The Last Directive

A free browser mining game in the spirit of Motherload. You pilot a battered drilling machine on a world somebody abandoned, and the only way to find out why is to keep going down.

How to play

• Arrow keys or WASD — drive left and right, thrust upward, drill down.
• Space — confirm dialogue and menu selections.
• Esc — pause, check your inventory and upgrades, adjust sound and music.

Field items fire on their own keys, the same ones the genre has always used:

• F — Reserve Flask, a portable refuel
• R — Repair Nanites, a field hull patch
• X — Blast Charge, clears a small area
• C — Shaped Charge, clears a large one
• Q — Recall Beacon, a cheap and imprecise ride up
• M — Anchor Transmitter, an exact one

Ore sells at the processor on the surface. Fuel, hull repair and consumable items each have their own building, and the outfitter upgrades your drill, hull, engine, fuel tank, cargo bays and radiators. Everything you buy is permanent for that run.

What is down there

• Depth-banded ore. Ironium sits near the surface; goldium, einsteinium and amazonite only appear far below it, and the deeper seams get richer the further you go.
• Heat. The core gets hotter with depth. Push past what your radiators are rated for and the hull starts cooking — the temperature gauge sits beside your altimeter.
• Gas pockets, lava and earthquakes. All of which will end a run that is carrying too much and repairing too little.
• Buried artifacts. Rare finds worth a great deal more than ore, scattered at depths that are worth remembering.
• An ending. There is a bottom, and something at it.

Saving your progress

Every run saves to your browser automatically. Signing in with Google is optional — it adds four cloud save slots that follow your account between devices, and posts your best run to the global leaderboard on the title screen. If you never sign in, the game still saves locally and plays exactly the same.