Factory automation and a skinner box? Let’s give it a go. Free demo, why not?

The main concept here is that you want to empty the pile of hay, 1 strand at a time. In that pile are 6 needles that provide absolutely atrocious buffs, but acts as a sort of meta-badge I guess.

You start as all automation games do… manually. It takes about 60 minutes before you can truly start automating anything. It takes even longer before you complete the 10 delivery quests that unlock all the available tech.

Progress is gated through money, there are no building materials or anything complex here. You need cash to build machines. You need cash to build belts. You need cash to build power stations. You need cash to upgrade machines. You need cash. And the best source of cash quickly becomes obvious as paper mills.

Eventually you do realize that you no longer need cash, you need throughput. At max level, each arm can extract about 3,500 strands of hay per minute (if there’s hay in range). That’s about 48 hours to eliminate 10,000,000 hay. You need a lotta arms! Which then fill your belts with hay, which also get saturated. The belt merging causes a slight hiccup in throughput, actually slowing things down. Oh, and to find the needles, you need to scan the hay, with 1 scanner per 2 arms.

The end result is a massive spaghetti run of belts, mergers, producers and power poles. Did I mention that there’s collision detection? That then means you need some 3D magic to make it all work together.

The two images below have maximized the number of arms possible (again, due to collision) at about 20. There’s 8.5m hay to go. That’s 2 hours, at best, to get to the bottom. The reality is that the arms will need to be moved closer together as the pile shrinks. I generally dislike AFK automation games, and there’s really nothing left to build now, just waiting. So I guess for all intents and purposes, I’ve completed the demo. It’s a neat idea, with a ton of rough edges. Free demo though…