Chainsaw Simulator

You are the operator of a two-stroke chainsaw in a fenced maintenance yard at dusk.

An order card is pinned to the corner of your eye: what the customers want cut, and how many. You haul a workpiece out of the rack, set it down, and swing it to the angle you want.

Then you gas the saw and cut it however you please.

• WASD walks the operator round the yard; mouse looks and aims.
• Hold left mouse to gas: the engine catches, the chain runs, and wherever the bar touches the workpiece it carves material away.
• Q / E drop and raise the saw on its mount. Z / C roll the bar between vertical and horizontal. X flips it to the far side. Scroll pushes it out and pulls it back.
• 1 – 8 pull stock into the work zone.
• Hold G and steer the mouse to rotate the workpiece. Release to set it.

Stock you can pull:

key	piece
1	pine block	40 cm — small work, and what the orders ask for
2	sawn log	a metre of trunk on its side
3	block ice	40 cm, cuts fast and shatters
4	sawn plank	thin hardwood
5	pine beam	1.2 m cube
6	tree trunk	2.4 m standing
7	ice monolith	1 m cube
8	hardwood block	1.2 m cube, slow and deliberate

The big stock is there to be sculpted. It is not on the order card and it will not retire until there is almost nothing left of it — so you can carve a figure, a totem, a face, whatever you like, for as long as you like.

Straight through, notched, gouged, sculpted down to nothing — nothing tells you what shape to leave behind except the order and your own hands.

Cut through enough of a working piece and it retires: one cut off the order. Clear eight orders and the shift is done and the pay slip prints. Ice cuts fast and shatters into chunks. Pine is steady work. Hardwood is slow.

One thing to watch: gas the saw hard with no load for too long, or hold one deep continuous cut, and the engine overheats, sputters and dies for a few seconds while the needle sits in the red.

Between orders the yard stays open. Keep cutting. Listen to the saw.