Final post for a bit on this topic. I’ve talked about the mechanics and the math so far, and to a degree the limits of an early access product. The game is only in v0.3, which is two content releases from the basic portions. And in a game that is about production optimization, it is missing some key components to “make things clean”.

There are two core examples of this challenge.

First relates to constructing bases, meaning floors/walls and whatnot – not required at all but are about visual customization. There are about 30 items you can create to build a base, each of which uses a different set of material to construct. In practical terms, this means that you cannot practically automate construction of building forms and create each piece individually as you need it. This issue means that you need to haul around a lot of materials in your bag, and that if you need to experiment, you’ll end up with a bunch of crafted pieces in your bag that eventually need to be sorted out. There are two possible solutions here… building materials are split into 3 base items (concrete, steel, biomatter) and that you can “transform variants” of established pieces OR you can disassemble a piece into it’s base material to avoid inventory bloat.

Second is crafting tiers. Research tiers are a different thing, I specifically mean the two crafting tiers – Miners and Blasters. From the start, you have miners who give you basic ores, which can be refined in various stages to create every single item in the game. Eventually you unlock Blast Miners and Blast Smelters, which allow you to operate at scale – instead of 100 ores you need 1 slab, making it incredibly more space efficient. Most, but not all items allow crafting with tier 2 materials. Sadly, 3 things do not: Electric Motors, Steel Slabs, and Cooling Fans. Effectively that means that you cannot optimize those items without causing breaks in Blasting lines. The solution here is rather simple, there are missing 3 recipes and I could cut out a whole pile of spaghetti. I’m rather confident that v0.4 will have these, as v0.3 added others. I won’t rehash the Mining Charge math.. that has efficiency (and supply) issues.

This reminds me a lot of Satisfactory as the game added more content over time. Each patch had three types of changes : Quality of Life, Production Optimization, and Content. That game’s world is substantially larger, with way more than 4 node types. Satisfactory is finally going to reach v1.0, which has been a very long time coming. I still have some significant gripes with the game – that the engine is way too finicky (this is Unreal related and I honestly don’t think fixable), inventory sizes are too small (the mod is all but mandatory), transport across the world takes too long (this is dumb, put in a personal transporter), and that there are no tools to build at scale (I can’t fathom anyone playing past oil without this mod).

Techtonica is different because it’s voxel-based, meaning that the world is naturally smaller, that spaces cannot overlap, and that tools to build at scale are less important currently as the end-tier material doesn’t need 100+ miners to build 1 item. Helping Techtonica’s case is that you can automate the construction of every single object – material and stations. Dyson Sphere Program is a closer comparison in terms of tooling/structure, though that game has a significantly larger scale that Satisfactory (and infinitely better tools as a result).

Similar to DSP, I can see myself spending 10+ hours per content patch in Techtonica to rebuild the world with the new tools at hand. If I had to guess, there are at least 3 content patches to go from here.

Let’s start with 2D crafting first and the grandfather – Factorio. Crafting stations produce X items if you feed it Y material. You want to ensure you are feeding it the most to get the most production. Factorio uses inserters to transfer items to crafting stations. These have different speeds, depending on type, and different ranges. At scale you will have multiple stations running from a single belt, but won’t be optimal without a lot of work.

Dyson Sphere Program uses inserters and they marginally slow down at range. However you can research stacking options, so that you get max reach and max speed. Crafting at scale here is extremely easy to achieve.

Satisfactory doesn’t use inserters at all and only relies on belt speeds. This is good for many reasons, mostly to offset weird alignment issues (and boy are there lots of those!) This essentially means that any crafting station will simply take in (and give out) everything up to its stated max, and allows for “buffering” of items on the belts. The challenge with this particular model is that you’ll need to work belt magic if ever you need to split items between multiple crafting stations if you are unable to produce MORE items than the belts can buffer. For example, if you create 100 iron ingots per minute and have 2 stations requiring 30 each, you’re fine. If you have 2 stations requiring 60 each, then you need to split the belts rather than buffer so that both stations work.

Techtonica uses inserters like Factorio but is 3D. The progression of the game has various inserter types:

• Regular – these move items 1 distance at a rate of 20 per minute
• Long – these move items 2 distance at a rate of 15 per minute
• Filter – these move items 1 distance at a rate of 15 per minute, but allow you to select the type of item moved (which is about half of all crafted materials)
• Fast – these move items 1 distance at a rate of 40 per minute. In most cases you are better off using 2x regular, if you have space
• Stacked – these move a stack of items (3/6/9/12) 1 distance at a time at a rate of 60 per minute. Caps at 720/minute.
• Stack Filter – these move a stack of items (3/6/9/12) 1 distance at a time at a rate of 50 per minute, but allow you to select the type of item moved (which is about half of all crafted materials). Caps at 600/minute.

(Note: as with other factory games, create an automated supply chain of inserters, storing 250 at a time. Basic Assemblers make 45/min, more than enough speed.)

When to use these is the key piece is the math part. One recipe requires 904.9 items/minute, meaning that you need 2 Stacked filters to even have a chance to meet the requirement. Nothing too complicated so far.

When looking at having a main bus, things start off simple enough as long inserters typically have enough speed (if you put 2) to run 30/minute. At later points, especially with advanced assemblers, you need 100+ items inserted per minute. Creative needs call for creative solutions.

I do like this creative aspect of the game, which is much more similar to the belt ninjistu of Satisfactory. The larger challenge is not so much building these things, but the lack of blueprint tools to repat them – an item only solved through mods in Satisfactory and yet to be available here.

Now, one caveat to all this, and it relates to Blast Miners. Through upgrades, you can get 5x the material with 15x the explosives, and at max level that means 60 explosives per minute, per miner. In fact, it goes 3x, 5x, 10x, 15x in terms of requirements for benefits.

• Base: 5/ minute
• 3x: 15/minute – a long inserter can do this well enough. The worst ratio and the best option.
• 5x: 25/minute – this is horrendous belt ninjistsu
• 10x: 50/minute – as bad as 25/minute
• 15x: 60/minute – 1 fast + 1 regular inserter sending to a stack inserter, or you need belt magic. Let alone the fact that you can only realistically create 75/minute until you invest heavily in end-game automation.

For the 5x/10x variants: Option 1 = ignore the 25 per minute and only do 20, save the hassle. Option 2 = belt magic with a ton of splitters to break down materials across multiple belts.

I am chalking this mostly up to Early Access foibles here. First, that the “end game” scaling has some really weird magic math, and second, this Blast Miner balancing act is trying to be fancier than it need be. I enjoy mathing stuff out. This one though, right on the edge of madness! Which I think is what keeps me coming back.

I picked Techtonica up in the Steam Winter Sale, though it launched in EA back in July. I’ve got something for production optimization games, obviously. It recently hit v0.3, which is all about efficiency, my kind of patch!

For starters, Techtonica is what Satisfactory (mod-free) would be on a smaller map and much, much less finicky controls. Factorio-3D to a large degree. This reduced scale improves accessibility, because you don’t need to build a 72-step factory in the early game that takes up all your screen space. Techtonica instead focuses on exploration and gradual automation. Progress is gated behind milestones, each bound to a specific station. You start with Lima, which acts as a tutorial. Victor is next, and the game effectively opens nearly every aspect here, and gives you the space to build a multi-floor factory. Xray is next, and that is about large scale automation with monorails. The milestones aren’t incredibly burdensome, you’ll need 200 of a given item and most production rates are enough that you can get buy with a half dozen harvesters. Compare this to Satisfactory where you needed dozens upon dozens of harvesters/foundries to get even the most basic elements running.

An extremely large quality of life feature is that the game is more or less voxel based, meaning there’s no real possibility of being mis-aligned or not clearly understanding how space is managed. You can’t clip objects, which re-enforces the mathematical optimization. Vertical belts (rather than super spaghetti) allow for cleaner and more optimized multi-story factories. The ability to quickly copy objects is the first step for blueprints (which really only matter in large scale things), and the replacer tool almost acts as an upgrade mechanic.

Now, Dyson Sphere Program (if you turn off Dark Fog) is still the gold standard here, and Techtonica has some rather large QoL bits to figure out. Some items require tremendous amounts of material and the results can stack to crazy amounts (you’ll know when you make monorail bits), which makes it hard to manage crafting chains. Research is done through cores, which must be physically placed in the world, taking up huge chunks of room. Assemblers have rate inputs that simply cannot be met by inserter tools, certainly the long variants, which adds unnecessary puzzle mechanics and overly complicate production chains (you’ll need many storage containers to manage overflow).

One piece that annoys me to a great degree in these games is the concept of intermediary steps, especially those that are single material ones. The only purpose they hold is to create artificial time gates – or allow scaling when belts/inserters cannot provide. For example, Iron Mechanisms. They need 100x Iron Components. Those require 2 Iron Ingots, which come from 2 Iron Ores. Do the math, and each Mechanism takes 400 Iron Ores. Related, when you encounter one of these steps, your prior balanced production rates of say, 10x/minute now require 100x/minute, which means more scaling is required.

Now that is an issue with the genre as a whole, and if the tooling is there to manage the scale issues, then no real biggie. Again, Dyson Sphere Program completely knocks it out of the park when it comes to scaling tools, which Satisfactory is the lead-chip-eating-cousin. It remains to be seen how Techtonica addresses scaling as more content is added… because it’s not like you have infinite space to build with.

As for a roadmap, with “Desert MIRAGE” as a content point, I am assuming that open space may be on the horizon. Given prior history, it’s likely 6 months away. At this point, I’d recommend a watchlist rather than giving it a shot. It’s good, but unless you really love the genre and willing to have the odd bug muck-up an optimized belt maze, well… your library is likely chock full of options.