TIMBER!!

You are a faller with an axe and no money.

Six trees carry an orange band. Get them on the ground and get them within reach of the winch, because timber that lands out of reach never gets scaled and never gets paid.

A tree falls the way you open it. Cut a notch on the side you want it to go, then cut in from the opposite side. The strip of wood left between the two is the hinge, and it steers the whole stem. The stump diagram on the right shows the actual remaining wood as you cut it — not an abstraction, the real cross-section of the tree you are standing in front of.

Nothing here is on rails. Stems are built from 20cm voxels, so the wood you remove is the wood that was holding it up. When a tree goes over it breaks — the trunk snaps where it strikes, limbs shear off individually, and a big fir comes apart into thirty-odd pieces that roll, settle, and then lie there as something you have to walk around.

Three tools, three different mistakes

• Axe — slow, and it leaves a ragged hinge. It is what you can afford at first.
• Chainsaw — fast and clean, but the bar has to span the stem. On anything wider, the hinge comes out ragged on both flanks and the tree wanders off your line.
• Charge — opens a face in one bang. Instant, and you lose most of your control over where it goes.

Trees fight back

Every stem leans. A hard leaner will sit back and fall the wrong way if you try to take it against its lean — the real failure that puts fallers in hospital. A wedge fixes it: get behind the stem, opposite your notch, and drive one into the back cut.

Five blocks, and gear you actually need

Pay is real log scale — the measured volume of every stem the winch can reach, times what that species is worth. Alder is cheap and soft. Oak pays four times as much and takes twice as long to cut through.

What you buy with it changes what you can do:

• A longer bar spans wider stems, so the big timber stops wandering.
• A clinometer narrows your drop cone from ±29° to ±4°. Without one you are reading the lean by eye and the arrow on your stump diagram is only a guess. No instrument fixes a short bar.
• Wedges beat the lean.
• A winch line extension reaches further off the road, so more of every stem gets measured.

Blue bands mean leave it standing. Drop one and it comes out of your pay. Mind the crew shack.

Controls

W A S D	Walk
Right-drag	Look
Left click	Use the tool in hand
1 2 3 4	Axe · Chainsaw · Charge · Wedge
Space	Jump
F	Refuel the saw
Enter	End the shift and get scaled
R	Re-cut the block
M	Sound

Runs in the browser. No install, no account, no saves — one session is one career.