My brain works in interesting ways. I tend to gravitate towards correlation and inference quite naturally, which doesn’t always work out. It makes the world this giant spiderweb of interconnected pieces, where pulling on one tiny bit can have effects at seemingly completely randoms spots. Things like climate change impacting well water, which impacts purification, which impacts hockey rinks, which impacts hockey teams being able to play, which means more travel, which means more traffic and more planning, which means a tighter schedule, which means improved meal plans, which means… it can be paralyzing at times. The whole thing is this giant puzzle that’s always moving.

Then you have mystery boxes, which require you to just accept that things go in and things go out, but without causality. Using the connected pieces above, it would be more like going from dry well water straight to scheduling with no real reasons between. I struggle tremendously with letting go of my desire to understand and mystery boxes absolutely fascinate me in their complete breakdown of logic. Put in a chicken, get a thunderstorm. Put in another chicken, get soup. Like what the heck? Under most circumstances the magical box is simply a quick method to gloss over details. In the poorer versions, like say a science fiction serial, mystery boxes become writers crutches. Star Trek’s holodeck is absolutely notorious for this.

Games

Return of the Obra Dinn and Strange Antiquities are good examples of puzzles with inference. You are given contextual clues (e.g. this item turns blue when next to a flame, or this person’s bunkmate was taller) and from that, you need to extrapolate answers. Given the amount of questions present, there’s a validation exercise for each guess, and more clues are discovered as you go. There’s a quiet joy when you make a stretch guess and it opens up a new area to discover. The development challenge is difficult, as you need to create breadcrumbs to a conclusion you’ve already come to. You can’t give the answer, and you can’t give super obtuse clues that conflict with others. The sanity check alone is massive, and frankly harder and harder to do as more and more people know the answer.

I like factory production games because they act as mystery boxes when fully formed. If you do it right, you put in a few items and out pop rocket ships. Often, these games focus on logistic puzzles so that you can optimize the box – logistics mostly about moving things from one place to another.

Factorio vanilla, DSP, and many others in the genre focus on belts/trains to move things around. Foundry’s recent-ish patch for space trading implemented a giant mystery box that negates 90% of the logistics issues.

Factorio Space Age broke this model, or rather evolved from it. The start planet still has logistics issues but by the time you leave, quite a few of them are negated through fleets of robots. Robots have amazing throughput options and absolutely remove a pile of spaghetti design for logistics.

Cerys

Cerys is a mod for Space Age that puts you on a planet that’s a mix of Fulgora (materials generally come from recycling material) and Aquilo (the planet is frozen and needs to be melted in a very linear fashion). I’ve completed the game a few times now, so I’m quite aware of the tools and their applications. A recycling plant is not hard to build, but building logistics between ‘islands’ of thawed areas, or fixed production plants across the planet is challenge for sure. Bots are not an option until the puzzle box is solved.

The good part is that with a set of knowledge coming in, most of these challenges can be sorted out. The less good part is that there are 2 new core mechanics introduced that do not make any sense on the surface – both relating to particles. How you can control, defend, deflect these particles is fundamental to the larger planet puzzle. I was able to infer to a degree how one of these mechanics worked, but it’s also quite RNG based and hard to validate. The second mechanic absolutely eluded me and had zero in-game context that I could find. I still honestly have no idea how you’re supposed to figure it out. That said, once the solution was present it wasn’t terribly difficult to work my way around it.

I’ve yet to complete the planet, and I don’t see any particular benefit long-term to maintaining a presence (aside perhaps Holmium productivity boosts). I also don’t really see how anyone could appreciate this particular puzzle box without first having spent time on Aquilo in a previous playthrough. I figure I have a few sessions to go to close out this mod and then try a new one.

This time of year is usually quite busy, with the return to school and hockey season going into full swing. By the end of the month, I’ll have a grand total of 1 day where I wasn’t in a rink. Thankfully I enjoy it! Still, it takes up a huge chunk of time. The neat side effect is that I’m quite a bit more physically active as a result, which is great for my health. It’s not super for my back mind you, that physio needs to continue so that I can get more than 4 hours of sleep a night…

I did miss out on the launch of Silksong, which depends on your perspective of ‘miss’. After years of waiting, a few weeks or months more doesn’t really change much in terms of expectations. In fact, it’s a larger benefit since some stability/balance patches are going to be deployed before I press the buy button. It’s on the list, and again the Steam Deck provides the near-perfect tool to play games I really enjoy.

Given the extremely sporadic game time, I’ve opted to get super nostalgic. I can remember the Christmas where I received Hero’s Quest (now called Quest for Glory). I’ve owned the anthology from GoG for a long time now, and the improvements to DOSBox are quite noticeable. Not to mention the slew of game patches provided since to address a wide range of bugs.

QFG1 takes only a few hours to get through, and I know I took weeks to get through it all as a kid. It is pure nostalgia. There’s a VGA option for point and click, though I honestly enjoy the very limited text parser option from Sierra.

QFG2 only offers EGA on GOG, but you can find a free VGA version through AGDi. In this one, the VGA version is quite a bit better, if only for the really painful map option present. It is quite a bit more linear than the first one, but it offers a much more interesting playground of things to do. You can see the devs were reaching here and got most of it done.

QFG3 is VGA, point and click, and relatively simple. This model was retro-actively applied to QFG1+2. I wrote my own mouse driver in order to play this game! It is substantially shorter / simpler than prior games and has quite a few bugs in it. The final area is amazing mind you, and quite a bit different than the content that precedes.

QFG4 is a big departure. Everything is voice acted and more cartoony. The combat model here is quite poor, but is entirely offset by the amazing writing. I played this on release but encountered soooooo many bugs I had to shelve it for years. While it has my favorite storyline by miles, the game is a challenge to get through.

QFG5 is, well, it’s a cap on the series. It’s 3D before 3D was a thing. It addressed dozens of plot points from the prior game. It had a ton of interesting lore bits, puzzles, and challenges. I bought it really close to release and played the heck out of it. It was an amazing capstone of 5 games across 9 years. That dev cycle is insane to write out for an RPG series.

It isn’t a stretch to say that the modern RPG has a ton owed to this series. Multiple character types, different solutions to puzzles, stats that go up with use, cross-game saves, dialogue trees, 3D characters…. Do you think games like Mass Effect would be around without this foundation?

Nostalgia is a heck of a thing and really speaks of a golden age of game design where bold ideas were common, whether they stuck or not. Glad GoG has so much to pick from.

For years, Satisfactory ended at Tier 4, which was more or less the Nuclear phase. In practical terms it was actually the Aluminum phase as Nuclear components were not needed, but there were power scaling issues that made it more complex to attain. Tier 4 was a balancing act, given the power / storage limitations at the time, not to mention the ‘issues’ with managing nuclear waste.

1.0 brought in Tier 5. It also brought Rocket Fuel, dimensional storage, and sommersloops which double productivity. Tier 5 itself brings more space parts but also the practical ability to create Mk6 belts (1200/m which finally supports Mk3 miners that are maxed), portals which allow instant travel across the map (later than I think it should be), and importantly the ability to create Power Shards to boost productivity.

The first time I went through this path I took a more traditional progression path. This second pass through, I opted to make improvements earlier along the progression.

First, I prioritized anything that generated power, specifically coal, fuel and then rocket fuel. Rocket fuel in particular is overly effective at generating power, to the point where Nuclear should be avoided. I did Nuclear in my first 1.0 path, skipping that here saved hours of set up.

Second, I prioritized blueprints. The 4×4 option is surprisingly effective if you apply design principles. The 5×5 option is the only option to get up to Tier 5, buildings are simply too large to fit in the standard layout. The 6×6 option… that’s too small. Or rather the buildings are too big. The Quantum Encoder only fits if it’s diagonal (use a beam laid sideways to make it click). The 5×5 blueprint is life. The auto-connect brought in with 1.1 makes it exceptionally time efficient.

Third, jetpacks + hoverpack. Get these ASAP. Massive quality of life boost.

Fourth, and counter-intuitive, I avoided trains where possible. I did need them for plastic, rubber, aluminum and quartz due to my starting location. When I unlocked drones and packaged rocket fuel, trains were completely deprecated. The reason is quite simple, laying tracks is a friggin’ nightmare. I love trains in Factorio, but this 3D layout here is horrendous. Drones used to only work with batteries, which were a huge pain in the butt to craft and it was a toss up to create those or lay out tracks. Batteries are still a huge pain to craft and you should avoid them at all costs. It’s super simple to package Rocket Fuel, distributing it even more so, and you can have multiple drones head to one location to speed up transfer rates. Trains look cool but are ever more impractical.

Finally, was thinking ahead for processing base material (ingots, concrete, rubber/plastic). I knew that I would unlock alternate recipes that are insanely more efficient, and planned accordingly. I had a ‘base material’ base which gave me construction material up until Steel Pipes. I put it in an out of the way location, with dimensional storage. My main feeds into the production bus were 100% dedicated to the bus, were built on the ground floor (the bus is very high in the air) so that I could eventually move to refineries. The basic recipes are 1:1 ore:ingot. The ‘pure’ recipes are nearly twice as efficient. Planning for this meant not having to tear up large chunks of the factory.

End result is cutting the playthrough time by a good 3/4. No major trains. No turbofuel. No batteries. No nuclear. Blueprints for 99% of the construction. Auto-connect allowing them to easily scale. Nearly all of my playtime instead is spent either building a blueprint or collecting hard drives / mercer spheres / sommersloops. Wildly efficient.

So now what? There’s not really much optimization to do, all my bus lanes are in surplus, with a 5x boost to tier 5 space parts. Anything I do past this is for aesthetics or achievements. I’ve ‘mathed’ it out, now its more about making it look pretty. I could quite honestly spend 1,000 hours making stuff look pretty, it just wouldn’t have any purpose.

Hmm, maybe I’ll just put this aside for a bit.

We’re a few weeks away from the Steam Summer Sale, which after so many years I’ve come to think of ‘let’s build a backlog’ sale. Not everything is crazy good, but there’s so much that is, that I’ve developed an interesting habit.

The Steam wishlist sends me emails when something goes on sale. I’m so accustomed to this now that I rarely buy anything at 50% off, because there’s bound to be a better sale in the future. Star Wars Outlaws goes on 50% sale every month. Is it really a sale or are you just paying a higher price because you can’t control your impulse?

The Summer + Winter sales tend to be even larger, so within a month or so I tend to simply wait. It’s like not buying yourself anything a couple weeks before your birthday or Christmas, you may end up with it as a gift. Most times, I can pick up games for less than $10 that would ‘normally’ be $70+. At that price point, I can take a few more gambles on games where I’m just not sure if I’ll like it. It’s cheaper than a pint at the rink!

What then happens, twice a year, is that I build a backlog of games that I will select over the coming months. I’ve often used the front page of Steam to find games during the sales, but over the years have instead paid attention to various curators and just plop things down on my wishlist instead. That list is about 50 long now, and nearly everything on it won’t be purchased until the sale comes across. (There are some items that are announced and not released, wishlisted to keep track.)

All of this benefits me. I am conscious that for smaller developers this is less than ideal, and depending on the team, I may just end up buying it early. Some will never go on sale (Factorio notably), so there is some wiggle room here. The largest impacts are on the big companies though, where price points are $60+. Square Enix in particular has horrendous pricing, and I picked up the entire Kingdom Hearts series for $20 in the Winter Sale. Normal price point is over $200.

For the next 2 weeks, I’ll be adding to my wishlist. There’s a lot of amazing games out there, would be nice to increase the backlog with some quality items found at a good price!

Opportunity cost and bulk measures fit here, so math talk a bit.

JIT (Just In Time) is a delivery method that focuses on anticipating needs in highly complex production chains. The automotive industry is a perfect example of this. A manifold has a dozen steps to create, and the first one takes place months before it’s actually going to be used. Assuming a stable logistics chain, JIT ensures you have only what you need, when you need it. Saves overhead and unnecessary storage costs..

Saturation is a delivery method that quite simply fills up the storage containers as the production chain is simple and volatile. An ice cream shop is an example, where the product can stay frozen for an extremely long period of time. One rainy day you sell nothing, the next sunny day you have a run on double chocolate. This allows for stock protections, but does have a cost for storage. For smaller items, this is less of an issue. Larger volumes – issue.

For what it’s worth, Amazon uses the saturation model. Next day delivery of a pair of shorts only works if they have them in the giant warehouse after all.

Factorio

For the wide majority of the game, Factorio uses saturation methods. ‘Fill a belt’ as it were, and when the belt looks empty, fill it some more. There’s very little math involved in the raw material processing, aside from knowing how many machines it takes to fill a belt. Vanilla Factorio had mini-factories, but that’s long gone now. You build big, and you fill that box at the end. Stack inserters broke the older model.

DSP

Also a game that focuses on saturation as mini-factories have very little benefit. Even with the best belts, you’re going to need to stack items. It’s maybe 10 seconds to build a line of 30 smelters that will produce a hundred or more plates. It’s meant for scale.

Satisfactory

While I prefer saturation, or perhaps simply more accustomed to it, Satisfactory is designed for JIT. A full belt feeding a dedicated crafting station will put out a pittance of material. This gets worse and worse as you build more complex items. There’s a reason there are offline tools to help you figure out the math on production chains. Heck, powering a basic Nuclear plant takes nearly a thousand raw items per minute.

Saturation works if your goal is simply progression. The challenge is that you need bulk material in order to unlock specific research / space elevator tiers. While a production chain will only ever use 1 Nuclear Pasta, you will need a collection of 100 to meet a given milestone. If you only apply JIT, you’ll never have that extra 100. Now, if you use the basic tools, such as a 48 stack container, you’re wasting storage. The balance here isn’t super clear, so your mileage may vary (I put in a mod to reduce storage, I set it to 5 stacks per container). The end result for progress is that you visually see a belt is full, and have minimal storage for when you need to unlock something new. You’d be surprised at how few machines you actually need.

If your goal is aesthetics and end-game scaling, then JIT is the only way to play. A nuclear plant takes 240water per minute, which is 2 extractors. If you want 40 nuclear plants.. well 80 extractors. It’s a pain enough that you don’t want to build 200. (It’s also 10 supercomputers per Nuclear Plant, and the base creation rate is 2 per minute. So 40 nuclear plants = 400 supercomputers = 3.5 hours of base crafting.)

Note: Don’t build nuclear plants for power, build them for looks. Rocket Fuel plants are a good 90% more efficient.

Basic Materials

The exception to JIT is for basic materials: Iron Ingots, Copper Ingots, Concrete, Caterium Ingots, Plastic, Rubber, and Aluminum. Trigons and Diamonds too, but that won’t matter much by the time you unlock them. Saturate the crud out of that stuff, it’s simple enough to do and in the case of Copper Ingots, you are going to need way more than you ever thought.

Sommersloops & Power Shards

This part messes up the math. Sommersloops double the output of a machine – it costs no extra resources but does require substantially more power. Power Shards increase the output of a machine, up to 2.5x the amount, for a commensurate amount of intake materials + power. Combine both, and you get 5x the output for 2.5x the input. What’s neat in Satisfactory is that you can set the output to a math formula, and it automatically resolves – like 3.5/2 will set itself up to 1.75 just fine. When you’re building a unique factory for say, a Thermal Propulsion Rocket, you’re going to see a lot of weird math. Having flexibility in and out is a must.

Note: I consider power ‘free’ past a given point. A simple rocket fuel plant can give you 50GW+. Power Shards are also free, but only once you reach tier 9. Until then, you need to harvest slugs in the world… still, it’s quite easy to have 300+ by the time you unlock nuclear. You’ll need 240 of them for a Rocket Fuel plant.

Starting this on a different footing. I really like the tools in Factorio. Space Age added a bunch of different puzzles, and through a serious amount of applied logic, you can do almost anything. The tools present mean that you spend very little time with finicky placement and instead solve math problems. The friction points have all but been removed. Dyson Sphere Program is 2.5D and has a very similar set of tools.

Satisfactory does have blueprints, which aid in growing scale, but they operate independently. You need to manually connect them together. At scale, this is super annoying.

1.1 Changes

Sweet baby carrots is this a massive quality of life boost! To get the auto-connect to work, you need to be within 2 spaces between the in-world item and your blueprint… not really an issue for belts but much harder for rails. This is entirely due to the Z axis (vertical) and how items need to be touching something. Belts work best when on the ground as they need to connect a machine… which should also be on the ground. Rails… they are meant to not be on the ground as you want to move across complicated terrain.

The general rule of thumb is that if only 1 axis moves, it looks really good. If 2 axes move, then it looks ok. If all 3 axes move, it looks like a 2 year old drew with crayons.

The impact for normal production blueprints is small. There’s a minimum distance for belts to run, so it is possible that blueprints need to be adjusted to ensure connections are larger than the limit. In my testing so far, belts set up to the limit of the blueprint box work just fine.

There are now 2 new types of valid blueprints – one for a belt bus and another for rails.

Belt Bus Blueprint

The idea is simple but building it is a bit weird. My take on this is to use a 4×4 blueprint and put in double belt holder equally spaced. Belts need to be on something. I added temporary poles next to them, ran the minimum belt length and then deleted the temp poles.

Placing this blueprint brought a tear to my eye. In the time it took to lay 1 extension, I can lay 20+.

Rail Blueprint

Rails should not be on the ground, and rails also have a minimum length. That means a small pillar with foundations on top that have 2 parallel rails. A very simple blueprint. It won’t look good as you’ll have rails floating in the air, but it is extremely quick and practical.

Placing this blueprint is not fun. You need to ‘lock it’ (press H), then nudge it close enough to the existing rails so that it connects. Then you click. And then you make a choice.

If you want to manually place the rail extension because you have terrain nearby, press H again, rotate and place the extension. This works for about 50% of the time you’ll use rails.

If you do not have terrain nearby (say you are trying to elevate a rail), then you need to manually nudge the rail blueprint (up/down, left/right, pgUp/pgDwn). The downside to this is that you cannot rotate the blueprint to make turns, so you may want to build a 45/90 degree turn blueprint as well. The crayon downside here is that your rails will have ‘humps’ rather than a smooth incline.

The net result is rails that work, placed in a tiny fraction of the time. This will save hours and hours and hours. And a few more hours.

Summary

I’ve been playing Satisfactory for a long time, and I’ve hit numerous quit walls over the years. All of those were related to a perception of wasted time. I had goals and would find myself stuck in minutiae for 80%+ of the time rather than the fun stuff. Blueprints were a HUGE boost in 0.7, if limited. Dimensional Storage removed the need for central storage in 1.0, saving dozens of hours in the late game running around for materials. Connecting Blueprints, to me, is the final QoL change which will dramatically remove friction in building factories.

While there are other tweaks I could suggest here that would aid in QoL, they are generally low friction events. (This is aside from the HD/Sommersloop/Mercer Sphere 4-hour scavenger hunt.) Finicky tweaks, for sure, but big system changes are pretty much all there now. Satisfactory is essentially ‘complete’. A heck of a journey to get here.

When I was younger I enjoyed TT games, though less 40K given the length of the gameplay and well, smells. It’s certainly better now with more adults. I’ve generally shied away from the video games. The lore is interesting but the IP is the selling point here, not the actual gameplay. Feels more like a Disney approach to milk a franchise.

Space Marines 2 was on sale and my gaming news feeds generally had high praises. The campaign for one, the associated coop and PvP. I dislike PvP for a multitude of reasons – mouthbreathers, try hards and bots notably. But a decent campaign is worth a shot.

I completed the campaign in about 6 hours, which feels really weird. The first few missions were interesting and flowed well. The second half was full of loading screens and aside from 2 specific fights, a cakewalk. Run in, melee, AE melee, execute an enemy, move on. With few exceptions, the guns in the game serve little purpose.

I get the grimdark setting. I don’t mind the gruffness of the characters where everything is dour and serious. I don’t see them as heroes at all, what given that 40K is an outright criticism of religious fanaticals. Everyone is effectively a bad guy. The setting and lore are solid in that regard, so hats off in that regard.

(Side note: there’s some irony that this game is a Gears of War clone given that Gears of War borrowed heavily from the setting. Oh, and Starcraft/Zergs a plenty.)

Mechanically the game is simple but effective. There’s weapon variety which is mostly meaningless, except for the melee options. The invulnerability from executions needs to be exploited to survive, and there are some battles where you simply get chain stunned to death. The AI companions are actually quite good here, which is nice.

But the grand total of it all is quite meh. It does nothing well, except give you the experience of playing in the setting. You certainly feel like a Space Marine, which is neat. The ‘mini-bosses’ are more complex than the final boss who is about parry/dodge timing. Quite honestly, it felt more like a 6hr interactive video than an actual game.

The game peaked at 200k players and then has stabilized at about 10-15k since, which is a fairly health multiplayer base. I have no interest in this, but for those who do, it’s good to see it still going.

Overall, I wouldn’t recommend Space Marines 2 unless you find it on a decent sale, or are a die hard 40K fan, and you likely already have it. There are many more games that have done this better.

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.

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.