Hot Coals is a free browser app that renders a living bed of glowing charcoal. Every lump is a real 3D object carved from signed-distance volumes, sitting on a heat simulation that spreads, flares, and cools on its own. There are no flames — this is the bed a fire leaves behind.

Yes, completely free. No account, no signup, no watermark, no feature gates, and nothing to install. It runs entirely in your browser.

Open the page and the bed builds itself in a few seconds. Drag anywhere to pan across the coals. Tap the gear for presets, sliders, sound, and capture. Press F or use Fullscreen for a clean full-screen view.

Because the coals are the point. Every other virtual fireplace leads with dancing flames and treats embers as a garnish underneath. Hot Coals is the opposite — the deep, slow, radiant stage of a fire, after the flames have gone. It is quieter to sit next to and far less distracting on a second monitor.

Yes. Open it in a smart TV browser or cast a laptop tab, then turn on TV mode to hide every control, or press F for fullscreen. Nothing loops, because nothing is a video — the heat simulation keeps running, so it never repeats.

No. Everything runs locally in your browser. Your settings are saved to your own device's local storage and never sent anywhere. There are no uploads and no servers beyond anonymous page analytics.

A modern browser with WebGL 2 and hardware acceleration — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari on desktop, iOS, or Android. If you see a message about WebGL 2, turn on hardware acceleration in your browser settings and reload.

Video-based fireplaces loop, so you eventually notice the seam. Screensaver apps like FireplaceGo or the Windows Store 3D fireplaces need a download and mostly play footage. Hot Coals generates everything live, never repeats, costs nothing, installs nothing, and lets you rebuild the entire bed from a number. The tradeoff is honest: it needs a GPU, and it will not give you flames.

A seed is the number that generates a particular bed of coals. Two people entering the same seed get the same arrangement, down to the last chip. If you land on a bed you love, copy the link — the seed rides along in the URL, so you can get it back on any device.

Yes. Capture renders a fresh still off-screen at up to 4K, or 8K on desktops that can handle it, so the image is far sharper than your window. There is also a one-tap 1200×630 preset for social previews. Choose PNG, JPEG, or WebP, and copy straight to the clipboard if you would rather paste than download.