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 The Powder Toy is a physics sandbox game for Mac OS X that offers you the possibility to build and blow up various structures and observe the results. The game is able to simulate various environment situations, and how certain elements interact.

You can download saves offered by other players in the  The Powder Toy community, and even share your own. Of course, you must first sign up for a The Powder Toy account.

Upon launching the game, the main window will display a set of instructions comprising the most basic game controls. Note that The Powder Toy software archive also includes a ReadMe file that contains more detailed usage instructions.

However, finding your way around is fairly intuitive: the lateral panels provide access to the list of supported materials (you get to select the type on the right, while in the bottom area you can select the actual material), the bottom bar allows you to sign in to your  The Powder Toy account and save your simulation, and you get to create various situations by using your mouse.

 The Powder Toy simulates environments that have a certain air pressure, velocity, heat and gravity: you get to easily toggle between different modes by using hotkeys, and you can modify other parameters in the Simulation Options panel.

In this empty space, you can use various materials to build different structures, or to analyze how different materials interact. To get inspired, you can browse the online simulations database that contains games shared by other users.

The Powder Toy proves to be a very interesting game: you can test and experiment with different materials under various situations, and verify your own hypotheses.