Six seconds. Pour, or close the grate and let the board record a shutdown.
CUPOLA No. 4 · FOUR HEATS TO A POUR
CLINKERLINE
You are the near-side stoker. An ash-raker works the far side behind the screen, and the rake head is the only thing that can clear your bed. Their read of the bed is half a second old, so you can out-think them — but only inside that lag.
FIRE HELD
Paused
The bed is exactly where you left it. The rake is mid-stroke.
OPERATING CARD
Three verbs
- FEED · W
- Hold to meter coal off the scuttle. Raises bed heat, depth and slag together. Drains your shift's coal.
- TIP ALL · D
- One stroke, the whole scuttle. Huge output, a slag spike, and a clinker the raker will have to break. Costs their trust.
- BANK · S
- Close the grate. Cools and packs the bed, stops slag accruing, keeps the raker out, and kills your output.
- POKE · E
- Stab a crust into rakeable slag. Never scores you. Feeding into a bed you just banked re-fuses faster than you think.
The other side
The raker draws the air slide to help you when they trust you, screen your good coal out with the fines when they do not, and jam when the head is in the mass. A jam is your window: one poke frees them. Let it close and the run is void.
Read the furnace
The throat aperture is the draught. A wide opening is a clear, hollow draw note; a choked bed is a dead flat one. The blue ghost line on the bed is what the raker believes it looks like — it is always half a second behind.
Raker keys in two-player mode: I rake J screen K draw — the screen delays those by the same half second.
THE BOARD