Mentions: Factorio

The factory must grow.
Unravelling, from web to thread.
Pieces fall into place one by one.
A job well done, but perfection, tantalizing.
A new horizon.
The factory must grow.

I have spent numerous sleepless nights coming up with factory layouts, expanding train networks, and balancing conveyor belts. The game weaves together numerous systems into a beautiful and sophisticated wellspring of challenge and industrial beauty.

Factorio is a 2d top-down factory Big-A Automation game. You’ve just crash landed onto an alien planet, and you want to go back to space. You don’t have anything but your wits, and the heap of scrap that used to be your ship.

You start off in typical survival-crafting fashion: mining, hand-crafting parts and machines. But not for long. You begin unlocking more advanced buildings and parts. The research starts requiring more and more science packs. Recipes get more complicated, and their resources are scattered accross far flung parts of the map. To progress, you need to craft and build an enourmous amount of stuff, plenty of which you can not even craft manually. It’s time to start automating.

That’s where the real game begins. You refine, combine, connect and move dozens of parts and buildings, creating and managing a supply chain of increasing complexity, just to get that one next thing. Once you get it, you realize you’re going to need plenty more of said thing - then you scale-up and fix bottle necks. Build, debug, scale-up, repeat. The siren song of Factorio.