There’s something hypnotic about an assembly line, as bits and pieces move from one machine to another and are constructed into components and products. Ore becomes ingots, ingots turn into base materials, materials are combined and configured into new components, and eventually the components become a useful piece of hardware. There have been plenty of automation games about taming the logistics demon, where materials not only need to get where they should go but do so in ever-larger numbers as the tech needs scale up.
Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Project, Techtonica, Sixty Four, Nova Lands, Shapez, and many more have turned automation intoa fairly substantial genre, each with its own take on turning a handful of dirt and twigs into high-end tech. One of the games that’s been in production for a while has been Foundry, but at long last it’s finally about ready to be available to the public again with the announcement of itsMay 2 Early Access release.
Building up and digging down to meet the factory’s needs
Initially Foundry was available on itch.io in an alpha state, right up until it got a publisher in the form of Paradox Interactive. At that point the alpha came down and everything went quiet for a while, until a demo came out last October for the fall Steam Next Fest. When the Next Fest was over so was the demo, which went over about as well as one might expect, but the wait to dig back into Foundry’s take on automation is finally about over with today’s announcement of a release date.
Massively Revamped Foundry Demo Briefly Returns with New Publisher
Foundry is easily (and lazily) described as a cross between Satisfactory and Minecraft, in that it’s a first-person automation game in a fully-destructible cubic voxel world. The blocky terrain isn’t just a bullet point but rather a key component of Foundry, in that mining is one of its major elements. Veins of xenoferrite (basically iron) and technium (space copper) are right at the surface where the player-robot lands, but almost everywhere else in the world are found deep underground. Digging it up involves either a whole lot of drill-work or much more efficient explosives, at which point a mining platform with autonomous drones takes care of the grunt-work.
Run a conveyor belt to a smelter to create plates and rods, connect those to a fleet of assemblers, and suddenly you’ve got the basis of an ever-growing tangle of buildings and belts pumping out all sorts of products. All of which, of course, will be needed to make bigger and better components and devices as new materials are discovered and the factory sprawls across the landscape and into the earth, while drones scurry through the sky.
There’s a lot ahead for Foundry, but the Early Access release hitting on May 2 will include most of its systems in one form or another. Basic automation, mining, aerial delivery, major buildings designed in a modular fashion depending on player need, and even decorative structures for when you’ve got a completed factory and want it to do more than just sit on top of a boring grey-block platform are all part of launch, and plan to be tweaked and expanded as development progresses.
Thelaunch-date trailershows off player creations using the decorative pieces, and as a disclaimer I’ve got a building in today’s trailer at the 0:16 and 0:32 mark, so bias alert I guess? (You can watch me blow up my structurehere.) I’ve beenenjoying Foundryfor a couple of years now, though, and it’s great to see the game finally taking its first steps towards release. You canwatch the trailer here.
