Lava (the wiki's name for what players also call magma) occurs naturally deep underground in the Lava Cave, and the game quietly forbids the obvious way of moving it: Pumps consume any liquid except Lava. No pipe will ever carry it. That exclusion is the whole design — lava is meant to travel as a solid.
The cycle: freeze, dig, carry, reignite
- Freeze it. Hit Lava with Snow — the Cryoblaster is the tool built for this — and it solidifies into Scoria.
- Dig it. Scoria is soft (10 HP, any digging tool breaks it) and drops Cinder.
- Carry it. Cinder is an ordinary solid: grabbers, conveyor belts and launchers all move it happily.
- Reignite it. A direct Flamethrower flame turns Cinder back into Lava. Passive heat is not enough — cinder sitting next to a fire stays cinder, which is exactly why it is safe to transport past your burners.
That last property deserves emphasis, because it answers the "cinder to lava" search directly: only deliberate, direct flame converts it. You choose where the lava reappears, and nowhere else.
What lava is for
- Auto-burners. Trap a blob of Lava inside a Filter and every flammable pixel that passes through ignites. This is the standard automated incinerator for Residue and harvested Flowers — see the slag guide for the disposal line it powers.
- Smelter fuel. The Smelter runs on heat from a Thermal Buffer or from Lava. A captive lava blob is a fuel supply that never depletes — remember, water landing on lava steams off without consuming the lava, and nothing else eats it either.
- A weapon against ice. Vault puzzles from the demo era involved melting through thick ice walls with redirected lava when the flamethrower alone was too slow.
Safe handling
The two accidents that actually happen: water meeting your lava store (harmless to the lava, but the steam flash will fog your shafts — vent it or condense it, see the water guide), and lava dropped into a conveyor line burning cargo you meant to keep. The discipline is simple: lava never rides belts. Cinder rides belts; lava exists only inside filters and smelter chambers you built for it.
One community find for the ambitious: an achievement guide mentions a late-game "volcanizer" producing, in its words, unhealthy amounts of lava — unconfirmed beyond that mention, but a sign the endgame expects industrial-scale lava handling.