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Dusty Bones

Four billion years lie under your camp. Pick up a trowel. Dusty Bones is a cozy incremental game about digging down through Earth's history. Break the rock, brush the bones free, and winch each find up to your camp. Then decide what becomes of it: show it in a museum you can walk through, study it in the Lab, or bring it back to life in the Preserve. The deeper you dig, the older and stranger life becomes, all the way down to the first cell. Dig Hold to keep digging. Every rock has its own quirk and its own sound: soft loess, river gravel, permafrost, tar seeps, the red beds of the Triassic. Skeletons lie whole in the rock, each species in the kind of deposit where it is really found, and you brush them out yourself. Swing too hard beside a bone and it chips. Hire a digger and a preparator and watch them get better at it, from a steel pick to a headlamp to a power drill. They keep working while you are away. Show it off Walk through your museum hall by hall. Mount each find on the plinth you choose and watch it go up bone by bone, with any missing pieces cast in white plaster. Visitors pay at the desk, point, and cheer. Fill a hall with a matching set and it earns more. Build new wings, run tours, and open a gift shop. Or get it wrong, the way history did. Put Iguanodon's thumb on its nose. Put Elasmosaurus's head on the end of its tail. Build the Quedlinburg unicorn, or Hydrarchos, the 34 meter sea serpent made from five whales. Your visitors will laugh, and you can put it right later. Study it Send a find to the Lab and watch the plaster and rock come away on the bench. Everything you study adds to what you know, for good. Open the ancient DNA room, sequence proteins, and find the pages of an old notebook hidden in the rock. Bring it back Let mammoths and woolly rhinos loose on the steppe, and watch them graze and raise their young. Keep a food web in balance across four habitats, and turn the weather station's dials for temperature, oxygen, and carbon dioxide. Older finds have no DNA left, so their living kin come in their place: ostriches, crocodiles, dragonflies. Nothing dies if you forget about it. Hungry animals simply go into cold storage until there is food. Five extinctions The dig stops at the K-Pg boundary, at a glowing seam of iridium from the asteroid that ended the dinosaurs. To go deeper you pass it: the run starts over at the surface, what really died out dies out, and what you have done becomes Deep Time, which grows roots of its own. Each of the five great extinctions changes the rules in its own way. Below the last of them lie the Cambrian, the first animals, the oldest rock, and the bottom of it all. What is in it 64 real species, each with a short, accurate note on what it wasTen eras and 34 kinds of rock, from the Ice Age to the oldest rock on EarthFive mass extinctions, each with its own lasting ruleSeven real fossil sites to send your team to, from La Brea to the Burgess Shale82 upgrades that grow as roots under your camp, with what they build standing in the worldAbout 20 hours to the first cell at an easy pace, much of it while you are away, and more after that How to play Hold the mouse or a finger on the rock to dig, and drag to keep going. Space works the next thing. Tap a building at the camp, or in the dock, to go in. Escape opens the settings. Use the button at the corner of the game for full screen. Your save In a browser, your dig is kept in your browser's storage for this site. If your browser blocks that (a private window, or cookies and site data turned off for this game) the game plays on and tells you it cannot keep your dig. Either way you can download your save or copy it as text from Settings, Your save, and load it on another device or in the Windows version. The Windows download is not signed, so Windows may warn you about it. Choose More info, then Run anyway.