The Technology and Design Behind Noita

It is the go-to talk for anyone building falling-sand or pixel-physics simulations, and several commenters say they modeled their own engines on it.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.