The Components, and What Each One Actually Costs

Every puzzle hands you a spark budget and a palette. The budget is the real constraint, because the components split into two groups that are priced very differently.

Passive parts are free. Ramps, walls, springs, puddles and tubes cost nothing, no matter how many times the marble touches them. A ramp deflects and bleeds a little speed. A wall bounces. A spring waits until the marble is falling, then flips that downward speed and multiplies it by 1.4 — which means a spring pays back height you banked earlier and does almost nothing for a slow marble. A puddle cuts the marble's speed to a fraction of what it was. A tube carries it through without interference.

Active parts cost one spark each time they fire. Dominos, fans, magnets, levers and fuses all draw from the same budget. A fan does not nudge the marble — it overwrites its velocity outright, sending it off at a fixed speed along whatever direction the fan faces, which makes a fan pointed the wrong way a way to reverse a run rather than slow it. A magnet pulls. A lever redirects. A domino topples and passes the topple along to a horizontally adjacent domino, and each one in that cascade spends its own spark.

Fuses buy timing, not free sparks. A fuse burns for 600 milliseconds and then fires every active component orthogonally next to it, up to four at once. Each of those still costs a spark of its own, and a fuse lit by another fuse spends a spark without passing anything on. The way to finish a hard level under budget is not to chain sparks cleverly — it is to replace active pushes with passive geometry, so the marble arrives where it needs to be under its own momentum.

Difficulty Bands and Scoring

The 24 puzzles run across five bands — Tutorial, Easy, Medium, Hard and Expert. The two opening tutorial levels give you a spark budget of zero, which is the point: they teach you that a marble with a good ramp under it needs no help at all. From there the budgets climb to six, and the later boards start pre-placing fixed components you cannot move or rotate, so your build has to work around furniture rather than on an empty grid.

Scoring rewards economy rather than speed. Each solve pays 100 points per level number, then adds 50 for finishing under the spark budget, 30 for using fewer components than the palette offers, 50 for solving on the first run, and 20 for beating the level's par attempt count. There is no timer anywhere in the game, so a solution you thought about for ten minutes scores exactly the same as one you found immediately — the only thing the board measures is how little you needed.

Tips

• Spend your first run learning the fall. Drop the marble with almost nothing placed and watch where it goes. Chainwork's physics are consistent, so one observation run tells you more than three speculative builds.
• Count your active components before you place them. Every domino, fan, magnet, lever and fuse is one spark. If your plan needs seven activations and the budget is six, the chain will stall — and it will stall at the last one, after everything before it looked fine.
• Reach for a ramp before a fan. Ramps are free and fans are not. A fan is worth its spark when you need to reverse direction or gain height the geometry cannot give you.
• Put springs where the marble is already fast. The bounce scales with the speed coming in, so a spring under a long drop is worth far more than a spring on a gentle roll.
• Rotate before you delete. Clicking a placed component turns it 90 degrees, and a great many failed runs are a correct component pointing the wrong way.
• Undo is your friend on desktop. On a mouse, UNDO takes back your last placement and RESTART clears the board; long-press removal is the touch-device gesture.
• The marble has to arrive moving. A marble that trickles to a dead stop inside the goal pad does not count as a solve, so leave it some speed at the end.