I like experimental ideas and I’m supportive of devs trying something new. I’m back to the point I was in Foundry when I left a year ago, and have some thoughts on what Update 2 has brought. In short, they are an improvement over the prior version, but still need some time to cook.

General

There have been some QoL changes, mostly related to balancing recipe volumes. It is better. It still doesn’t support large scale, primarily due to stack sizes that are absolutely too low. Foundations stack to 200, it should be 1000. This becomes very obvious once you unlock Olumite (oil).

Recipes need a general rebalance of ingredients. Having a late game item require copper wire is dumb. You won’t have used copper wire for anything for a dozen hours by that point. You could build a dedicated offramp to build these weird one-offs, but the splitter/ramps/inserter size means you need to use about 500 foundation each time this happens. See prior point.

Research is too complicated and takes too long. For long stretches in the mid-game you will research something you will never build in order to unlock something you’ll build 1 of. Actually, it may take the right amount of time, just that you literally have nothing to do while it’s underway.

Elevators and bulk miners need some tweaks. Their throughputs are simply too low given their size. Good news is that mining base power management is generally improved. 5 Solar Panels + 10 Batteries will support 2 diggers.

Modular buildings are still a cool idea that is poorly executed. They take a pile of material to construct and take way too much power, and once built, generally can be turned off. They become visual achievements.

The Lava Caves and Firmarlite Sheet process is cool as an idea, but poorly executed. You can only place the massive buildings on open lava, which is not continuous. Think of it like connecting islands with foundation pieces and 2 belts (in and out). The production rates are so low that you need 16 of these buildings to choke a basic belt. If I could change the lava floor to make openings, just like water above, that fixes this.

Building robots (the end game ones) is still cool to see.

Galactic Market

There are two parts here.

• Building Robots and Shipping them
  • Robots are unlocked through research. You have no idea what a robot is worth unless you did through a pile of menus.
  • Building them isn’t necessarily hard, but is also isn’t fun. Get an assembler, build robots, belt them to a shipping pad and put them in space.
  • Selling the robots is too complicated. You can simply sell on the market for a 30% loss, or invest in the incremental game (see lower) to unlock the possibility to sell them on a planet. Each planet requires a license and a dedicated ship.
• Upgrading the Spaceport
  • This is an incremental, plain and simple. Build up 2 numbers (money + material), then press a button for a timer that adds 10% to some function.
  • To unlock some features you need to research them on the planet. Not clear why.
  • It is possible to make a mistake in an upgrade and I am not sure how to revert a choice (e.g. unlocking a useless planet, or upgrading the wrong thing).
  • The orbital laser is friggin’ cool! Wow!

Ok, I lied. There’s a 3rd thing that completely changes this game.

• You can buy almost anything from the space station, with I think a half dozen things left over you can only construct on the planet.
• In general, it is much cheaper to buy an item than to construct and then sell it.
• On paper, and with a few spaceport investments, it appears entirely possible to have a factory built entirely on the concept of shipping down from space, building a complex robot, and turning a profit. This completely negates all mining and productivity bottlenecks, assuming your ships have the throughput required (each shipping pad has a built-in buffer).
• I’ve yet to fully test this mind you. Nor do I actually want to. Nilaus has though!

In Summary

Foundry is really trying for some interesting bits here. If I take a step back, the concepts here are really quite something. The implementation needs some serious thinking. It’s a bit like when my kids drew animals from their imagination, super cool but not practical.

The devs have stated their next major update will focus on quality of life things, that’s good. Tweaking the ideas present so that they work together in a more streamlined fashion would be great for everyone.

I still recommend buying the game if you like the genre. There’s enough good ideas here to justify the price.