Everything is built from everything else and eventually it can all be resolved down to a few basic components. The universe was only helium for most of its first hundred thousand years and now you’re able to’t throw a rock without hitting a few dozen different types of matter, including the rock. Entropy may break everything down eventually, but until that time, matter seems determined to be as many things and exist in as many states as possible, and maybe a few that shouldn’t be just for good measure. Even the earliest physical matter of helium started with only a few basic elements like heat, radiation and pressure, though, so by that comparison the workers ofFakutorihave a wealth of options to build with.
Building The Universe One Block At A Time
Fakutoriis a laid-back automation game where the object is to turn blocks into other blocks, starting with the basic elements of fire, water, earth and air, and what starts off as simple grows into a wonderfully free-form puzzler. The elements are produced in machines that output a single block a little less than every five seconds and the entire factory runs on this cycle. Each machine is a single square in size, leading to a brief moment of hope that just this once designing a factory won’t be a tangle of conveyors running every which way. And for a short while that seems possible until the elements start running multiple transformations deep.
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Starting off in the dark you convert a network of caves into an automation empire, pneumatic tubes zipping supplies through an ever-expanding network
As the new foreman on site it’s your job to work with the waka, who are the mostly-enthusiastic crew in charge of keeping their corner of the void running. This is done by them bringing the foreman up to speed on the processes and machines necessary to create whatever new elements are needed for the current objective, rather than doing any of the work themselves, but with their guidance you may create ever-more-intricate materials and just maybe even a legendary one. Starting off from the basics of running two elements through a combiner to create something new, the objectives get steadily more complicated as the number of steps needed to create the elements increases.
Iron, for example, is made of coal, fire and copper, but getting there takes several different transformation processes involving the various properties of each element. Copper, for example, is its own separate process outside of iron production, part of which involves dropping any item subject to gravity down ten squares to turn it into a shooting star. Fire doesn’t fall like water and earth do, or rise like steam and smoke, so the producer for that should go beside and one square below the copper output, pointing upward so the two elements end up side-by-side. Finally, to make coal you first need wood, and that’s easily made by water and earth run through a combiner. Put a producer for water and earth above and beside a combiner then point the combiner’s output downward and it will drop a block of wood right beside the fire, which will then burn it into charcoal, and that’s all the elements in a row ready to be transformed. Add a combiner at the end of the row and that outputs iron, which can then be transformed into silver and then silver into gold. Gold, of course, sells for a nice chunk of change.
Fakutoriis a laid-back automation game where the object is to turn blocks into other blocks, starting with the basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air, and what starts off as simple grows into a wonderfully free-form puzzler.
Element production is free but every piece of equipment on the screen has a cost associated with it, and while nothing individually is expensive and removing a device fully refunds the cost, an intricate series of transformations can add up quickly. Research into new tech also costs a bit, and while the demo doesn’t have too many new gadgets available, they’re a little expensive to unlock at the start. Raw elements only sell for a single coin apiece, but those numbers start shooting up once the combiners come into play. It also helps that space is infinite, so if you want a money-generation machine ticking away off to the side, there’s no reason to let the budget become a problem. The same holds true for mana, which is consumed at a rate of one hundred per magic block consumed, but is generated at a single point apiece per block transformation. Look at the elements, figure out which ones are best for mana production, create a single mini-machine that produces what you want and then use the copy command to clone a bunch of them, and the mana budget can take care of itself.
TheFakutoridemo is a nicely-meaty chunk of game, with a good eight or more hours of play depending on how deep into its mechanics you want to dive. Triggering star showers to boost production, mastering blocks by completing their bonus goals in order to make the star shower gauge fill more quickly, uncovering every element in the demo from the simplest to the most intricate, experimenting with status effects like electrifying conductive blocks to increase their recipe value, and of course, building the most efficient layout possible to do all this with are incredibly effective at enjoyable ambling through the hours. While the stage goals are something to create towards, they can become secondary to playing withFakutori’s systems, laying out and eliminating ideas to see which ones work and which don’t. There’s no time pressure, just a goal that will be there when you’re ready for it, and an entertaining crew of workers who can’t wait to explain what the next objective is on the way to creating all the elements a functioning universe needs.
