The Hundredth Gear

THE MACHINE STARTS WITH YOU

The Hundredth Gear is a first-person incremental game about building a machine that was never supposed to exist.
At first, there is no automation. No sprawling factory. No impossible numbers.
There is you, a machine, and a gear that needs to turn.
Turn it by hand. Complete rotations. Generate Research. Learn how to make every turn more valuable, then use what you discover to transform a painfully slow mechanical experiment into something increasingly powerful.

BUILD WHAT MAKES THE NUMBERS GO UP

Progress isn't just a number changing in a menu.
Unlock new technology, earn money, purchase physical modules and install them onto the machine in front of you. Improve existing systems, automate what you once had to do by hand, and expand your creation with new mechanical stages.

The machine grows because you built it.
What begins as a simple mechanism gradually consumes the workbench as gears, shafts, supports, modules and new systems become part of an increasingly complicated mechanical monster.

FROM YOUR FIRST TURN TO FULL AUTOMATION

Every improvement pushes the machine further.
Research better technology.
Upgrade your existing systems.
Install new machinery.
Automate production.
Increase efficiency.
Build additional stages.
Generate more Research.
Make the numbers bigger.

Then use those bigger numbers to build something even more ridiculous.
Manual interaction never becomes meaningless. Even as your creation learns to run without you, you can still step up to the machine and give it a push yourself.

ONE STAGE BECOMES ONE HUNDRED

Every new stage makes the machine larger, more capable and more productive.
But a larger machine brings new problems.
As your creation grows, simple incremental progression develops into managing an increasingly extreme mechanical system. New technologies and challenges emerge as you push the machine beyond anything it was originally capable of doing.

Your workshop experiment has one ultimate objective:

Build all 100 stages.
Build The Hundredth Gear.
THEN KEEP GOING
One hundred stages may complete the machine.
But there is another number.
10¹⁰⁰ rotations.
A googol.
An absurd target sitting at the edge of what your machine could ever hope to achieve.
Upgrade it. Automate it. Push it beyond reason.
And perhaps, eventually, discover what happens when the impossible counter finally reaches its end.