Gunpowder
Gunpowder is a dark powder that flashes into fire at the touch of flame or lava, carrying a burn along any trail it forms.
- Movement
- Powder — falls and piles up
- Weight
- 5 / 9 (heavier sinks through lighter)
- Lifetime
- Permanent
- Glow
- None
Mechanically, gunpowder is another weight-5 powder: it falls, slips diagonally off slopes and builds cones, and it settles through water, acid and oil. It never ignites on its own, and neither friction nor impact sets it off.
Contact with a flame changes that immediately. Gunpowder’s table gives an 85 percent chance per check of becoming fire when fire touches it, and the flame that lit it keeps burning. The number is high enough that a grain beside a flame almost always catches within its first couple of checks, and the new flame does the same to the grains around it, so a line of powder burns from one end to the other in a quick, visible streak.
Lava ignites it at the same 85 percent rate. Since the powder is lighter than lava, a handful dropped onto a lava pool rests on the surface and lights from the bottom of the pile upward.
Real gunpowder does more than burn: it turns into hot gas almost instantly, and that sudden expansion is what makes the bang and the blast. Sandlab has no pressure or explosive force, so nothing is thrown around. What you see is a very fast chain of fire, not an explosion.
Water is the main defence. Powder lying under water never comes into contact with a flame, and a flame that reaches the water turns into steam first.
Try it yourself
- A fuse to a woodpile. Run a thin line of gunpowder along a wall floor from a small fire to a block of wood. Once the near end lights, the flame races along the powder far faster than it could move through wood, and the block at the far end catches on arrival.
- Powder kept wet. Pour gunpowder into a pool so it settles on the bottom, then paint fire over the water. The flames turn into steam at the surface and the powder underneath never lights.
- Sprinkled on lava. Scatter gunpowder over a lava pool. The grains land on the glowing surface and flash into flame where they touch it, so each little pile burns from its base to its tip.
Reactions
Odds are per contact check: each tick, touching cells inside the same two-by-two block are checked against the reaction table, so even a small chance happens soon after contact.
When gunpowder touches something
- Touching Fire: turns into Fire. (almost instant, 85% per contact check) →
- Touching Lava: turns into Fire, and the Lava turns into Fire. (almost instant, 85% per contact check) →
Tip
Lay a fuse on a flat, solid floor. Powder painted on a slope or in mid-air slides as it settles, and the trail breaks into separate heaps that the fire cannot jump between.