SpaceChem

Zachtronics is back with an ambitious new design-based puzzle game. Take on the role of a Reactor Engineer working for SpaceChem, the leading chemical synthesizer for frontier colonies. Construct elaborate factories to transform raw materials into valuable chemical products!

SpaceChem is a puzzle, difficult and programming game developed and published by Zachtronics.
Released on March 02nd 2011 is available on Windows, MacOS and Linux in 8 languages: English, French, German, Russian, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese - Brazil and Spanish - Latin America.

It has received 4,952 reviews of which 4,565 were positive and 387 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.9 out of 10. 😎

The game is currently priced at 9.75€ on Steam.

The Steam community has classified SpaceChem into these genres:

Puzzle Difficult Programming Indie Logic Singleplayer Automation Sci-fi Great Soundtrack Science 2D Space Simulation Illuminati Casual Addictive Education Strategy Touch-Friendly Building

Media & Screenshots

Get an in-depth look at SpaceChem through various videos and screenshots.

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Requirements

These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.

Windows

OS *: Windows XP SP3 / Vista / 7 / 8 / 10
Processor: 2.0 GHz Processor
Memory: 1GB RAM
Hard Disk Space: 300MB
Graphics: frame buffer support recommended

MacOS

OS: macOS 10.9 Mavericks or later
Processor: 2.0 GHz Processor
Memory: 1GB RAM
Hard Drive: 300MB
Graphics: frame buffer support recommended

Linux

OS: glibc 2.17+, 64-bit only
Processor: 2.0 GHz Processor
Memory: 1 GB RAM
Hard Drive: 300 MB
Graphics: frame buffer support recommended

Reviews

Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.

Oct. 2024

I much prefer opus magnum, from the same developers. This game is more crude graphically and does not communicate how to play nearly as well. I feel like the difficulty on this game quickly surpasses Opus magnum, which may or may not be for you. Surely a good head-scratcher and worth to grab it on sale.

Sept. 2024

A true game for engineers at heart (same goes for all zachtronics games), and an odyssey that took me several years of slow progress and many long sleepless nights starting from my high-school years up to university, just tuning away at my horrible un-optimized solutions to see how it'd be possible to beat the level. Because of this i also journeyed through it without any kind of hint. This puzzle game is all about open-ended puzzles, where you have to craft your own solutions; you get some input molecules, one or more molecules you have to output, and with the help of 2 "waldos" (circles that go around a circuit, triggering commands when they go over them), you have to craft circuits with commands for them so they can achieve the required outputs, you also have to ensure that your reactors can work for a very long time without breaking along the way. There can be many, many solutions, but getting to any of them in the first place is genuinely hard past the first planet. This game also keeps histograms of how efficient the solutions of all players were, so there's a bit of an incentive to improve upon your previous solutions. Suffice to say this was the hardest but especially most satisfying puzzle game i've ever played and completed so far.

Sept. 2024

80 hours in ... and only now I realized that you change the grab/drop function to grab or drop only. Was a 10/10 before...but now it is still a 10/10,

Sept. 2024

Zachtronics is insane, I got this one and infiifactory on epic games for free, but its well worth the money at its og price. Challenging, creative, mechanisms easy to understand, its got it all. requires no previous knowledge of anything except your intuition and logic.

June 2024

This is one of my all-time favorite games. This should be taken with a grain of salt, because it very closely mimics the joy I get from writing code. If that doesn't bring you joy, you probably won't like this game. Please not, I'm not saying that you should buy the game if you *can* write code or if you will enjoy the game if you can write code, but only if writing code brings you joy.

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