#Factory town fish upgrade

You’re like Elon Musk except with iron ore instead of Tesla SUVs. Once you really get going, you can link buildings up with an elaborate marble-run of chutes and belts and remove the human workers from the equation entirely, eventually unlocking more complex machinery like logic blocks and switches. When your lumber mill starts spitting out planks faster than you can haul them away, you’ll need to construct wagons, which can carry four times as much stuff as a worker, and stone paths for them to efficiently trundle along. and you can simply roll all of the logs to their destination rather than lugging each one down by hand. Place a lumber mill downhill of a forest, for example. Chutes are your earliest method of quickening the pace at which resources are delivered to where they need to be. There will always be an efficiency bottleneck somewhere in your factory town, and it’s your job to spot it and alleviate it, which inevitably shifts the bottleneck to somewhere else. Levelling up your base is the clearest objective early on and requires that you meet certain thresholds of prosperity.

#Factory town fish upgrade

The collective happiness of your houses is a resource to be topped up like every other, and determines how much you can upgrade certain existing buildings. Your job is to please the houses themselves, first by having workers drag grain to their doorsteps individually, then by refining that grain into flour and delivering it to a market that serves all nearby houses, and later by more advanced types of refinery that turn lower tier materials into high-value items like socks and shoes. They’re basically mindless cogs, meaty conveyor belts on legs, presumably with surnames like Brian “Carry Water to the Paper Mill” and Sandra “Deliver Everything to the Barn”.Īnd unlike in, say, Banished, a town management game where the population’s sense of self-preservation is so lacking that they’d sooner hurl themselves against the sharp edges of the user interface than spend another second in your thrall, the villagers of Factory Town are entirely willing automatons. Instead they’re defined by (and limited to) the specific job you’ve set them to do. Workers also don’t need to be placed into professions, where they would seek out any jobs to do within that role.

It’s a small detail, but one that makes Factory Town feel way less like a city builder and way more like the production line game it’s aiming to be. Once you’ve enough stuff to make some houses and increase your population cap, you can begin employing more workers to start hacking away at the environment some more, sucking up stone and grain and coal and hurling it all on top of your ever-growing stockpiles.īuildings insta-drop into the world, appearing on the ground from the tip of your omnipotent cursor rather than sitting around in a ghost-like transparent state while waiting to be constructed by a special class of worker. Your headquarters is a City Hall type building that spits out your first two workers, who you instruct to chop down some trees and convey the resulting materials to your base. It’s a factory, just like in those other games, but this time it’s also a town, set in a bucolic and resource-rich landscape. More lately there is the three-dee Satisfactory, whose developers were so pleased with their own bad pun that they wilfully called their game something that literally means “good enough I guess”.Īnd now there is this little Early Access boy on the sidelines, plainly named Factory Town, a name I like because it doesn’t try to be too fancy, like calling Doom “Hell Shoot”, or No Man’s Sky “Space Roulette”. First came the more puzzle-focused Infinifactory, and the addictive, top-down, conveyor belt sandbox game Factorio. So this latest spate of factory games should come as no surprise to anyone, scratching, as they do, our very human urge to convert raw wood into planks and then into wagons. We blast stuff out of rocks and turn it into gardening shears and fidget spinners and lamp shades and clothes hangers, before dumping it all back into the sea – nature’s bin – where we can only assume it safely disintegrates back into benign molecules that fish love. We scoop stuff up out of the ground and stack it into great big pyramids to dispose of unwanted mummies and ankhs. It's Factory Town!Īll of human history is just moving stuff from one place to another. This week he's building a giant factory in a 3D landscape, but not in the game you're thinking of.

Premature Evaluation is the weekly column in which Steve Hogarty explores the wilds of early access.