Chimp Works

This is a Cheery Chimp original.

How To Play Chimp Works

Fruit arrives by truck, and every dock has an order to fill. Lay belts and boxes across the factory floor so that each dock gets exactly what it asked for. There are no words in the game, so this page explains what the pictures mean.

The floor

The truck is the green tile. It shows each kind of fruit it carries, with a count beside it. Crossed arrows mean the fruit comes off in a mixed-up order.
The dock is the brown tile. It shows what it wants and how many. A dock takes fruit from any side a belt can reach, marked by a blue wedge on each of those sides.
Tap a truck or a dock to see what it holds at a larger size. Touch anywhere to put the card away.
A number tag on a crate, tray or pallet says how many it holds. The number under the picture is how many of them the dock wants.
Grey blocks with a cross are pillars. Nothing can be built there.

Building

Drag to lay belt. You can start on the truck and end on a dock. Dragging back along the belt takes the last step back.
Tap a belt to turn it.
Place a box. Tap a box in the bar at the bottom, then tap a cell. It faces the way the fruit is already flowing, and the belt tool comes back afterwards.
Change a box. Tap a placed box to select it. A bar opens where you can turn it, flip its side port, change its setting or remove it. The tick puts the bar away. Tapping a selected box again also turns it.
A red bar on the side of a box means a belt points at a side that takes no fruit. Turn the box or bring the belt round to a blue wedge.
Fix mistakes. The eraser removes whatever you tap or drag across. The curved arrow undoes your last change, and the dashed square with a cross clears the whole floor.
Watch your coins. Every piece has a price, shown under it in the bar, and a small × number when only so many are allowed. The coin at the top shows what you have spent out of the level's budget. It turns red when you are over, and the floor will not run until you are back under.

The boxes

Every box shows its ports. A blue wedge pointing in is where fruit enters. A yellow arrow pointing out is where it leaves.

Belt (1 coin): carries fruit one cell at a time.
Sorter (5 coins): pulls one kind of fruit out through its side port, the violet arrow, and lets the rest go straight on. The picture on the box is what it pulls out. Select the box to choose another fruit, or, on levels that have them, to pick out muddy, rotten or sliced fruit.
Splitter (4 coins): shares the fruit between its front and its side. Each way out is labelled with its share, so a 2:1 splitter sends two out of the way marked 2 for every one out of the way marked 1. Select it to choose 1:1, 2:1 or 3:1.
Washer (8 coins): the water drops. It cleans muddy fruit, and takes two steps for each one.
Slicer (10 coins): the knife. It slices fruit, and takes three steps for each one. Wash first, because sliced fruit cannot be cleaned.
Packer (6 coins): the crate with a number. It packs that many of the same thing together, from 2 to 6. Fruit becomes a crate, fruit cups become a tray, and crates become a pallet. The number on the packer must match the number tag on the dock's order.
Cup maker (8 coins): the cup with a plus. It has a way in on each side, and puts one item from each into a fruit cup. It waits until it has both.
Bin (2 coins): the leaf. Anything sent into it is thrown away. Use it for rotten fruit.

Running the floor

Play is the yellow button. While the floor runs it becomes a stop button.
Fast forward is the double arrow. Skip, the double arrow with a bar, appears during a run and jumps straight to how it ends.
The clock at the top counts the steps the run has taken.
You win the moment every dock has its whole order.
A rejection ends the run. The dock is crossed out and a red badge shows what it turned away. A dock rejects anything that is not what it ordered: the wrong fruit, fruit that is still muddy or rotten, a mixed crate, a crate of the wrong size, or one more than it asked for.
A jam ends the run too. A warning sign appears and a pulsing frame marks where the line stopped. Common causes are a belt that leads nowhere, a packer left short of a full crate, and a cup maker fed from one side only.
Mixed-up trucks are checked three times. When a truck shows the crossed arrows, the game tries three different orders. The little trucks at the top turn green as each one passes.
After a failed run, tap the floor to go back to building.

Stars

The first star is for any floor that works. It also opens the next level.
The coin star is for spending no more than the level's cost target.
The clock star is for finishing in no more steps than the level's time target.
Both targets are shown at the top while you build, each beside a star. On the level list and the result card, stars come in two rows: one for the coin and one for the clock.
The cheapest floor and the fastest floor are usually different. You can earn the two stars with two separate builds.
On the result card, your number turns gold when it meets the target. A spark beside it means you beat the target.
The first few levels and the lessons have a single star, and some levels have a coin star but no clock star.

Lessons

Tiles with a dashed border on the level list are short lessons. On most of them the floor is already built and locked, and only the highlighted cells can be changed. Add the missing piece and set it correctly to earn the lesson's one star. One lesson shows a clock with a number and no star beside it: that is a time limit, and the run must finish within that many steps. A gold ring on the level list marks the level to play next.

Machines

Your old floors come back as boxes. On later levels, a level you have already solved appears in the bar as a single gold-rimmed box. It does exactly what your floor did, costs what your floor cost, and runs as fast as your floor ran.
Two builds are kept for each level: your cheapest and your fastest. A machine wears a coin for the cheap build or a clock for the fast one, and a number tag for the level it came from.
Select a placed machine to switch between the two builds, or tap the eye to look inside it. During a run, tap a machine to watch its floor working.
Better machines make later levels easier. Going back to improve an old level makes every machine built from it cheaper or faster.
A locked star means an earlier level has to earn that star first. The lock shows that level's number. Tap the locked target at the top to see which star is missing, then tap the small level tile to go there.

Coming back to a level

When you reopen a level you have solved, the game asks which floor to open. The coin is your cheapest build, the clock is your fastest, and the pencil is the floor as you last left it. A build opened this way only replaces your own floor once you change it.

Tips

Boxes can sit right against each other and right against a dock. Every belt you leave out is a coin saved.
Bring a belt into the side of a dock when that is the shorter way.
Washers and slicers are slow. For the clock star, split the fruit across two of them.
Go for one star at a time. Build cheap first, then come back and build fast.
If a tray or pallet is rejected, compare the number tags. The packer's number has to match the order's.

Settings (⚙️)

The settings hold one button, which erases every star and every saved floor. It asks a second time before it does anything: the arrow goes back, and the red bin starts you over.

Contact: Feel free to contact us with any bugs, complaints, or requests.

Release Date: October 3, 2026

Behind the Scenes

Chimp Works has no words in it. Trucks, docks, belts and boxes are all pictures and numbers, and there is nothing to translate. That was an early decision and an easy one. What it cost only showed up later, a piece at a time, whenever I got stuck in my own factory.

I got stuck a lot. Most of what is in the game now, beyond the first ten levels, is there because of it.

The idea

It started as a nugget: a factory floor where black boxes do things to fruit. One sorts, one washes, one slices, one packs. Fruit comes in on a truck, an order waits at a dock, and the puzzle is the arrangement in between. The last level would be a whole working factory.

Two things were settled before any code. The boxes would stay black boxes for now, with a chimp holding a knife saved for some later version. And the levels would be open. There are many floors that fill the order, and the game does not pick one for you. It gives you a budget loose enough to build something clumsy that works, then shows you a target and lets you come back.

Two targets that pull apart

One target was not enough. If cost is all that counts, every level has one best answer and replaying it is a search for a belt to remove.

So there is a second target, speed, and it pulls the other way. On the first washer level, one line through one washer costs 14 coins. Split the fruit across two washers and it costs 27, and finishes sooner. Neither floor is the right one. They are answers to different questions, and the level keeps a star for each.

The stars took a couple of tries to draw. First it was three in a row: works, cost, speed. I would hold all three, earned by two different floors, and the result card lit only the ones the latest floor had earned. That was fixed, and the row was still confusing. Now each level shows two short rows, one beside a coin and one beside a clock, and it was the first time the scoring made sense at a glance.

Stuck on a rule the game never showed

The first splitter puzzle has a cost target of 12. I built it the obvious way, a 2:1 splitter with a belt to each dock, and got 13. I tried again and got 13. I could not tell whether I was bad at my own game or the target was wrong.

It was neither. A dock takes fruit from any side, so a belt can run along the bottom row and enter a dock from its flank, which saves a cell. The simulation had always allowed that. Nothing on screen had ever said so. In a game with words this is one sentence in a tutorial. Here it had to become a picture: docks now wear a small blue wedge on every side a belt could reach, the same wedge that marks the way into a box. There is also a short lesson just before that puzzle where a pillar blocks the straight path and the side door is the only way in.

That set the pattern. Every time I was stuck, the question was whether the puzzle was hard or the picture was silent. It was nearly always the picture.

Pictures that said the wrong thing

A tray of fruit cups was drawn as a tray with two cups in it. The order wanted trays of four, and nothing on screen said so. Crates, trays and pallets now carry a number tag, and it is the same number the packer shows on its face.

The pallet level stopped me completely. I did not understand what the level was asking for. A pallet is now drawn as crates sitting on a pallet, and a lesson before it has you pack crates that another packer has already filled.

The cup maker was the first of these, back when the game had ten levels. It has two ways in and waits for both. That is simple once you know it, and I did not find it by looking. It has its own lesson now.

Seven of the 26 levels are lessons like these. Most have the floor already built, with one or two open cells for the piece being taught. Several exist because I needed them.

Your old floors become machines

Past the cup maker I wanted bigger orders: trays of cups, pallets of crates. Building those from loose boxes every time would have been a chore. The answer is the part of the design I like best: a level you have solved comes back later as a single box. It is not a stand-in with fixed behaviour. It is your floor, running inside the box, at the price you paid for it and the speed you got out of it.

Each level keeps two of your floors, the cheapest and the fastest, and offers both. That gives the two targets somewhere to go. A cheap cup maker helps your cost on the tray level, and a fast one helps your time. It also means the targets on a machine level cannot be fixed numbers, since my cup maker and yours cost different amounts. They are measured with your own machines, so a dear machine never makes a target impossible.

It does hold a star back, though. If you only have one star on the cup maker, the tray level will not give you more than one. I asked for that rule, and then it caught me. I met the target on a later level, got no star, and knew exactly why, because I had designed it. A player would have had no idea. Now the star is drawn locked, and beside it sits a small copy of the level it is waiting on. Tapping that takes you there.

The same blindness cost me a speed target on another level. I was four steps over and could not find them. The cup maker on that floor was set to its fast build. The wash machine was not, and I had not noticed it had a setting at all, because both builds looked identical. Machines now wear a coin or a clock, and the number of the level they came from.

The move that was not saved

Every so often I would reopen a level and find it broken. The last thing I had done was missing, and I could not find a pattern.

The save code remembered the last floor it had written, so that it would not write the same floor twice. What it remembered was not a copy. It was the same set of pieces the editor was still working on. Turn a box, and the remembered floor turned with it. The new floor and the old one always matched, so the write was skipped. Placing or removing a piece was saved, because that changed the list. Changing a piece already on the floor was not.

The fix was to hand out copies. The test that guards it had the same flaw: its stand-in for storage kept whatever it was given, live. It copies now too.

The factory

The last level is the one the idea promised. Two trucks bring bananas, oranges, mangoes, some of them muddy, and muddy pineapples. Three docks want crates of mango, crates of sliced pineapple, and a tray of fruit cups. The bar at the bottom holds a belt, a sorter, a packer, and three machines you built on the way there.

The first version did not work as a finale. It had one truck, and only the tray machine made any difference to the result. The loads were reworked until all three machines mattered, for cost and for time.

The cost target is 108. My own floor came to 111, and I did not find the three spare belts by myself.

Where it is

There are 26 levels: eighteen puzzles, seven lessons and the factory. The simulation underneath is deterministic and has no screen in it, which is what lets about 270 tests run without a browser. One of them builds roughly 2,600 random floors and checks that each behaves the same way twice. All the art is drawn in code, and all the sound is made on the spot.

One thing I want to be straight about is the targets. Each one is the best floor I have found, not a proven minimum. If you beat one, the game puts a spark beside your number. I would like a solver to settle them properly. Until then, a spark means you have out-built the author, and on three of the speed targets I had to be shown the reference floor myself.