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Sandlab is small enough that one person can explain all of it. These articles go through how the simulation actually works, with the code and the test results behind each claim, and where the falling-sand genre came from. They are written for curious players and for developers who want to build something similar. Every article lists its sources at the end.

• How Sandlab moves 720,000 grains without losing one

  Why falling sand is hard to run on a GPU, how the Margolus 2×2 block rule avoids races, and the tests that check no grain is ever created or lost.

  9 October 2026 · about 6 min read

• Materials as data: how Sandlab defines 18 elements without writing physics code for each

  Sandlab has 18 elements and no per-element physics code. One shader reads one table. Here is how a row becomes behaviour, and how tests keep it honest.

  9 October 2026 · about 7 min read

• A short history of falling-sand games

  From a 2005 Java applet on a Japanese blog to Powder Game, The Powder Toy, Sandspiel and Noita: how the genre grew, and what Sandlab took from it.

  9 October 2026 · about 8 min read

Looking for a specific element instead? The materials guide covers every material and what it reacts with.