Every new morning is another chance to try again. Sometimes that chance involves rolling over and telling the universe to go away for a while, but whether you embrace the morning’s opportunities or deeply resent the need to deal with them, a night’s rest is a mental reset button that helps make old problems look a little more manageable. Granted, most problems aren’t quite so dire as waking up alone in the caverns deep under an alien planet’s surface in the ruins of the expedition’s base, butTechtonica’s groundbreaker is awake now and it’s time to get to work.
It’s the End of the World, Automate Everything
While the situation is possibly a little overwhelming, the groundbreaker isn’t alone thanks to a friendly voice over the radio. Sparks has a good idea of what’s happened and what needs to be done, and while she’s in no condition to lend a helping hand, it’s at least company, even if two-way conversation isn’t an option. The radio is conveniently stuck in receive-only mode, so the groundbreaker ends up being a silent protagonist, but Sergeant Sparks has a much better (but still fragmented) memory of the mission and most of the events leading up to the current situation. What happened and how the mission fell apart is a mystery that will slowly get revealed during the journey, but with the outpost being a silent ruin, peaceful in the very specific way a derelict left alone to fall into decay over time can be, the operation to harvest resources for a dying Earth on the wandering planet Calyx is feeling like a lost cause.
Automating the Expoplanet Underground in Techtonica Demo
Techtonicais more story-oriented than most games of its type, with a small cast of characters trying to make sense of the mysteries found deep in the heart of Calyx, but it’s still an automation game with a good hundred-plus hours of assembly and debugging what had seemed to be a brilliant (or at least functional, which is frequently the same thing) layout. The game plays from a first-person perspective likeSatisfactoryorFoundry, but unlike those two it’s got more of a level-based layout than an open world. One of the groundbreaker’s first jobs is to get the elevator functioning again, creating a basic system of miners and smelters to get the needed ore to construct excavator bits. These feed into the elevator to have it automatically drill down to the next level, letting you progress from one floor to the next deep into the heart of Calyx. Each level is distinct from the others, but you may travel back and forth freely and the elevator has a large number of ports you can feed conveyors into and out of to transfer items between floors.
The other major progression mechanic is the research spheres, which need to be manufactured to buy new technologies. Both drill bits and spheres work off the standard automation-gaming formula in that you can have as many as you want so long as you can set up the machines to build them for you. Hand-crafting is always possible, of course, but when you’ve got machines that feed together in a massive interconnected sprawl of production it makes a lot more sense to have one of the assemblers creating stacks of miners, threshers and other more-complicated devices. When creating a farm of a hundred planters, it’s a lot easier to dump a couple of crates around an assembler, toss in the needed components one type per crate, link crates to assembler with inserters, and come back later to pick them up. Yes, automation games are technically about making an infinite amount of things at ever increasing efficiency, but if you only need a few dozen of something, there’s no point in getting too fancy.
It all starts from basic components, at least in the beginning. Copper and iron in the first floor are joined by limestone on the second, and orange and blue plants (kindlevine and shiverthorn, respectively) can be grown in planters and refined through a couple of steps to gain their extract. Metal components tend to be put together in assemblers, once the raw ore has been turned into ingots in the furnaces, while the threshers are initially for organic matter before various mineral powders are introduced later on. These all combine in various ways to create a large array of differing components, from chips of varying complexity to metal and plantmatter frames, not to mention conveyor belts, rails, walls and platforms, and many other devices of varying usefulness.
The longer you play the easier it is to use conveyors and inserters to make the biggest spaghetti-tangle imagineable, which is incredibly satisfying when it works as planned and leaves you wondering how on earth you designed this ridiculously overcomplicated system when it’s time to debug it.
This also includes new tools, which the groundbreaker needs to clear out caverns or find pockets of ore buried in the earth. The one that gets the most use is easily the mole, which excavates a cubic section of earth into its mini black hole.Techtonicadoes a lot of good work to hide its voxel-based terrain, with beautiful caverns illuminated by bioluminscent plants, but underneath it all are the cubes of the voxels. The mole initially clears out a five by five by five section of earth, which is big enough to walk through and build in, but various upgrades expand the options all the way to twelve cubes in all three dimension, not to mention a ground-flattening feature. The open space of the caverns are frequently going to take more work to make useable than may seem necessary, not to mention the scenery is nice enough that it’s better to leave it intact as factory backdrop, so it’s frequently better to carve into the walls than pave over the existing terrain.
Decently Horizontal, but Huge on the Vertical
The levels are also presented horizontally and not all that expansive. There’s plenty of space to put things, of course, but hitting the un-mine-able edge of the world can be common for larger layouts. The levels are both deep and tall, though, whichTechtonicanot only uses to create impressive views, but provides all the space a vertically-minded factory builder could hope for. This also practically demands flight, which comes along as a mid-game upgrade and both frees up factory design and makes you realize that everything you’ve built so far is fairly cramped. Like all first-person factory-builders getting a little extra height makes lining up machine placement much easier, but when the ceiling is low the groundbreaker will pop up through it rather than bounce off. One of my earlier factories is five stories high and the ceiling warps chain together, so it’s easy to attempt to reorganize on the second floor only to place something on the roof, or worse erase a strip’s width of complicated conveyor belts and machinery several stories high.
Like any good factory game, conveyor belts are the arteries that bind everything together, andTechtonica’s let you make deeply complicated layouts without even realizing it. The conveyors have five different options available at any given time: horiztonal that will drop or raise with the ground, horizontal staying flat no matter what, up, down and intersection. While conveyors can run to the ports in machines, they don’t just plug in, but rather need inserters to either pull items from the device or add them to it.
The longer you play the easier it is to use conveyors and inserters to make the biggest spaghetti-tangle imaginable, which is satisfying when it works as planned and leaves you wondering how on earth you designed this ridiculously-overcomplicated system when it’s time to debug it. Accidentally used an up conveyor instead of a down one, or a stack inserter (grabs up to ten items at once) instead of a fast inserter (quick, but won’t monoplize limited resources when you’ve got a bunch of devices to feed), or mis-aligned an inserter so it’s not pointing to a port on a machine, all of this can make the best plans fall apart, and when you’ve got conveyors stacked three-high coming in from every direction it can get a little confusing. Which, of course, you’ve got nowhere to assign blame but yourself because the level was pristine when you got there.
What you can blameTechtonicafor, though, is a lack of polish on a number of features, most importantly the information needed to build things being frequently obscured. Calling up the basic inventory menu also brings with it a list of items, and highlighting one lets you know how to build it and in what machine, although with the fine details left out. As the game progresses, alternate recipes show up but aren’t found in the menu, so the only way to know is to drop down an assembler and leaf through the incredibly long semi-organized but not indexed list of things it can build to find just the right one. Assemblers need to be told what to make so the recipes are all there in its menu, but furnaces and threshers just take whatever’s fed into them and do their magic, meaning they don’t show a full list of the things they can produce.
Threshed ore turns into powder, which can be combined with other powders in an assembler, to make metal slabs in a furnace, and of those three steps only the one involving the assembler is clearly spelled out. When the late-game crusher comes along it’s even less helpful because crushers work their magic on several items at once for a specific output, and while there’s a Recipes tab in its menu, it’s blank with no data. It also doesn’t help that metrics, X components needed per minute to produce Y items only show up when the device is active.
Closing Comments:
There’s a lot of polish needed in many different places inTechtonica,such as the way most – but not all – items and components tell you which specific crafting machine can build it or how on the PC version every item uses the V key to switch modes except for the mole, which wants Z, and “you get used to it” sounds like a terrible excuse. That doesn’t change that I’ve got 100 hours on my save game and have stayed up until 3-4AM several nights not because I had to, but due to the wayTechtonicaencourages having a million projects all running at once, whether that be a major construction to produce a new complicated part or tweaking layouts on existing factories to optimize their efficiency.
Yes, placing things in 3D space can be much harder than it should be, levels without a river to spin the crank generators are nice to explore but not particularly useful to set up shop in, blueprints are desperately needed at the very least to help with the more common but intricate conveyor belt configurations and some of the end-game tech feels may be generous in the payout, but by the time those issues make themselves clear,Techtonicahas got its hooks sunk in deep and they’re just another thing to deal with as each new successful production line makes life a little nicer.Techtonicais a huge and rewarding automation adventure that can be hard to tear yourself away from and will easily occupy a fair amount of head-space when your’e not playing. It’s a long way down and the only way to get there is to automate all the things, and each new factory is another step on the way to the mysteries buried deep in the heart of Calyx.
