Everything begins somewhere and while automation gaming didn’t start with Factorio it’s the game that gave the genre its biggest boost. Factorio inspired Satisfactory, and Satisfactory became the kind of hit that turns a healthy niche into a thriving genre. “Automation” is such a broad term that there’s no one way to do it right, in the same way that “FPS” can be applied to everything from Doom to Thief to Portal, and much more beyond that. A flat-plane, overhead view game like Shapez 2 plays very differently from a first-person builder like Foundry, while others like Omega Crafter or Nova Lands dispense with conveyor belts entirely in favor of drones, bots, and other helpers. So long as there’s a way to take a handful of nothing and turn it into a massively interconnected system of production, it counts as an automation game.
Just A Few Thousand Hours More and the Automation Will Be Perfect
Steam’s new Automation Fest started today and runs for a week, and these fests are becoming major events for within their genres as evidenced by the sheer number of new releases and updates all taking place today. There’s far more than would be practical to cover individually, so here’s a look at a selection that’s by no means definitive taken from the day’s automation events-
Pure Automation Assembly Deep in the Heart of Shapez 2 Demo Space
Shapez 2 is enjoyably relaxing, but the kind of relaxing that, when you’re done, you come up slightly amazed at the intricate clockwork beast.
Foundry- This only gets top billing because it’s a personal favorite and I just came off an 80+ hour run putting the last update through its paces. Foundry mixes first-person gaming with a blocky, Minecraft-like randomly generated world, and May’s Galactic Commerce update revamped the game so thoroughly that its old saves were incompatible. The goal changed to selling robots on the galactic market, giving the factory a purpose beyond making a bunch of machines to make a bunch of machines to make a bunch of machines, and while today’s update is nowhere near that scope it does add a number of major new features. Rubber and super alloy let you build aquatic-bots to sell, a new mid-tier power generation system makes use of the lava caves at the bottom of the world, and research queues mean you don’t have to be continually hopping into their menus all the time.
Kaizen: A Factory Story- A new Zachtronics game from the developer that is no longer Zachtronics. Move to 1980s Japan and set up an assembly system for everything from cameras to recorders to toy robots, striving for efficiency with the fewest moves or smallest number of components needed to rivet, weld, cut, or otherwise shape a bunch of parts into a consumer-ready product. In addition to the automation there’s a visual novel-style story going on between each new production challenge, chronicling a foreigner’s arrival at Matsuzawa Manufacturing and getting drafted into the production side of the business rather than the administrative side he was expecting.
Dawn Apart- An Early Access release right on the heels of a successful Kickstarter ending back in March, Dawn Apart is a voxel-y overhead-view adventure on an alien world, mixing automation with worker management plus alien natives who really don’t have a lot of faith that humans are good for their planet. Judging by other automation games that’s probably a valid judgement, but you may choose what and where to develop and how much to impact their lands, but there’s going to be some friction no matter what.
MoteMancer- Lazily described as magic Factorio, complete with double-sided belts, MoteMancer sets itself apart by being laid out on a hexes rather than the traditional grid, plus having magical manufacturing so it’s more than just the standard ore-iron-components treadmill that can be a bit familiar between one automation game and the next. There’s a demo on its Steam page I’ll admit to not having had a chance to play yet, but today’s Early Access release is a good reminder to check it out.
Plan B: Terraform- No major game update for this one, which has been growing nicely since releasing in Early Access two years ago, but it did get a major announcement for its 1.0 release coming on August 29. This is an overhead-view automation game about taking a cold, lifeless chunk of rock and turning it into a green new home for its settlers, using roads, trains, and even boats once an ocean or two has risen to transport resources around the spherical planet.
Super Loco World- Trains! It’s hard not to love playing with trains, and Super Loco World is a great balance between the toybox of Tracks and the more sim-like elements found in the deeper end of the pool. Lay down tracks, set up switches, connect towns and resources, and plan to keep the lines moving as multiple locomotives all need access to the same stretch of tracks. Sadly the Next Fest demo from June is gone, but it was great fun to figure out the logic behind the lines and see the towns grow. Today’s full release also isn’t planned to be the end of it, with more updates coming down the line depending on reception.
Block Factory- This actually came out on Friday, but close enough. Set up assemblers, gluers, painters, and any number of other machines to turn building blocks that are legally distinct from Lego into the needed item. Each stage has a diorama in the middle of a large, flat plane, but it’s missing some figures you’ll need to supply in order to complete the scene. Once a figure is supplied that’s the basic success, but you can also earn stars by meeting production challenges. Block Factory is a chill, laid-back construction game with no pressure outside of figuring out the best way to put the blocks together, and then scaling up if you want to chase after any production bonuses.
Auto Forge- Side-view automation about a little golem in a large underground complex, building a factory to harvest mana and learn why everything shut down. The world around it remembers, though, and isn’t too happy that the golem has woken up. The latest update, Forgotten Wilds, actually arrived on Saturday, adding two new biomes to the Early Access game while introducing customized world generation for those starting a new game, as well as new tech for the golem, new structures that help with early-game power management, and even multiple save game support.
Icaria- Overhead-view voxel world automation featuring robots mining a procedurally-generated landscape. This one leans heavily on programming, using a drag & drop command interface to tell the bots what to do, and a little care with the instructions can make for a highly productive system. This one is still fairly early in its Early Access, but today’s update added sloped conveyors and blueprints to the mix. That last one is a major automation feature, allowing users to create and save systems then stamp them down wherever needed rather than needing to rebuild a known system time after time.
Final Factory- This is an Early Access overhead-view space factory builder, set in against a starry backdrop that’s far less welcoming than expected. In addition to automating production you’ll also need to design ships to defend against a hostile alien threat that attacks in huge numbers, but those ships can also include the entire factory if you just need to get it out of the way of combat. Today’s update adds a peaceful mode, though, for designers who are more interested in the production aspect than the fighting, replacing the tech dropped by the aliens with loot boxes spawning randomly around the map.
As mentioned, this is only a small selection of games in the Automation Fest, with plenty of games older and newer in a huge variety of forms all vying for attention. Whether it’s something like the base-building of Space Trash Scavenger, underground exploration like poor Techtonica, which stumbled into 1.0 as the team dissolved and never got the final patches it needed because there was nobody left to work on them, something puzzly like Word Factori, most mascot-adventurish like Oddsparks, or any number of other takes on the idea of automation, there’s something out there for anyone who can take satisfaction in seeing a system they designed spring to life. The most important thing to remember, though, is that while efficiency is nice and organization can be beautiful, so long as it works that’s the only important metric.
