Powder Toy
Version: 96.2 Web: https://powdertoy.co.uk
The Powder Toy is a free physics sandbox game, whose description will never be able to do justice to its awesomeness. You can use The Powder Toy to simulate interaction between gravity, air, pressure, heat and various substances. Installing the program is fairly simple. Just grab and extract its compressed binary, and you’re good to go:
$ wget -c https://powdertoy.co.uk/Download/ powder-lin64.zip
$ unzip powder-lin64.zip -d powder
$ cd powder
# ./powder
The Powder Toy’s interface looks rather busy for a game. On the right side, you have a toolbar that enables you to select various substance types. There are solids, liquids, gases, explosives, elements and more. The actual list of materials for the select substance type, appears at the bottom. For instance, under liquid you’ll get everything from carbonated water and salt water to liquid nitrogen and diesel. It’ll also tell you how to make a particular substance explode. www.techradar.com/pro/linux
You can use The Powder Toy to create walls, or containers, then fill them with materials and watch them interact. You can for instance, simulate the hydrogen fusion at the core of stars by adding immense heat and pressure.
The game gives you the option to pause and resume your simulations, so you can carry out small tweaks and then observe how they affect your creations.
You can also load one of the many existing simulations, created by The Powder Toy community. And there are some impressive constructions out there, including complex machines, bombs and intricate laboratories.
To use the downloaded .cps files, first register the game with your distro using the Ctrl+i keyboard shortcut. Then you can simply double-click the .cps files to load them in The Powder Toy.