Every giant machine is made from easily-understood parts. Sometimes the parts are huge, like the bucket on a steam shovel, but you can look at the single piece and get an idea of how it works even if the entire machine might be an overwhelming collection of systems. One of the joys of factory games is starting small and simple, with a couple of tools that interact in obvious ways, and eventually as new materials, methods of processing and other functions open up you’ve built an insanely complex tangle of assemblers and conveyor belts that only one person can ever truly understand, and that’s its creator. Thankfully a video game factory doesn’t have to be comprehensible to be fascinating, and Foundry lets you build as intricately as you could hope for.
Foundry is a factory game in an alpha preview state, which means it’s only got dozens of hours of content rather than what seems like the hundreds it’s aiming for. It plays out in first-person view like Satisfactory, but takes place in a world made of blocks like Minecraft, fusing elements of each into an incredibly-playable whole. While Foundry is missing a few Minecraft-ish pieces that could make for some fun design work, like being able to create brick and glass blocks to construct an 1800s-style factory housing, it makes up for it with destructible terrain that lends itself to mining ores found deep in the earth. That’s for later, though, and at the game start all you’ve got is a drill and a couple of nearby patches of ore.
The starting ore types are your basic iron and copper analogues, called xenoferrite and technum. The first ore deposits are clearly marked on the map and not too far from each other, although there’s no promise one won’t be on a hill while the other is in the forest. Step one is clearing the land, using the drill to take down trees and other plants that convert into biomass, and the ore deposits are conveniently located on the surface with several nodes poking out for easy harvesting. In a factory game, though, the whole point of manual labor is avoid having to do more of the same type later on, so the first recipe you’ve got is the starter furnace to convert ore to metal shapes more easily used for crafting.
Once the first xenoferrite plates and technum rods have been crafted it’s time to start the long road to automation, beginning with mining stations and building blocks. Building blocks are one of the most important pieces in the game, in that they act as power conductors for most of the machinery. Create a three by three platform of building blocks for a mining station, add a couple more blocks and dump a biomass burner on one, toss some of the tree leftovers in the burner, and the mining station now has power to send out little drone robots to haul in ore. Each block in the deposit has a huge but not unlimited amount of ore stored inside, so while the starting patches will run out eventually, it’ll be well after you’ve got bigger and much more productive mining options. For now, though, it’s time to get to grips with one of Foundry’s quirks, and that’s the way materials move around.
Almost every structure, from the smallest mining station to huge smelters, sits on top of a base of small doors. A three by three unit like the assembler will have twelve spots, three per side, which you can use for either input or output depending on how you configure another piece of equipment, the loader. Loaders need conveyor belts, and conveyor belts like in every factory game ever made go everywhere in a wild tangle of logistics. One of the advantages of the Minecraft influence, though, is that not only can you send belts soaring through the air but also underground, with the disclaimer that it’s easy to forget which product goes where when the production line is buried.
As Foundry opens up, new technologies introduce new ways to do everything in the game, from powering the grid to extracting ore. Patches of olumite are basically oil, coming up as a liquid and requiring pipes to transport about the base, while deep underground are infinite supplies of the basic materials of xenoferrite and technum. The underground mines are particularly fun to set up, requiring mining trains and freight elevators plus new machinery to refine the rubble into usable ore. Every new technology is its own little puzzle to figure out how to use most efficiently, and it’s too easy to lose huge amounts of time tweaking and adjusting the production lines so nothing runs out of parts or gets too badly backed up.
The thermal separator, for example, not only needs electricity but also ignium fuel rods, which when fully consumed kick out a recyclable casing. The problem from that comes if you’ve only got a standard loader output, which will send the casing down the line just as it would processed ore, leading to a backed-up production line when the casing gets to an assembler that has no place for it to go. The solution is to build a couple of filter loaders, which can be set to process only a single type of item, and send the casing back to the fuel rod assembler to be used again. It’s the kind of thing that can add an interesting kink in what had been a one-way production line, with all product flowing from one machine to the next to be processed to its new form, and a fun logistics puzzle to figure out how to tidily deal with it. If it does turn out wrong, though, ctrl-Z lets you mass-erase a user-defined area with little fuss, leaving it blank to see how the next idea works out.
While Foundry is in a pre-alpha state one of the developer’s goals is to make sure that every new release is solid enough to stand on its own. It’s a long way from done, and the alpha comes with a guarantee that save incompatibility will happen (very rarely) when major updates come out, but the current version feels fantastically polished. Huge factories with belts everywhere act exactly as they’re supposed to, and while bugs do pop up they’re squashed almost as soon as reported in the game’s Discord channel. There’s a lot more planned, but the only major obviously missing features are the plot and some type of end-game. Foundry in its current state has enough content and options to keep players busy for a good long while, whether that be creating a sprawling set of interconnected systems or going hyper-organized while taking advantage of the Minecraft-y ability to build multi-story factories with conveyors bringing in components and shuttling out completed products. The goal of Foundry at the moment is to build bigger to earn more tech to build even bigger than before, and as it turns out that’s all that’s necessary.
The Foundry alpha has yet to show up on Steam but is readilyavailable on itch.io. There’s no demo, just a paid alpha, but any itch.io purchase gets a Steam key when the time comes.
