One of the major rules of automation is “The factory must grow”, like it’s some kind of gluttonous beast whose hunger can never be satisfied. That’s kind of true but not really; the factory is only as hungry as the player. If you want to set up each type of ore and resource using one miner, putting out one belt of the item to feed a single smelter or product refiner apiece and have everything come from there, that’s perfectly fine. Granted, that means playtime will be in the tens of thousands of hours, but the real problem is that it doesn’t look anywhere near as impressive as thousands of machines all working in unison. The factory must grow because it’s just so much cooler that way, and that’s as true for the giants of automation like Factorio as it is for the newest one finally released today, Foundry.
Building the machines that build the machines
Foundry is a first-person factory game in the vein of Satisfactory and Techtonica, and it’s been in the works and players' hands for a while. Starting off as a project on itch.io that anyone could buy and leave feedback for, it found a publisher in the form of Paradox Interactive and then switched to private development. Thedemo releasedfor last October’s Steam Next Fest generated a fair amount of positive attention, and not a little impatience after it was removed once the event had been completed. That’s over now seeing as finally, after theitch.io version’s removalin November 2022, Foundry is available again with its Early Access release.
Massive Sprawl and Efficient Optimization in the Factory of Foundry
The basic setup is pretty much exactly what anyone who’s played a factory game would expect. You start off in an open world with resources scattered around, in this case the iron-like xenoferrite and copper-ish technium, set up miners to converty the ore veins into usable chunks, run conveyor belts to smelters, the refined output goes to manufacturers, and then things get completely out of hand. One new product leads to another, whether that be new tools or different kind of refinery buildings, all of which are needed to make the factory grow bigger, faster and more efficient.
What sets Foundry apart from other factory games, though, is its fully-destructible and randomly generated infinite Mincraft-blocky world, which is meant to be dug into and mined to your heart’s content. One of the first items you get is a scanner that can reveal ore veins deep underground, and if you decide you want to go full-on dwarf and never see the sun again that’s certainly an option. The world is yours to play with in whatever configuration seems best.
Foundry is available now in Early Access, complete with the traditional release date trailer.Watch it hereand get ready to automate all the things to make the factory grow.
