Factorio
Be an industry titan in Factorio.
Rows of assembly machines stretch further than the eye can see. Conveyor belts run through like blood vessels, carrying their cargo to the heart of this self-sustaining machine. Fields of accumulators crackle through the night, storing the energy from a sea of solar panels. Trains work tirelessly ferrying who-knows-what to who-knows-where. I did not build this place. My forays into Factorio’s mix of construction, resource gathering and automation have been basic. The opening moments will feel familiar if you’ve played any building or survival game. You craft a pickaxe and gather iron ore, copper ore, stone, and wood. You build a furnace and refine those base resources into building materials to craft more complicated things.
Those things are expensive. You’ll need plenty of iron sheets and copper wires, which means ore and coal. Perhaps you should build a drill to automate parts of the process? And maybe you could set up a conveyor belt to transport ore to the furnace? But to do that you’ll need power, which means yet more materials. And so you fall deeper and deeper down this industrial tech tree, until before you know it you’re surrounded by endlessly churning machines.
Factorio gets complicated, and the route from my early steps to the endgame save file I downloaded from someone who’s spent hundreds of hours perfecting their design feels intimidating. But once you’ve set up the beginnings of automation, the loop of planning, creation, and tinkering is relaxing. Even unfinished, Factorio feels generous.