Ember Forge

An alchemical smelting idle game built in Common Lisp.

You inherit a crumbling furnace and a pile of raw stone. From that humble start, you'll mine ore, discover ancient alloys, queue up smelting jobs, and slowly build a self-running forge-town — until the day your first Ember Crystal ignites and everything resets a little stronger than before.

The Loop

Start by clicking your way through stone and coal. Spend your first coins on a rusty pickaxe that mines while you're away. Queue iron bars in the forge. Use those bars to unlock bronze, then steel, then mythril. Buy buildings that automate what your hands used to do. Research upgrades that make everything faster and more efficient. Eventually condense raw mythril into an Ember Crystal, ascend, and do it all over again — permanently smarter, faster, and richer each time.

mine → smelt → combine → automate → prestige

Features

• 12 smelting recipes — from basic iron bars to Machine Parts and Ember Crystals, each unlocking as your forge grows
• 9 buildings — Pickaxes, Mines, Furnaces, Bellows Workshops, Mythril Drills, and more, all stacking and scaling
• 20+ upgrades — boost production, unlock recipes, expand storage, and speed up your smelting queue
• Shop system — spend Coins on stackable per-run bonuses like discounted prices, better sell rates, and bigger warehouses
• Prestige & Ascension — reset for Ember Essence, then spend it on Eternal Upgrades that carry into every future run
• Random events — cave-ins, wandering merchants, and ember pulses fire every few minutes to shake things up
• Offline progress — up to 8 hours of production applied when you return
• Keyboard shortcuts — switch panels instantly with keys 1–6, toggle fullscreen with F11
• Human-readable saves — your save file is a plain text Lisp plist you can inspect or back up easily

Progression at a Glance

Early
Clicking stone, buying your first pickaxe and coal pit
Mid
Smelting iron and copper, unlocking bronze and gears
Late
Forging steel, assembling machine parts, drilling for mythril
Endgame
Condensing Ember Crystals, ascending, buying eternal upgrades
Loop
Each prestige run starts faster and reaches further

Eternal Upgrades (Prestige Rewards)

These persist across every run and stack with each ascension:

• Eternal Miner — start each run with a free Pickaxe
• Ember Memory — keep 10% of your coins on reset
• Forge Mastery — all smelting 25% faster, permanently
• Ancient Veins — +50% ore production from all mines, forever
• Twin Furnaces — begin each run with an Auto-Furnace already built

Technical

Built from scratch in Common Lisp (SBCL) with SDL2 for rendering. No engine,  Just some basic background images, TTF fonts, and a 60 fps game loop. Runs natively on Linux and Windows

Github: https://github.com/RootOfCode/Ember-Forge