About This Game

Desert silence and a pickaxe in your hand. You head underground, and for a while the world above stops mattering.

Dust & Diamonds is a calm pixel-art game about digging, building and trading. You are a goblin with a handful of coins and a crumbling settlement at the edge of the desert. The rest you write yourself, one tile at a time.

Day and night over the desert

A day lasts half an hour: dawn, noon, a violet dusk, the moon over the rocks and lights in the windows. Sandstorms, vultures over the desert, caravans making camp in the distance. Sometimes a cat sleeps on the Shop roof. When it comes down, you can pet it.

A mine you'll want to come back to

Dig at your own pace. First dirt and coal, then gold, platinum, titanium and diamonds, all the way to the bottom, 100 metres below the surface. Place ladders, torches and support beams, pick up what you dig out, while your Workers carry goods from the chests back to the settlement. One more tunnel. Five more minutes.

The rock keeps its surprises

Behind the wall wait hidden pockets and caves, some with ore, some with water or lava. And water really flows. One swing of the pickaxe and the tunnel you dug so patiently has a river of its own.

The mountain likes to remind you it's there

No ceiling holds forever. You place your support beams with care, and when things start to crumble, you simply run. Then you come back with your pickaxe, one cave-in wiser.

A settlement that grows with you

Raise six buildings from the ruins: the Shop, Workshop, Warehouse, Greenhouse, Water Collector and Worker Hotel. Each has five levels and a rhythm of its own. The Workshop holds over 200 recipes, the Greenhouse its crops, and the Hotel Kitchen meals for your crew. Workers have names, skills and wages, and they'll let you know when they get hungry.

The Shop earns while you dig

Set your minimum prices, head underground, and the Shop keeps working. Customers come to the door, thirty of them by name, along with merchants and their own offers. Father has something to say about every one of them, in a voice of his own in every language of the game. The Business Chronicle remembers every product you've managed to sell.

Music to dig to

Dozens of music discs to collect. They play on the radio while you keep digging.

Play your way

Keyboard and mouse or gamepad. Three difficulty levels, a skippable tutorial, rebindable keys, colorblind mode, reduced effects and a larger interface. English, Polish, French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Russian.

Head down to the mine for a while. You'll see how quickly the evening goes.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Dust & Diamonds is made by one person. I used AI tools while making the game. The game generates nothing during gameplay.