The Powder Toy is not really a game: it is a two-dimensional physics simulation sandbox. You get a palette of materials — sand, water, oil, metal, lava, plutonium, virus, plants, gases — which you drop with the mouse or the controller onto a grid of particles, and then you watch what happens. The engine simulates heat, pressure, gravity, state changes, chemical reactions, electrical conduction and even radioactivity.
The project started in 2008 in the tradition of falling sand games, those little Flash toys where you poured sand around. The Powder Toy pushes the idea much further: over two hundred elements, working electronics that let you build real logic gates, and an online library where the community shares its creations — nuclear reactors, computers, Rube Goldberg machines. The software is free, licensed under GPL-3.0, and has been developed by its community for more than fifteen years.
Recalbox integrates the libretro version of the simulator, which appeared in 2018 and allows it to be launched like any other game from the system list.
| Type | 2D physics simulation sandbox |
| Origin | Open source community project, 2008 |
| Integrated version | libretro port, 2018 |
| Port licence | GPL-3.0 |
| Controller | Mandatory |
The Powder Toy is entirely free software, shipped with Recalbox: there is strictly nothing to provide or install. See the Included games page.
Emulator availability per board:
| Emulator | RPI3/RPI02W | RPI4/400 | RPI5/500 | OGA/OGS/RG351 | PC | RG353 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Libretro thepowdertoy | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
The Powder Toy is the only emulator for this system and is therefore used by default on every machine. One caveat: the simulation is very demanding on the CPU as soon as the grid fills with active particles, and the framerate drops on the more modest machines. Netplay is not available on this system and RetroAchievements are not supported. CRT output is handled by the core.
The system's roms folder is:
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/The Powder Toy/
Supported extensions: .cps .game
Recalbox ships a thepowdertoy.game file out of the box: it is the shortcut that launches the bare simulator, with an empty grid.
/recalbox/share/roms/ports/The Powder Toy/
└── thepowdertoy.game ← launches the sandbox with an empty grid
The .cps files are the simulator's saves: each one holds a complete scene, with its materials and its state. Drop some into this folder — creations shared by the online community are downloaded in this format — and they will show up as separate entries in the game list, each opening its own scene directly.