This page shows detailed help and some technical stuff about EKCuZC. If you'd like a simpler introduction, consider watching my video.
You're a small black square searching for gems in the depths of a mountain.
To find them, you need to enter deeper and deeper caves until you've gotten to the end.
WASD to move around, click to dig if you're overground, or burn if you're in the caves.
Move your torch around with mouse. ESC to pause and unpause, R to restart.
Swipe on the left side of the screen to move around.
If you're overground, tap on the right side to dig, but if you're in the caves, swipe on the right to move your torch around.
Tap on the top right "fire" button to burn.
Tap on the top left corner to pause or unpause, and tap the retry symbol to restart.
You start at the snowy top of the mountain. At first you need to find the hole that'll lead into the caves, which only appears when you dig while standing on top of it. So move around and click/tap on the right side of the screen until you've found the hole.
When you walk on the hole, you'll enter the caves.
In each cave, your goal is to find and enter the hole that'll lead into the next cave.
In the first ones, it means just walking around walls searching for the hole, but in later caves you'll also have to avoid monsters,
which will kill you with a single hit if they touch you.
In the last ten caves, the holes will be "locked" at start and could only be entered after you've flipped a lever.
Your goal is to pass cave 50, after which you've won the game.
Your torch, which is the only light source in the caves, will start to burn out slowly with no way of renewing it.
So it's actually a timer that forces you to hurry through the caves.
The amount of light left is represented by "light levels". At the start you have 50 of them, but after they've hit 0, the torch burns out and you've failed.
A special thing you can do with the torch is burning.
If you hover your torch over a block or monster and click/tap the fire button, the block or monster will "burn down",
letting you walk through the previously occupied space.
But the main downside is, you'll lose quite a bit of light, so it should be used only when you really need to.
Also, keep in mind that the hitbox of the torch is just a point in its centre, so make sure it really overlaps what you're trying to burn.
The monster's hitbox is also smaller than it seems, more info in the video.
You'll lose light after clicking/pressing the fire button even if you didn't manage to burn anything, so be careful.
After pressing the plant button in the start screen, you can insert a seed(sorry for it being pretty uncomfortable to do on mobile), or play with a random one.
Playing with a seed means that if you insert the same number as a seed later, the exact same "world" will be generated.
You can see the seed in the pause or win/lose screens.
All the caves are generated by placing walls and other objects in completely random positions, making sure they follow these rules:
There are always 10 trees overground. From cave 1 till 21 the amount of walls increases from 6 to 16, and stays the same the rest of the game.
Starting from cave 16, a single monster will spawn. From cave 31 there'll be two of them, but from cave 46 - three.
From cave 41 the lever will start to appear.
To win the game, you need to pass cave 50, which means you can die in cave 50, but not in 51.
Your torch light and the track of the game are very closely tied together. Firstly, you lose a light level whenever a "section" of the song passes... Or actually wait, it'll take a bit more to explain all this.
As I said earlier, light levels represent how much light you have left in the torch. At the start you have 50, but when they reach 0, you fail the game.
When you enter the caves, at first it'll play the entire song, which consists of 8 "sections", each 9.6 seconds long, and you won't lose any light levels during that.
But after that, the game will start randomly choosing which sections to play -
whenever a section ends, it chooses another random one(which could also be the same section), and decreases the light level by one.
I think it's a pretty unique thing that I haven't seen done anywhere else, but I just liked the idea of parts of the song playing in random order, so making it.. less repetitive maybe? : )
Moreover, to add tension, the less light you have, the faster the music plays! They're tied with the formula: track speed = 1 + (50 - light level)/70,
which means that at the start, the music plays at normal speed, but when you run out of light levels, it will be at 170% speed.
As the decreasing of light levels is tied to the time a section plays through, and the song plays faster when you have less light,
the light levels will also decrease faster when you have little light! Hope that'll make you more nervous.
A thing to note here is, if the main theme doesn't play or load for some reason, you won't lose any light levels.
Also, for browsers other than Chrome it usually takes a moment to load a different section of the song, so generally playing on them gives you a bit extra time.
In conclusion, the idea to use the song as a timer is very unstable, but I hope it is fine for most people.
Now, about burning: whenever you do the burn action, even if you don't manage to actually burn anything, you'll lose 1 to 4 light levels(chosen randomly),
which, as said earlier, corresponds to the same amount of sections in the song. The song speed also updates to the new amount.
So, if you can do something without burning in less time than needed for 1 song section,
it's 100% better to do that than to burn, and even if it takes up to 2.5 sections, it's still less than you'd averagely lose when you burn something down.
So, as I think, it's almost always better to take your time and trick monsters off your track than to just burn them down, as in many similar situations.
Your "torchlight" is a .png image drawn to the size corresponding to the light levels you have left.
More precisely, the radius is about 150 * (0.3 + light levels/50) pixels big, which means that at the start you'll see a bit less than 19 "pixel-art pixels" in each direction of the torch,
but at the end it'll be about 4 pixel-art pixels.
Note: one "pixel-art pixel" is 10 real pixels. Your square, for example, is 40 pixel or 4 pixel-art pixel wide.