Golden PanGolden Pan

Golden Pan

Every morning you walk down to the creek with a pan in your hand. You crouch by the water, scoop up sand and gravel, and start washing. The light stuff spills over the rim. What stays at the bottom, if you're patient, glints.

Golden Pan is a slow, warm game about prospecting. There is no timer, no health bar and no way to lose. There is a creek, a pouch that slowly fills, a village that knows your name, and a small room that becomes a home.

Gold glinting at the bottom of the pan

Panning is the heart of the game and it is entirely hands-on. Fill the pan, swirl it, tip the water out, and watch the material thin out layer by layer until something bright is left in the bottom. Gold sand grains, coarse grains, small nuggets and, once in a long while, a real nugget worth a week of work.

Shovel, pickaxe, detector: open new paths

Start with a black pan in the Bedrock Crack Mountain Creek. Buy a shovel to dig the gravel banks, a pickaxe to crack open bedrock seams, and a metal detector to sweep the ground for what is buried. Each tool unlocks new routes and new regions: Creek Junction Valley, the Exposed Old River Bed, the Dried-Up Creek Bed, the Quartz Vein Slope and the Old Prospectors' Camp.

There's more than gold in the creek

Precious stones you can find in your pan: quartz, garnet, zircon, topaz, spinel and sapphire. Some regions favour some stones. The common ones you sell at the gold shop by weight; the rare ones are better held back for the 23:00 auction, where a real bidder may pay far above the shop price, or may not show up at all.

A little village that knows you

The village has a gold buyer, an equipment shop, a furniture shop, a pet shop, a bank and a scratch-card stand. There is a task board with dozens of small goals, a daily bill that lands while you sleep, and 5% overnight interest if you deposit your money in the bank. Nothing here is a punishment. It is just the pace of the days.

Your small room, your warm home

The day ends when you climb into bed. Before that, water the plant on the sill, furnish the room piece by piece, and scratch the ears of the cat or dog you adopted and named yourself. They have things to say. So do you.

The big goal: the Creek Deed

Every find goes into your Finds Journal, with your best weight beside it, and now and then the pan turns up a curiosity with a little story of its own. Each morning a card sums up yesterday and shows the day's luck: one region where a certain stone turns up twice as often. Shopkeepers post requests and get to know their regulars, the task board sets a new challenge every week, and your title grows from Novice to Golden Hand as the grams add up.

And at the equipment shop waits the Creek Deed. Save long enough, and the creek is yours.

No rush, just cozy days

• Hands-on panning, digging, sieving and detecting: every find is one you worked for
• Six gold regions, each with its own spots and its own mix of stones
• Dozens of gold and gemstone finds, each with its own per-gram price
• A day cycle of morning, midday and evening, three save slots, and a bed to end the day in
• A village of six shops, a task board and a nightly auction
• A home you furnish, a plant you water, a pet you name
• No timers, no fail state, nothing to rush you
• A Finds Journal, curiosities, weekly challenges and titles from Novice to Golden Hand
• One big goal to save for: the Creek Deed
• 57 Steam Achievements and Steam Cloud saves
• Fully playable in 17 languages, on Windows, macOS and Linux

Some days you find nothing. Those are still golden little days.