Hippy Moon Miner

Fresh out of the slammer, straight onto the moon. You've done your time, and Big Cheese Holdings has a job for you: one moon contract. Vacuum the dust off the moon, press it into bricks and glass, ship it to the Big Cheese office and get paid for every unit. The big cheese says the moon is grey rock all the way down. It isn't. Clean a hex down to nothing and green cheese shows through. Don't tell Big Cheese. THE REAL MOON, ONE HEX AT A TIME You land at the Apollo 11 site, on a 2 km by 2 km patch of the real moon built from lunar orbiter survey data: its real craters, slopes and low sun. The ground is cut into 12 m hexes, and every hex holds its own dust, down to the last half metre. Clean one spotless for a bounty, and keep it clean, because the dust drifts back onto bare ground beside dusty ground. CHUNKY TOY MACHINES - The hand vacuum to start: $20,000 in your pocket and dust everywhere. - The vacuum truck, which drifts, with a long hose and a wide head for the corners, and AutoGroove: hand it the wheel and it mows the hex in neat rows by itself. - Tank trailers and land trains: hitch up to four behind the truck and keep cleaning while they fill. - The Mower-bagger, the Dust Tractor and the street cleaner: a nimble ride-on, a second land train with its own trailers, and the big one with two heads and a 30-tonne hopper. - Bins, belts, brick and glass presses and dump pads: build a little factory that turns loose dust into money. HIRE A CREW Sprocket, Dusty, Bolt and Noodle are robots who drive for you. Paint an area on the map, pick a machine, and a robot climbs in and cleans it, empties at the pad when the tank is full and goes back for more, while you drive something else. PLAY IT YOUR WAY - Touch controls laid out for phones and tablets, and full gamepad play on a phone with a controller or an Android handheld. - A map and a globe of the whole moon, a sandbox mode with money to burn, autosave. - No timer: the contract is a story, not a clock. Free, with no ads, no in-app purchases and no accounts. It plays offline, needs no internet permission and collects no data. This is an early build: more machines, more of the moon and more to do with what's under the dust are on the way. The moon's terrain and globe come from public-domain lunar orbiter data (NASA/GSFC/Arizona State University). The models and sounds are our own, generated from code; the code was written with AI-assisted tools.

First test build: clean the moon hex by hex, AutoGroove, land trains, belts and presses, the robot crew, Mower-bagger, Dust Tractor and street cleaner.