulder bursts into nine crystals. Deeper down, mill walls turn falling boulders into crystals and creeping mat grows through the earth.
There are 200 caves in eight depths, each introducing one new thing, and every cave was escaped by a planning bot before it shipped. Each cave keeps two Top 10s, best score and fastest escape, and every run on them is re-played by the site before it is ranked.
How to play
- Goal
- Gather enough crystals to wake the haul-lift, then step into it.
- How it ends
- You escape when you step into the open lift; the run is lost if a falling boulder or crystal lands on you, a creature bursts beside you, or the cave's time runs out.
- Record
- For every cave, the ten best scores and the ten fastest escapes, each proved by replaying the run.
- Move with the arrow keys, WASD, the pad or a held drag: walk into earth to dig it, onto a crystal to take it.
- Hold Shift or Space (or tap Reach) with a direction to dig or take without stepping, and lean into a boulder to push it.
- Gather the quota of crystals, then step into the open lift before the time runs out; never stop under a falling boulder.
Controls
| Arrows · WASD | Move (hold to keep going) |
|---|---|
| Shift · Space + arrow | Reach: dig or take without stepping |
| Drag · pad · Reach | Move and reach on a touch screen |
| M | See the whole cave |
| P · Escape | Pause (the run then counts as practice) |
The earth, walls, crystals, creatures, boulders and the lift are Blender renders of textures and models from the Morass warehouse, and the delver is the warehouse's animated dwarf miner. The cave follows the original game's published object rules, except that a push is certain on the second step of leaning. The simulation uses whole numbers only and a run is just the actions the delver took, so every browser plays it back identically and the records worker re-plays each one before it enters a Top 10. Your bests stay in this browser under morass.delve.v1. No ads or analytics run inside the game.
