Crafting table
W
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6 wood of one kind → 1 table. The only recipe you can make by hand, with no table around.
a living voxel world, growing every day
Every block is real. Dig it, build with it, defend it, make it yours.
Chop real trees, dig real terrain, fight with swords and bows, and breed creatures nobody has seen before. It's one live world you share with every other player from the moment you log in.
Name your own price on itch.io, including nothing · New updates ship almost every day
see it move
Real gameplay clips, recorded in the game
No cutscenes, no concept art. Every clip below was recorded straight from a running build.
how to start
Three steps to the live world
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1
Download
Get the 5.6 MB zip from itch.io and pay whatever you like, including nothing. Unzip it and run Hiili.exe. There's no installer and no launcher.
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2
Pick a name
Choose a name and a password right on the title screen. That's your account. No email or store login needed.
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3
You're in
You spawn into the one always-on world with everyone else, holding a shovel and an axe, with a crafting table to make. Start digging.
Hiili (Finnish for charcoal & carbon) is a voxel sandbox built completely from scratch — no off-the-shelf engine, no borrowed netcode, nothing bought off a store shelf. Every tree, tool, fish and footstep sound is made by the project itself, a Vulkan renderer written just for this game. It's not open source, but it is relentlessly worked on — new things to do ship most days.
craft it
One table, almost everything you need
You start with a single crafting table. Place it and press E within 4 m to open a 3×3 grid: put items from your bag into the squares in the shape of a recipe and the result appears. A shape can sit anywhere in the grid and be mirrored left to right — it just has to be the right shape, made of one kind of wood where wood is called for. Lost your table, or never had one? Press E out in the open, away from any door, chest or seat, with no table nearby, and a one-off hand-crafting window opens — the only recipe the server allows without a table in reach. An axe takes a placed table back down in a single hit, so you can always bring it with you.
Planks
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3 wood in a row → 4 planks. The basic building piece — oak wood makes oak planks, pine makes pine, and a mix makes nothing.
Torches
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1 coal over 1 wood → 4 torches. Light to carry, light to place — on the ground, a table, a shelf.
Storage chest
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8 wood in a ring → 1 chest. Holds 24 stacks, and the server keeps what's in it, saved with the world.
Campfire
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Wood over stone → 1 campfire. Health doesn't come back on its own — cook raw meat or fish on one, then eat to heal.
Bed
F
L
L
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A feather and leather over wood → 1 bed. Aim and press E to lie down in it.
W wood (any one kind, not mixed) · C coal · S stone · F feather · L leather
sculpt it
Carve anything, then wire it to do something
Place a sculpting table and a 32×32×32 grid of 3 cm cells floats over it, yours to fill. Add material from your bag with the left button, carve it away with X, and switch your brush from a single cell to a 7-cell block with Shift. Every cell costs real material from your bag, and carving gives it straight back — rework a piece as many times as you like before it's finished.
Then give it a job. Aim with the chisel and press J or K to cycle through behaviours that fire on E: turn a quarter round, light up like a lantern, spin slowly, or swing open like a door. Wake one sculpture and it can pass the signal on to every sculpture touching it — chain enough of them together and a single press ripples through all of them in sequence. No code to write, just behaviours you pick and chain.
Pop the finished piece off the table with P and it becomes a real item: name it, carry up to 32 in your bag, place copies anywhere as solid statues, or trade one whole, behaviours and all. The same chisel also cuts gems out of the ore you mine — opal up to diamond, and the rare sunstone.
Turn
Light
Spin
Swing
Chain reaction to neighbours
breed it
Every chimera is one of a kind — some are shiny
Cross any two of the land's animals and their young draws its body, head, tail and wings from one parent or the other at random — and one time in eight, any of those four parts can jump in from anywhere further back in both parents' lines. Breed two chimeras together and their young can be stranger still, mixing traits nobody has seen in the same place before. Two alike chimeras breed true, so a line worth keeping stays worth keeping.
Once in about every 2,048 births, a young chimera comes out shiny — its coat shimmering through colours as it moves, with a faint glow after dark. A shiny parent passes it on far more often, so a good shiny line is worth protecting. The chat tells you exactly what was born — "pig with chicken head, tail and wings" — every single time.
- 1 in 2,048 odds of a shiny birth from two plain chimeras
- 1 in 64 if one parent is shiny, 1 in 2 if both are
- Body, head, tail and wings are each inherited independently
so much to do
Everything here is something you can actually do
Not a tech demo of one idea — a whole world of things to get good at.
Build anywhere, instantly
No separate build mode to step into: shovel soil and clay, pickaxe through rock, and place what you craft right out of the hotbar as you play. Loose soil slumps naturally, water finds its level, and everything you touch is synced to everyone and saved for good.
Full-blooded combat
Swing copper, iron or gold swords with four special strikes each, draw bows of nine different woods with real arrow drop and flight time, or raise a shield and hold the line. Every hit trains real combat levels, so you get stronger the more you fight.
Fishing that's a real minigame
Cast a float onto the water, wait for a genuine bite, strike at the right moment, then fight the fish — reel when it's calm, ease off when it runs. Roach to the legendary sturgeon, rare golden carp, eels that only bite after dark.
Living villages & wanderers to trade with
A trader walks a round of stops in every 3 km square of land, always where the clock says. Trade with them, or take the quest they offer — go somewhere, clear a dungeon, fell trees, catch fish — for real skill experience. Whole villages of NPCs go about their lives on the map.
Dungeons, molten lava & a boss
Dig deep enough and you'll find pockets of molten rock that burn, boil water to steam, and only an iron bucket can carry. Somewhere in the deepest room of every dungeon, Krikkenkakkelkookel — antlers, dragon's body, pig's hooves and all — is asleep, waiting for you to step in.
Sail, trade and build an economy
Row a hand-built boat out onto open water and fish from it, or put up a notice board to post a trade request — fill someone else's board for their payment, or come back later and collect what was left for you, even while you were away.
Zero audio files, 100% real-time sound
Footsteps, wind, birdsong, crickets, wood and stone that ring when struck, an echo that grows in caves — every single sound is synthesized on the spot. There isn't one audio file anywhere in the game.
Land you can really own
Parcel a piece of the world for yourself, paid for and verified on-chain in HTN (Hoosat) through a wallet built straight into the client. Nobody, including the server, holds your keys.
Seen enough? The world's already running.
Pay what you want, including nothing. A 5.6 MB download and you're in.
built to scale
A world big enough that you'll never see it all
The world is 1024 by 1024 kilometres, generated from a seed rather than hand-placed, with beast camps, dungeons, villages and volcanoes scattered across it the same way every time for everyone. This isn't multiplayer bolted on after the fact — client-side prediction, snapshot interpolation, terrain and animals streamed in around every player, all engineered and stress-tested to hold a server full of people at a steady tick rate, not just a couple of friends.
- 1024 × 1024 km seeded world, the same for everyone who visits a spot
- 20 Hz simulation tick, snapshots interpolated client-side for smooth movement
- C++ / Vulkan throughout — client and server share the same movement and terrain code, bit for bit
- Built and stress-tested toward thousands of concurrent players on one server
from the game
What it actually looks like
Unedited, taken straight from a running build — no concept art.
get in
Stop reading. Go dig something up.
Hiili is still actively being built, so expect rough edges, and expect them to be fixed fast.
Is it really free?
Yes. It's name-your-own-price on itch.io, so you can enter 0 and download. Paying something helps fund development.
What do I need to run it?
A Windows PC with a graphics card that supports Vulkan, which covers most cards from recent years. The download is a 5.6 MB zip with no installer.
Do I need friends to play?
No. There is one always-on world, and everyone who logs in plays in it together. There's no lobby, no matchmaking and no server browser to pick through.
Is my progress saved?
Yes. The server keeps your account, your character and everything you dig, build and place, saved with the world.
Mac or Linux?
Not as a download yet. The itch.io release is Windows only for now.