SpaceChem Available for Windows! Available for Mac! Available for Linux!

Zachtronics Industries 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! Streamline your designs to meet production quotas and survive encounters with the sinister threats that plague SpaceChem.

Features:

  • Over fifty mind-bending puzzles!
  • An original soundtrack by Evan Le Ny, whose music was featured in The Codex of Alchemical Engineering!
  • Twelve challenging achievements!
  • New! Create and share puzzles with ResearchNet!

Supported Platforms

SpaceChem runs on the following platforms:

  • Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 7
  • Mac OS X (10.5 and above, Intel only)
  • Ubuntu (10.04 and above, via Debian package)
  • Linux (via manual install)

Install Instructions

Activate SpaceChem on Steam

  • In Steam, open the Games menu and click Activate a Product on Steam...
  • Enter your SpaceChem key when prompted.
  • Once complete, Steam will begin downloading SpaceChem.

Install on Windows

  • Wait for the installer to finish downloading.
  • Run SpaceChem-XXXX-setup.exe and follow the instructions.

Install on OSX

  • If you don't already have it installed, download and install Mono (x86).
  • Wait for the zipped application to finish downloading.
  • Open SpaceChem-XXXX.zip.
  • Drag SpaceChem-XXXX.app from the zip file into your Applications folder.

Install on Ubuntu

  • Wait for the package to finish downloading.
  • Extract the SpaceChem-XXXX.tar.gz archive.
  • In the extracted folder, open the correct Debian package for your platform by double-clicking on it. Don't worry, Ubuntu won't let you install the wrong one!
    • If you are on an i386 (32 bit) platform, select the “SpaceChem-i386.deb” package.
    • If you are on an amd64 (64 bit) platform, double-click the “make-amd64-package.sh” script. When it completes, select the “SpaceChem-amd64.deb” package.
  • Click the “install” button in the package installation program.

Install on Other Linux Distributions

If you cannot install the Debian package successfully, you can manually extract and run SpaceChem. First, you need the following libraries installed:

  • SDL
  • SDL_mixer
  • SDL_image
  • Mono 2.0
  • Mono WCF 3.0 library (Debian package "libmono-wcf3.0-cil")
  • Mono WinForms library (Debian package "libmono-winforms2.0-cil")
  • xclip

Next, from bash or a similar command-line interface:

  • Copy SpaceChem.deb or SpaceChemDemo.deb into a temporary directory.
  • Extract the game files from the Debian package.
  • ~$ mkdir temp
  • ~$ cd temp
  • ~/temp$ cp ~/Downloads/SpaceChem.deb .
  • ~/temp$ ar x SpaceChem.deb
  • ~/temp$ tar xf data.tar.gz
  • ~/temp$ mv opt/zachtronicsindustries/spacechem/ .
  • Now you can delete everything in the temporary directory but the spacechem folder, which contains the game.

To launch SpaceChem, change directories to inside spacechem and launch it through Mono:

  • ~/temp$ cd spacechem
  • ~/temp/spacechem$ mono SpaceChem.exe

You can move the SpaceChem folder anywhere you want, but it must be launched from within the spacechem directory.