The best games are nefarious and subtle. They start simple and straightforward, gradually adding complexity without it being obvious, and then at some point you’re an omnipotent god juggling fine pieces of art surrounded by a chorus of followers. Like that. Think about Minecraft. The first 15 minutes you played had you punching trees and dying to zombies once the sun went down. By the end, it’s redstone everywhere and you’re shooting a nether dragon.

Production games are about making numbers go up, and each step is more complex than the last. There’s an art to progression here, where you go from ore to ingots to plates to engines to robots to spaceships, and each step naturally flows into the next. At no point should you ask yourself ‘what’s next?’ as the factory must grow.

Foundry’s early game manages this well enough, up until you hit the steel tier. Before that point, you have 5 possible inputs to sort out and can find a way to bus it and manage crafting. It’s all smelters, crushers and assemblers. Straightforward enough and there’s always something to do.

The steel tier though, that’s where it gets complicated. Making steel required a very long belt (compared to what you have) to weave different materials and then put it on the bus, not necessarily more complicated just longer to set up. Concrete + Steam is in that tier, and now you need pipes and 3 new types of buildings that use water inputs. To get to the concrete step you need to build another mini-bus due to the conflicting materials, and eventually glass production. This is complicated, because instead of extending your main bus (and what you know), you need to build a second one, so that it doesn’t conflict with the main one. It’s a weird step back and sideways, rather than forward.

And then we get to Lava Caves / Elevators. The voxel world typically has you start the game at 150 units of height. Lava Caves are at 0. To get there you need to put an elevator and there are 2 types. One for you, one for freight, and they operate differently. The personal elevator has you select the depth, and can only dig through certain material. If you hit a single rock you need to manually remove it, and potentially don’t have the research unlocked to do so. Eventually through manual digging you reach the ground floor. The freight elevator is placed with a top (at +150) and a bottom (at 0) and it will self-connect if there are no rocks. If there are, you need to use the personal elevator to find them. This is still a baffling design choice to me. When it’s all working it’s really cool, but getting there is pure friction.

The Galactic Trade system changed a lot of the flow of the game, with a sort of side game of making literal spreadsheet numbers go up. I’ll have more on this in a bit, but it’s a significant break in game flow and an actual impediment to progress as Firmarlite (that 2nd R irks me) Bars are kept behind this mechanic. You need those for green research and access to the mid-game+.

This is a negative take on an experimental game, that comes from oodles of time spent in more mature and polished titles. I can emphatically say that Update 2 is miles better than what came before (belts and pipes for sure) and it’s clear there’s still a long ways to go. Pacing, tooling, and friction points are notoriously hard to balance, and exceptionally so if you have dev tools to skip pieces. I am really looking forward to testing more of the experimental components, there’s so much potential here.