What the Bucket Brought

What the Bucket Brought is a cosmic horror idle game about a flooded well, a bucket on a chain, and whatever floats up out of the dark. Light the candle, drop the bucket, crank it back up and scoop the curios drifting in the black water. Sell them, upgrade, and go deeper. The deeper you go, the more everything is worth, and the less the rock looks like rock. It plays like a fishing game turned inside out: you lower a bucket instead of a hook, and you never quite know what you are reeling in. Short, tense runs, a huge upgrade map to grow, workers who automate the hauling, and an incremental descent that keeps calling you back for one more night. Drop, steer, scoop, crank • Drop the bucket, then turn the big wheel with your finger to haul it up: a ratchet you can hear and feel. • Steer with a little stick under your other thumb and scoop the curios floating in the flooded cistern. • The bucket only holds so many. The deepest curios sell for the most, and the rare ones glow. • Crank at a steady pace and the chain sings: those hauls sell for more. Six strata of creeping dread • Topsoil, clay, sandstone, shale, a bed of bones, and then the page tears open onto something that was never mapped. • Faces pressed into the clay open their eyes as the bucket passes. The spiral in the sandstone stares back. A ribcage the size of the cistern waits under the water. • Sometimes something takes hold of the chain. Hold still and it leaves a gift. Crank and it lets go. • Dread, not gore: a creepy, eerie horror game in crisp pixel art drawn like an old engraving, bone and ink with every strange find glowing in colour. Collect 64 strange curios • A plumb bob that hangs upward, a vial that climbs toward whoever holds it, a page of this survey in your own handwriting, not written yet. • Every curio has its own line in the Book. Scoop 20 of the same curio to master it, and from then on it sells for half again as much. A map of 110 upgrades • An upgrade tree spreads out from the well in seven arms: longer chains, bigger buckets, longer candles, luckier finds, workers and clockwork wells. • Drag and pinch to explore it; the next upgrades wait in the fog so you can see what is coming. • Every upgrade shows plain numbers: what you have now and what you get next. Buy all you can afford in one tap. Idle workers and automation • Hire hooded workers and dig up to 24 side wells in the Works, or build brass clockwork that needs no one at all. • Idle progress: your workers keep hauling while you are away (up to 30 minutes, or an hour with the cistern). Seal the well and start deeper • When the well hits bottom, seal it for seals: a prestige reset with upgrades you keep forever. • Five sites, each with its own rule and its own curios. Reach the very bottom to see what has been looking up. Made for phones, plays offline • Short runs: 45 seconds at first, never more than a few minutes. • Plays offline, no Wi-Fi needed. No account, no sign-in. Your progress stays on your device. • Sound, music, vibration and reduced-motion settings. No purchases, fair ads • No purchases of any kind. • Optional short videos for a bonus that is stated before you tap. An occasional short ad between runs, never while the candle burns, and none in your first twenty minutes. • Every optional video stays optional: you can finish the game without watching one. A single-player cosmic horror incremental for players aged 16 and up. Good company on a dark Halloween night, or any night the well is calling.

The well is open. Light the candle, drop the bucket, and see what comes up. If anything breaks or an ad looks wrong, tell us from Settings.