Clearly, I really like the automation genre. I like a lot of genres (Metroidvanias are near the top), but automation is where I get a kick. At its most basic, it’s visual algebra, a near perfect merger of architecture and engineering. The factory must grow!

I covered Factorio the other day, and there are pile of posts on Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program (DSP). They each bring a different thing to the genre, and therefore have their own identity. Techtonica hits 1.0 today and I wanted to take a bit to go over how it brings its own flavor to the table.

World Design

• The maps are voxel based and designed by hand. This gives an inherent grid structure to everything, 3D construction, and a ton of exploration potential. There’s a substantial amount of lore and progress from the hand-crafted experience.
• The world size has functional limits. You have a LOT of space, but nothing infinite. Since you’re spending time in caves, you need to mine to make bigger factories.
• There’s a storyline, and a good one. Who’d of thunk it? Having goals outside of making numbers go up is important.
• Prior to 1.0, you had to unlock various station hubs, which gave a sense of progress as things changed over time. 1.0 you’ll unlock more floors, which again is focused goals.
• There’s no PvE. Hard to explain how much I dislike PvE in a game about numbers.
• The sound/art design is unique in that it doesn’t look to reuse Unreal Engine assets and structures. Art is always personal, and I certainly enjoy it more here than others (except DSP, building an actual sphere around a sun never gets old).
• There’s a jetpack. Jetpacks are life for 3D games.

Factory

• Every Assembler rank increases the amount created by a factor of 2 as compared to manual creation. This dramatically reduces the amount of machines needed at scale. So let’s say it’s a 2 stage crafting process (raw, intermediate, final). Automating it makes it 4x more efficient (each step reduces by 2x). Mk2 Assemblers are 16x more efficient (each step is 4x). If it’s 4 stages, then it’s 32x better (2x2x2x2) at rank 1, and 256x !!! better at rank 2 (4x4x4x4).
• All games have miners, smelters, assemblers, and then more complex variants. Techtonica has this, but by the mid-point pivots to a completely different method of collecting items through Blasting. Instead of more efficient numbers, you have to build new mining operations. 1.0 will pivot again, as you’ll need to pump sand and explore downwards.
• 3D main bus construction is automatically straight and intuitive to use. DSP is the closest comparison.
• Power generation is relatively simple (pre 1.0) with water wheels and transformers. Power distribution is through Power Floors, meaning no poles or wires getting in the way. I really dislike power poles.
• Production Cycles are present where you re-use items as catalysts in order to produce other things. Planter / Thresher cycles is a great example, where you continually re-use seeds to generate plant material.
• You can’t delete things, but you can blast them to oblivion. While I think the AwesomeSink in Satisfactory is both an easy out and end-game goal, I do like that production queues need to be thought out.
• Monorails that are a 1:1 system for transporting mass amounts of material. I have a general dislike of trains due to their complex pathing requirements and rail radius limitations. Monorails are awesome!

Research

• Creating intermediate research items to unlock new things is in all the games. Only Techtonica has those items as a permanent fixture on the map. Kinda like trophies. (They will take significantly less space in 1.0).
• Research is well thought out, with queues, and no randomness. (This, without hesitation, is my largest remaining gripe with Satisfactory – Hard Drives are dumb). NO RANDOMNESS! It also doesn’t add more unique buildings to an already complex production chain (I feel DSP has crossed that line now).
• Research is never wasted, as it provides an incremental benefit the more of it you have. Most games focus instead on logarithmic infinite research (e.g. +10% mining with increasing costs), here it’s a passive gain depending on the size of the trophy.

I am hopeful for Techtonica 1.0, in that it can continue to lean into it’s strengths so that comparisons are more obvious between games in the genre. I’ll be having regular posts on a new playthrough for the next little bit. Small devs can use the attention!