# The starting set

> Mixmote is a crafting game you play in the browser. This page is part of the [reading room](https://mixmote.com/reading-room), the game's handbook in plain text.

Every new game starts with the same set. The ingredients, forces and tools are unlimited: take as many as you like. Guild Coin starts at zero and is earned. Everything made from them is counted: it comes in portions and is used up when used.

## Basic ingredients

- **Water**: A litre of patient possibility.
- **Air**: A small sample of the atmosphere.
- **Earth**: A heavy clod of mineral soil containing iron, tin and sulfur deposits. A Shovel digs Iron Ore straight out of it; the other minerals take more work.
- **Stone**: A heavy lump of silicate rock. Ten chunks of gravel are waiting inside.
- **Wood**: A dry billet. Its living days are over; its useful days are beginning.
- **Salt**: A small measure of sodium chloride.
- **Clay**: A workable lump of damp aluminosilicate clay.
- **Aether**: An explicitly magical source, supplied by the laboratory. Enchantments begin here.

## Forces

- **Fire**: A laboratory flame. Enough heat for glass and a small kiln.
- **Sunlight**: Gentle warmth for water and drying paper.
- **Cold**: A cold source. It cannot cool anything below itself.
- **Lightning**: An electrical discharge. Energy alone does not grant magic or life.

## Tools

- **Hammer**: Separates brittle feedstock with little ceremony.
- **Knife**: Halves a whole inert body into a worked piece (a plank, a slab); on anything tiny, filed or already halved twice it cuts every particle into a hundred smaller ones. Living cuts take a tenth of a dull creature's health, more from a thinking one, and leave a sample.
- **Metal File**: A hardened rasp. Any inert solid no harder than it comes off as a hundred pinches of filings, shavings or dust, ready for the knife.
- **Surgical Knife**: Records the anatomy of a living subject.
- **Shovel**: Digs out what a deposit hides: Iron Ore from Earth. Clay, Mud and Sand hide other minerals.
- **Syringe**: Draws living samples, fluids and magically contained essences.

## Coin

- **Guild Coin**: Guild currency. Earned by trade; excluded from crafting.

What these make together is on [first recipes](https://mixmote.com/reading-room/first-recipes).

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From the Mixmote team. Built from the game's data (seed v3, version 2), last changed 2026-10-07.