Crate Works

How to play Crate Works

1. Choose Start shift for the first lesson, or open Warehouses to pick any unlocked world and room.
2. Find the blue marks and decide which crate should go to each one before you move.
3. Walk behind a crate and step toward it to push it one square. You cannot pull, and two crates in a row will not move.
4. Keep aisles open: a crate pushed into a corner or flat against a wall with no mark along it can never come back.
5. Use Undo freely, ask for a Hint when you are stuck, and watch for red crates marked with an exclamation mark.
6. Put every crate on a mark to deliver the warehouse, then compare your pushes with par to earn up to three stars.

Controls

About Crate Works

Crate Works is a warehouse puzzle in the style of early home-computer games: a sixteen-colour palette, red brick walls, grey floor tiles, wooden crates and a small worker in a yellow hard hat. The rule is simple. Every crate has to end on a blue loading mark. The worker can push one crate ahead into an empty square, but cannot pull a crate back, climb over it or push two crates in a row. A crate turns green when it sits on a mark, and the warehouse is delivered when every crate is green.

The campaign holds 100 original warehouses in five worlds of twenty. The Loading Dock starts with four hand-drawn lessons: a straight push, walking around a crate, the danger of corners and two crates that need an order. It then builds up to three-crate rooms. The Stockroom, Cold Store, Freight Yard and Night Shift follow with more crates, narrower aisles and puzzles that need thirty, forty or more pushes. Each new world opens after twelve deliveries in the one before, so a single stubborn room never blocks your progress. The 24 stages from the first release of Crate Works live on as the First Edition archive, always open, with any records you already earned.

The warehouses were not copied from any existing collection. An original generator assembles each room from small wall patterns, places the marks, and then searches backwards from the finished position, pulling crates away from their marks, to find a starting arrangement that is far from solved. The strongest candidates were ranked by measured difficulty, including push count, how often you must switch between crates and how much searching a solver needs, and then ordered into a smooth curve. Automated tests replay every stored route through the real game rules and prove each par with two independent searches.

Par is the minimum number of pushes needed, not a designer guess. One star means delivered, two stars mean you finished within a few pushes of par, and three stars mean you matched par without help. Each warehouse also has a foreman's route, a reference solution with a step count. Match par in no more steps than the foreman and you earn the foreman's seal. Your fewest pushes and fewest steps are saved separately, and after a delivery you can watch the foreman's route or replay your own best run.

Controls are built for quick, careful play. Arrow keys or WASD move one square, and you can type ahead or hold a key to keep walking. Undo and Redo are unlimited, and holding the Undo button rewinds. Restart is instant, and Undo brings the old attempt back if you restarted by mistake. With a mouse or a finger, tap any floor square to walk there along the shortest path, swipe to take one step, or use the on-screen arrow pad. Tap or drag a crate to see every square it can reach and deliver it with one more tap.

When you are stuck, Hint points at the next push of a real solution from your current position and draws the walk to get behind the crate. Press it again and the worker makes that move. Show solution in the menu plays the rest for you. A run that used help can still earn two stars, and the third star stays for an unaided par. The game also warns you about mistakes it can prove: a crate on a square from which no mark can ever be reached, or crates frozen against walls and each other. These crates turn red with an exclamation mark. Those checks cannot catch every trap, and the game says so rather than pretending.

The Daily Shipment is a fresh warehouse for each calendar day, built by the same generator and checked the moment it is made, so its par is exact. Everyone who plays on the same date gets the same room. Finishing daily puzzles on consecutive days builds a streak shown on the title card, and an unfinished daily waits under Continue until you start another warehouse.

Crate Works runs in any modern browser on computers, Android phones and iPhones, in portrait or landscape. On a phone in landscape the controls move to a side column so the warehouse stays large, and fullscreen gives an even bigger board. Sound effects are synthesized in the browser and start muted, motion effects respect reduced-motion settings, and there are no countdowns or lives. Progress, stars, settings and your unfinished warehouse are saved in this browser only, with no account required. Clearing site data removes them.

A few useful tricks

• Before the first push, ask where the worker must stand for the next one. Most dead ends start with a crate pushed one square too far.
• A crate against a wall can only slide along that wall. If no mark lies along it, the crate is lost there.
• Fill marks at the back of a room first so finished crates do not block the aisle you still need.
• Sometimes a crate must pass over a mark or wait in a corner of the aisle before it can reach its final place.
• Turn on Shade dead squares in the menu while you learn to see which floor squares a crate must never touch.
• For the seal, first find a par solution, then trim walking steps. The foreman's route shows one way to do it.

Good questions