Manual
Basics
You're looking at a hard drive. Every square is a cell of data; the drive is divided into 2×2 sectors, and the sectors are stacked into vertical platters (labelled P1, P2… above and below the grid).
- DOWNLOAD DATA drops a block of a random colour onto the drive. Blocks are your income: every block mines data (KB) for you constantly.
- Blocks of the same colour that touch each other earn more. The lines drawn between neighbours are the connections paying you. Bigger, tidier clusters mean more lines.
- Efficiency (left column) is how tidy the whole drive is: 100% means every colour sits in exactly one cluster.
- Perfect Colour is the big one. When every block of a colour is connected into a single cluster, that colour gets a white outline and your whole income is multiplied. Two perfect colours multiply it further. This is what the game is about: getting there, and keeping it there while the drive keeps changing.
- Rainbow blocks are rare, can't be moved, and count as any colour for connections.
Controls
- Click and drag the empty workspace to pan. Mouse wheel zooms toward the cursor; the ⤢ button fits the drive back in view.
- Hold on a block for a moment (a ring fills) to pick it up, then drop it on an empty cell or onto another block to swap. Drop it on the ✖ zone to throw it away.
- Hold SPACE to enter Cloud Sync mode, then click a square of same-coloured blocks to cut it into a payload (see Cloud Sync).
- Click a bad sector (big red X) to pay packets and repair it. Click a dead platter (cross-hatched column) to replace it.
- Top bar: pause, Sector Rewards, mute, contrast, particles, effects, block patterns, the disasters menu, hard reset, and your account.
System Hardware
- Auto-Downloader downloads blocks for you. Each level downloads faster. It's the first thing to buy.
- Expand Partition adds two rows and two columns — a new platter and a new row of sectors. More cells means more blocks, more income and more to tidy. Bigger drives also draw more power (see UPS) and each new platter arrives without a surge protector.
Power
A power surge is one of the three disasters. It does two separate things: it damages platters, and it causes an outage that takes your Defrag Suite bots offline for a while.
- Surge Protector shields one platter (bought left to right) from surge damage. Platters you expand into later arrive unprotected, so keep buying them as the drive grows.
- UPS Battery covers the outage. When a surge hits, the whole drive runs on battery first — every bot keeps working and the UPS button blinks 🔋. Whatever the battery couldn't cover becomes the real outage. A battery big enough for the whole outage means your tools never go down and nothing gets damaged by the outage. Bigger drives drain the battery faster, so a battery that was plenty on a small drive won't be later.
Disk Maintenance
- Purge Daemon finds corrupt data and fixes it — a corrupt cell comes back as usable data. It also repairs bad sectors when there's nothing corrupt to fix.
- Sector Swapper clears bad sectors, a whole 2×2 at a time.
The first level of each is cheap on purpose: a fresh drive should always be able to afford one. Later levels cost real money.
Defrag Suite
Bots that tidy the drive for you. Each level adds another copy of the bot. They pause during a power outage. Bought in roughly the order you'll want them:
- Linear Shifter — nudges completely lonely blocks one step toward company. Cheap, busy, not clever.
- Sorting Daemon — takes a block with no matching neighbours and moves it, anywhere on the drive, to somewhere it touches its own colour.
- Deploy Flipper — swaps two neighbouring blocks of different colours when the swap makes more connections than it breaks.
- Quantum Tunneler — like the Flipper, but across any distance: moves or swaps a block with a far-away spot when that pays.
- Batch Compressor — grabs the four loneliest blocks of a colour and packs them into a 2×2, in one operation.
- Cluster Consolidator — takes blocks from a colour's smaller clusters and joins them onto its biggest one.
- Data Magnet — the Perfect Colour specialist. It picks the colour closest to being perfect and works only on that: pulling strays in and building bridges between its pieces until the colour is one cluster.
The clever bots won't make a move that breaks a colour that's currently perfect. They all idle once the drive is at 100% efficiency.
Damage & Platters
Damage climbs three rungs, one per physical scale of the drive. Each looks different so you always know what you're dealing with.
- Corrupt data (a cell of animated static). Appears occasionally when data downloads, from disasters, or by spreading from a bad sector nearby. It earns nothing, blocks the cell, and drags your throughput down while it sits there. Fix: Purge Daemon.
- Bad sector (a big red X across a 2×2). A sector whose four cells are all corrupt goes bad, and disasters push already-corrupt sectors over the edge. Any blocks inside are lost. Bad sectors never heal by themselves — and a neglected one slowly spreads corruption up and down its platter. Fix: Purge Daemon or Sector Swapper, click it and pay packets, or FORMAT C:.
- Dead platter (the whole column cross-hatched). When every sector on a platter is bad, the platter dies. It's physically gone: it survives FORMAT C:, no bot touches it, and the only fix is Replace Platter — click it, pay data and packets, wait for the swap. Each replacement you ever do makes the next one slower and pricier.
Disasters start once you've formatted at least once. Earthquake shuffles the whole drive and roughs up a share of sectors. Power surge hits every unprotected platter and causes an outage (see Power). Platter failure crashes one platter — every sector on it gets one rung worse, and a platter that was already sick can die outright. A platter with existing damage is the likelier target.
Cloud Sync
Cloud Sync is a torrent client for your drive, and it's how you earn ☁ packets.
- Payloads. Hold SPACE and click a square of same-coloured blocks to cut it off the drive as a payload. Squares from a rarer colour are worth more, and a square cut from a Perfect Colour is worth a lot more — but cutting it breaks that colour's perfect bonus until your bots rebuild it. That trade is yours to make.
- Lanes. Payloads wait in a queue for a free lane and transfer at your bandwidth. Lane 1 is yours and always on.
- Peers. Every so often a peer knocks in the TRANSFERS panel and waits a few seconds for you to click ACCEPT. Accepting opens an extra lane for a while, then the peer leaves. Sometimes several arrive at once. You have to be at the keyboard for this — unless a Handshake Daemon accepts for you, a little slower than you would.
- Doing it hands-free. Both halves of the manual loop can be bought with data: the Auto-Seeder sweeps the drive row by row and queues the best square it finds (it will happily cut perfect colours), and the Handshake Daemon accepts peers for you. Buy those two and packets arrive on their own; your lane is always on. Uploads are always one 2×2 sector.
- Sync Coherence (bought with packets) makes newly downloaded blocks more likely to match a neighbour.
- Bandwidth and Lane Capacity are bought with data and make transfers faster and more parallel.
Packets pay for Sync Coherence, bad-sector repairs and platter replacements.
Currencies & Sectors
- KB (data) — mined by blocks, spent on hardware, bots and power. Shown as KB until the number gets long, then MB, GB and so on.
- ☁ Packets — earned from Cloud Sync transfers. Spent on Sync Coherence, bad-sector repairs and platter replacements.
- ◇ Sectors — earned from milestones (cluster sizes, data mined, blocks downloaded, corruption fixed, formats, moves, one-off feats). Spend them in Sector Rewards on permanent bonuses: more income, fewer disasters, less corruption, better offline earnings, faster repairs and more. These never reset.
FORMAT C: (prestige)
Formatting wipes the drive and your run — blocks, bots, data — in exchange for Core Fragments, a permanent income boost, one more prestige level, a bigger maximum partition, and a new colour palette. You need to have mined enough in the current run to bank a batch of fragments before the button unlocks; the bar at the bottom shows how close you are.
Kept through a format: Auto-Downloader and partition size, surge protectors and UPS, Cloud Sync bandwidth and lanes, Cloud Sync upgrades, packets, sectors and sector bonuses, fragments — and dead platters. Reset: everything else, including bad sectors and the transfer queue.
Data Reboot (available after your first format) tidies the drive in one go at the cost of a prestige level and some banked fragments.
Accounts & Cloud Saves
- Everything up to your first format works with no account; progress lives in your browser.
- FORMAT C: needs an account. Continue with Google is the sign-in; we receive only your email address.
- Once signed in your save is kept in the cloud and synced about once a minute and whenever you switch away from the tab. Sign in on another device and the save that has mined more data wins; a brand-new device just takes the cloud copy.
- Hard Reset wipes both the local and the cloud save. To delete the account itself, see the Privacy Policy.
FAQ
- Do I earn while the tab is closed? A little — offline mining runs at a small fraction of your rate, and Sector Rewards can raise it.
- The game feels slow on a big drive. Turn off particles, effects or block patterns in the top bar. The game also lowers detail on its own when frame rate drops.
- A perfect colour keeps flickering off. Something is cutting into it: the Auto-Seeder, your own uploads, corruption, or a disaster. That's the tension by design.
- Where are the exact numbers? Not here. Discover them.