The Lattice: Drill Mining Game

The Lattice is a dig down mining game with a lock on it. Drill for ore, sell it, upgrade your ship and go deeper. Anchors are buried across a planet, three under each of three barriers that nothing in your drill ship can touch. Break a barrier's three Anchors and its core lights up. Break the core and the way down opens. The last core is the door of the Vault at the center, and that is the end.

Hold down and the drill ship digs. Everything below you is rock until you cut it, and everything you cut is a shaft you have to climb back up. The whole planet is one world, 61 columns wide and 452 meters deep, in twelve regions that each have their own rock and their own rules.

DIG WHERE YOU LIKE
There is no route. The whole face is diggable, so the shaft is whatever shape you make it, and the one you cut on the way down is the one you climb on the way back. Cutting straight is fast and cutting wide finds more. Marks at the top of the screen fill as you break a depth's Anchors, so the game never stops telling you what it wants.

KEYS YOU NEVER SELL
Copper near the surface, then iron, silver and gold: that is money, sold at the pad. Deeper down are the keys: amethyst, emerald, ruby and rarer things, one crystal at a time in small pockets, each with a home region the map will name. Keys are never sold. They are what the better parts of the ship are made from, so every find is a moment and every rung of an upgrade is a hunt. Your sensors can tell you a key is near, never where.

THE PLANET COMES APART
Break the first core and the ground stops staying where you left it. Every Anchor you break after that shows in the rock, then in the air. You can patch the scars the Anchors leave by packing ore into them, and you watch them close. The back half of the game is dug through a world that is moving.

TWELVE WRECKS
Twelve wrecked drill ships are buried across the planet, one in every region, always in the same places. You will see the shape of one in the dark before you know what it is, its own lamp still faintly lit. Cut through and the hold still holds whatever that crew had dug before they stopped.

FUEL IS THE CLOCK
Nothing hunts you, but the ground is not safe. Gas pockets open the hull, deep rock cooks it, and tremors close tunnels behind you. What actually limits a run is the tank, and every meter costs the same going down as coming up. Turning around with half a tank left is the correct play and it never feels like one.

ROCK THAT IS HOLDING SOMETHING UP
Deeper down you will see a warm glow in the stone that is worth more than anything else at that depth. Cutting it brings the tunnel you came down in partly down behind you, so the way home is one you have to find again. Cut it or leave it, and either way it costs you.

SEALED IN THE ROCK
Seven devices are buried out there and none of them is for sale, among them a cutting laser, a salvage magnet, a repair drone, and a receiver that hears an unbroken Anchor through solid rock and tells you how near it is, never which way.

THE FITTING BAY
Sell the haul at the pad and fit it to the ship. Every upgrade is a card that says what it does and what it will cost you, in credits and in keys. Every barrier you open has a bay of its own, a save point, and something the pad will never sell.

If you like a mining game where you dig down at your own pace, drill your own shaft and decide when to turn back, this one is built for it. Plays in the browser or installed from the store. Free, with no wait timers, no ads, no in-app purchases, no accounts and no analytics. Your progress is saved on your device and nothing you do is sent anywhere.