Drag a stone to carry it, toss it to tumble, or tap it to read about it. Right-click a stone to open its record, or right-click the bare table to add more. Keyboard: arrow keys choose a stone, Enter opens its record, Shift plus arrow nudges it, Space rattles the table, slash searches the Field Guide, and question mark opens this help.
Which material matches this clue?
Come back to this exact arrangement. Off opens a fresh handful each time.
Soft clicks when stones meet.
How loud the clicks are.
A small buzz on strong impacts, on phones that support it.
Tip your device to slide the stones. They still rest when you hold it level.
A soft halo under whichever stone you last touched.
On: filters and sorting, table tools and trays, the Cabinet tab, the quiz, and a journal and compare view in every record. Off strips the Field Guide back to search and cards.
The table under the stones.
How many a fresh handful deals. Adding more later raises it.
Full uses denser stones. Balanced is easier on older devices.
A tactile collection of 286 minerals, rocks, gem varieties, fossils, meteorites, and related materials. Every pebble is generated from a seed — tumble them, stack them, and explore their stories. Your table, notes, and preferences are saved locally on this device.
Rock Collector is an educational simulation, not an identification, handling, medical, or safety service. Visuals and summaries are simplified; some catalog entries may be hazardous, fragile, radioactive, toxic, or regulated in real life. Verify an unknown specimen with a qualified expert and authoritative local guidance before collecting, cutting, tumbling, tasting, burning, or handling it.
A photograph shows one specimen; this shows the species. Every stone is built from a seed using its catalog palette, crystal form, surface pattern and luster, so quartz you pull twice is quartz twice and never the same stone. It also means a stone can be tumbled, stacked and turned over in your hand, which a photograph cannot do.
Because it would be wrong often enough to matter. Identification depends on streak, hardness, acid reaction and heft — tests done on the specimen, not on a picture of it. The catalog gives you the same properties a field guide does so you can work it out yourself, and the Science and Safety note says plainly that this is a simulation rather than an identification service.
Each catalog material carries a family of varieties — eye-clean, matrix-held, iron-stained, weathered, faceted rough — and each variety is seeded separately for shape, wear and pattern. That is roughly 4,500 distinct specimens. The Field Guide lists the 286 materials; the table deals from everything underneath them.
Yes — drag a stone and drop it on another to stack them. Stones tumble, rest, and pile with simple physics, and they stay where you leave them. Flat stones lie down rather than balancing on their edge, because a shed pebble does.
Real refraction costs a second render of the whole scene every frame, so the table runs it only for genuinely vitreous stones and the close-up view runs it for the single stone on screen. Inspect up close is where a gem is meant to be read — the light bends through the actual shape rather than around a rim.
Right-click a stone — or press Enter with one selected — and its record opens, which switches the strip back on. Closing the strip is meant to stay closed, so tapping another stone selects it without reopening anything. The menu also has a Specimen strip switch.
Your collection, notes, and preferences are stored locally in this browser. The app loads its rendering libraries from a content-delivery network and only contacts other sites when you follow an external link.
Very. Each stone carries a plain-language formation story plus identification clues like hardness, streak, and luster — the same properties used in real rock and mineral identification.
Yes, free with no account and no ads. If you enjoy it, there are optional ways to support Chris Pirillo's work in the help menu.