Of important note, while you can unlock yellow science, you don’t need it to complete the game. In fact I’d recommend you avoid all yellow science until you’ve unlocked every single green research.

The final green research item are the colorless cubes, which are needed for the final quest step. You’ll get 2 recipes, both of the same name but with slightly different icons. One gives a basic ratio of 1/minute. The other takes 400 input of the first recipe to give 1/minute, which clearly is broken. I’d go so far as to say both recipes are broken, as you’ll need a good 10 Mk2 Assemblers to make enough cubes in a reasonable time. There are no parallels to this scale of production.

Once you have 800 of those cubes, you put them in the machine on floor 16 and get to watch the final scenes play out. I won’t spoil the story here, as I think anyone who has invested the amount of effort to get there deserves to see it themselves. I will say that there is another milestone for 8000 cubes afterwards, which effectively made me save and quit the game.

My thoughts on Techtonica 1.0 are mixed.

• I really like the setting and foundation of the game. 3D voxel based factory just plain works.
• I think the multiple floors work, and work even better if you never played EA. It dramatically goes against the grain of ‘the factory must grow’, which is where the majority of player issues stem.
• The early to mid game portions are well constructed, and generally well balanced. A main bus on multiple floors is both functional and aesthetically pleasing.
• The story works most of the time, which I found entertaining. The final scene lays the groundwork for more, so fingers crossed there.
• I like the concepts in floors 12+, but the implementation has issues. I get the decisions made to create these environments, and they do change the gameplay. The math however, just doesn’t support these new mechanics.
• The inability to manage overflow outside of Mk2 Storage is a real pain point preventing large scale factories. Blast Incineration worked in EA as the numbers were smaller. It doesn’t work here.
• Some recipes are clearly broken. Either that, or purposefully designed to create timegates.
• Power management doesn’t really exist. Waterwheels + Mk2 Cranks come early and you’ll need a couple hundred total to keep floors 1 to 11 running. The options for floors 12+ are impractical.
• The tools to build nice looking factories are too cumbersome. The lack of blueprints & remote logistics compound this issue.
• In general, I think the game works. Certainly if this was still in EA. That it’s 1.0, well that’s a tougher one. There’s clearly a need for a balance patch.
• I do think the devs have done a ridiculous amount of work to get here and it shows in multiple places.

The reality of development cycles and costs means that this is almost guaranteed to be the last content patch of the game. Ideally there are a few balance patches that tweak some numbers without mechanical changes. Ignoring the content of floors 12+, there is tons of amazing content in Techtonica and dozens of hours of fun to be had.

I still recommend Techtonica, warts and all, if only to show the potential of the genre in a grid-based 3D environment, with story elements abound.