5q0 enter the workshop →

An instrument left exact. A commission left open.

5q0 is a machine-puzzle game. You place parts, program them, and watch a deterministic mechanism run — then make it cheaper, faster, or smaller, because it will not be all three.

5q0 · serial plate
BEGIN THE COMMISSIONING

What this is

Thirty machines across five bays, each solvable in minutes and improvable for far longer. Every solution is scored three ways at once, and the three optima genuinely disagree — the whole game lives in that disagreement.

In the margins of the manual, in three inks laid down across decades, the original engineer left notes. They are signed only V.H.

What it will never do

freeNo purchase touches hints, undo, levels or time. Enforced by a build gate, not a promise.
offlineInstalls as an app and runs with the network cut. Nothing is collected, because there is nowhere to put it.
no accountsProgress lives in your browser. You are not a row in anything.
honestIt trains planning, spatial reasoning and throughput thinking. It does not claim to make you smarter.

Try the first machine

bay one · first run open full →

From the margin

I left this bay empty on purpose. The room is finished; the thing it makes is not mine to choose. Whoever you are — make what you need.
— V.H.