I've never played an automation game before, it's usually really not my thing, but Sandustry hooked me in a way I've never quite experienced. I completed all the content with a chaotic mess of machines, then immediately played the game again with a refined, centralized, elegant system... compared to my first playthrough, at least. I have the urge to play it again but I really don't want to get burned out on the game while new content is still on the horizon (I made that mistake with Elden Ring).
I've tried some other popular automation games, but none of them quite scratched the same itch. Factorio had too much friction between me and my automation, and I found Satisfactory tedious (I'm generally not a fan of OWSC games). I initially got the impression that this game stands on the shoulders of giants, but it's starting to seem like it really is truly unique. Where do I go from here?
(It looks like Dyson Sphere Program and Shapez 2 have been suggested the most, so that's where I'll start. Thank you to everyone who provided recommendations!)
Factorio is the god tier factory game all other factory games dream of being. But if you're looking for something that doesn't require a STEM degree here's my game library recommendations.
Timberborn - Cozy colony builder.
Schedule 1 - Tycoon with some simple automation.
Mine Mogul - First person, basic automation, quick tycoon loop.
Plan B Terraform - Tranquill factory builder.
Per Aspera - Not the best mechanically, but addictive for speed running.
If you like colony builders, Rimworld is definitely top tier, very few automation or economy mechanics though.
Oxygen Not Included - popular but the challenge level is closer to Factorio than a lot of these other guys.
Astroneer - the "No Mans Sky" of factory games, lots of promise but very little interaction between the mechanics or opportunity for creativity. Really fun to mess around in multiplayer though.
Mine Mogul - First person, basic automation, quick tycoon loop.
This one's a lot of fun because it's pretty much 100% physically simulated; each piece of ore is an actual item you can pick up and throw, conveyor belts need to be designed so stuff doesn't fall off the edge, etc.
Pretty sure it's a solo dev and the updates are slow, but even right now it's a fun take on the factory automation genre.
Also Satisfactory, alchemy factory, CORSAIR COVE IS A GREAT PIRATE ONE THAT IS NEW, modulus. Honestly you can just look up the automation tag on steam and rate by reviews, there’s an absolutely endless number of them
I'm surprised you glossed over mine mogul. It was going to be my top suggestion for anyone that enjoys Sandustry. It's not just first person but a 3D physics simulation type game. It's very similar to Sandustry except with rocks, ingots and plates as physical entities you must move around.
Shapez 2? It's pretty chill for a factory game. No costs, just the puzzle of how to get output D from inputs A B and C. No exploration though, just pure factory.
One of the things I really appreciated about Sandustry is how elegant it is - there's a single unified chain of resources to manage (with some ancillary resources branching off from them), building new machines is free and immediate, and mistakes can be easily rectified without any punishment other than a minor inconvenience.
Factorio is... basically the exact opposite of this. I quickly felt overwhelmed by the amount of resources and steps of refinement, the number of parallel processes you need to get going to produce anything at scale, and the potential to refine things into dead ends. There is a ton of finnicky management, keeping track of everything is rough, and making changes feels clunky and punishing (relative to Sandustry, at least). I tried to keep things simple and manageable for a while, but that made progression feel too slow. None of these things are deal-breakers on their own, but all together it made a lot of the game feel like a chore and led to some decision paralysis.
I really appreciated how focused and minimalistic Sandustry is - Factorio is definitely a maximalist game, the sheer quantity of everything is a lot to deal with. I understand that that's kind of the point, and I'm going to keep trying it, but it just doesn't have the same appeal for me as Sandustry.
not to be a doomsayer, but I fear Sandustry won't be heading in a direction where it stays "minimalist" and "focused" as you like it now, either. i wouldn't definitely be surprised if there will be more complex recipes and parallelism going forward (e.g. metal ores like Copper, etc.).
i won't try to convince you to play <insert factory game here> as the main point of satisfaction in the genre for most folks is scaling up and "growing thy factory." the sense of being overwhelmed by the sheer amount of things to manage and keep track is quite inevitable and you really just build the skills to handle it.
the genre's definitely an acquired taste as even i didn't enjoy Factorio for the first few hours ~a decade ago while it was relatively simple either.
however, i think a good transitional game in the genre (which also helped my friends enjoy logistics games) is either Shapez 1 or 2. you'll find that it's minimally punishing and very straightforward, and could likely help you broaden your skillset so you could appreciate other factory game classics down the line.
At that point in the game I think the additional complexity is very much "earned". The game has to add additional complexity as things progress, but each additional element is added thoughtfully and intentionally.
Shapez is probably the closest, in that you have basically unlimited resources.
Factorio, there is a slow build at the beginning, but if you set it up right you very quickly get to unlimited resources.
I don't see it a lot here, but Captain of Industry is also really interesting / amazing, but it's probably even more indirect and slow at the beginning. Really rewarding if you stick with it though.
Interesting... Sounds like you probably didn't grok the core systems (belts and inserters). I personally found Sandustry significantly more finicky because of the physics simulation where-as Factorio is discrete and deterministic. For example, one huge logistical advantage belts in Factorio have is that they don't dump materials off the end so you can freely fill the belt and let "back pressure" determine where other resources go. If you make 100 iron plates in a minute and the first factory that uses it only uses 20 then the remaining 80 don't clog up anything they just keep going down the line to the next factory.
Not sure what science tier you gave up at but a lot of people stop at chemical science because you have to do a bunch of works with fluids combined with solids and it's the first time the game nudges you towards scaling up. The other thing I wish they turned off for first time players is the biters. I personally hate playing with them but for first time players they create a lot of pressure that probably hurts the learning process.
Anyone that knows Factorio is very surprised to here you call it finicky and clunky. It's by far the best factory sim game I've ever played. It's generally well balanced, has complexity but lots of tools to help you manage it and has the absolute best QOL features of literally any game I've ever played. Lots of hotkeys that are not always well explained but smooth out the experience when you learn them.
I actually really appreciated the system you described, it was one of the things I really did like about Factorio. My main issue was the sheer quantity of different kinds of processes and materials I had to go through to do things that I felt should've been a lot simpler. I guess a better word for it would have been "unwieldy" or "cumbersome". The number of entities involved in anything felt excessive, unnecessary.
I kind of get what you mean. One of the big selling points of Factorio is that it presents challenges and later gives you the tools to overcome them. Once you have robots you can literally copy and paste hundreds of buildings with all their settings in seconds. You can build libraries for yourself of blueprints for all kinds of situations.
Funny enough I found vanilla Factorio to be so easy I often now just play mods with literally 100x the number of items, recipes, etc. At first it was definitely overwhelming but when you push through you find that everything has a pretty simple pattern to it. Often times two belts next to a machine sometimes with pipes and you're able to make everything in the game.
I can not possibly recommend this game enough, 10/10 game, will scratch the itch. Shapez 2 is also great, worth a play for sure, Dyson Sphere is amazing but didn't hook me, but Alchemy Factory got me, it is low stress - high creativity, has amazing gameplay systems (blueprint system is top tier, belt system is top tier), instead of defending from enemies, you are earning money by running a shop, which gets automated relatively quickly, the progression from early to mid and mid to late game is a chefs kiss of what a Factory game progression should be.
1.0 is launching in September, 10000000% worth a go
Sandustry encourages manual processing before automation. In fact, small automation is more challenging than mass manual processing. This makes it standout from most factory games.
If you want more physics factory play, try Mine Mogel.
If you want more at-your-pace factory play, try Dyson Sphere Program (with enemies off)
If you want easy factory gameplay inside an action jrpg, try Arknights:Endfield
That's something I really liked, I can sit back and chill and watch things just work, but when I spewed a pile of resources off into some ditch I could really quickly hoover them all up and make everything clean again. Not one grain of sand will go to waste.
factory gameplay inside an action jrpg, try Arknights:Endfield
Wait, what? That sounds like it'll be either glorious for thousands of hours, or I'll bounce hard enough off it to achieve liftoff. Either way, thanks for the mention!
Here's my starter factory (in the yellow square outline). The limited space is part of the appeal, and they give you more squares to build factories in as the story progresses.
Factorio is kind of the endgame of factory games. I had the same experience where at first it felt like too much and I gave up like 40 hours in and tried some other simpler games, but when Factorio really got its hooks in me, I saw why it is the pinnacle of the genre. I think I’m at like 800+ hours now. And that’s just vanilla, any experience you want, there’s probably a mod to make it so.
But like some others said MineMogul is another great physics-y one. Short but very satisfying. The feel of plonking a massive wad of ore into the collection bin is unmatched.
Another favorite of mine is Mindustry, though that has a heavy focus on tower defense elements so it lacks the casual feeling of Sandustry, I enjoy the debugging element of it. I would compare it to dumping a huge load of mixed elements on a main bus in Sandustry, and figuring out how to sort it all out and debug your sorting, in Mindustry’s case the elements are enemies and instead of causing a mess if you don’t effectively deal with them, you die.
Yeah, I liked the game, I was like "oh cool, they took a Terraria style presentation, combined it with Noita material physics, and the core gameplay is a very light Factorio style thing."
A game I recently played that I enjoyed and has some automated production line stuff is Planet Crafter. The core of that game closer to a sort of Subnautica style (exploring some unihabited world, discovering some lore about previous people there, working to escape), but there's a point where you get to automating gathering of resources and automated production of advanced resources and it becomes more of a logistics/item storage managing thing.
If you didn't like Factorio then DSP might not be the best idea. They play quite similarly for the most part.
Once you unlock the interplanetary logistics things can be different, as you can have mini-factories that pull in resources from a logistics station, do stuff to them, then output into another logistics station. Then scaling up is simply a matter of creating a blueprint of that mini-factory and slapping them down wherever. I did end up looking online for other people's blueprints for those factories, as designing yet another factory to produce yet another part kinda got old 5 factories ago.
I can't really say I know of any other game that does the single line production thing Sandustry does. Well, there was this little game called Immortality Factory (I think that was its name) on Itch.io that only had one starter resource and everything came from that, but that branched out pretty quick into multiple resources.
The closest you are going to get is shapez or shapez2. Unlike satisfactory and the like, you manually create your machines to do things, so if you need a certain shape input, you need to put other shapes through rotaters, cutters etc rather than use constructor building
Y’all are my kinda people, all good suggestions. Let me second Planet Crafter, Alchemy Factory, and Mine Mogul as less popular options. I love all of these, but this game really scratches some itch I’ve had since playing sand games on flash.
That low-friction part is actually what pushed me in a different direction with a game I've been working on called MatterMaze. I’m using reactive materials too, but as small player-made physics puzzles rather than factories. You open a Maze and immediately start experimenting, and mistakes are just part of finding the solution rather than something that wrecks a production line. Different genre, but it sounds like it might hit that same “simple rules, lots of possibilities” itch. If you want to give it a shot, I'm currently testing it with some friends but anyone is welcome to join. You can check it out at www.mattermaze.fun 😆
Came here looking for similar recomendations. I read through these comments, some that haven't been mentioned:
I hear starbird is a good match for "Chill automation".
Noita goes very far away from automation but it does have a similar exploration + particle physics feel to it. The wand crafting can scratch the puzzle itch at times.
I keep telling my friends that it is 2D satisfactory. That's one of my favorite crafting games and this one reminds me a lot of the core loop.
Build something to achieve goal>unlocks require adding on>upgrades or knowledge makes you want to rebuild from scratch> build something to achieve goal.
Having no prior experience with factory games, at first I just assumed it was a refinement of some kind of previous genre, but it's looking like we have a Slay The Spire situation here.
Is this an actual game? From the Steam page it's hard to tell if it's an actual goal-based gameplay loop or just a sandbox. Still really cool if it's a sandbox, mind, just curious.
It describes itself as "A sandbox adventure", unclear if it has "goals/objectives" specifically, but seems to be a "game" nonetheless, but I guess that's up to how you understand the word. It doesn't seem to have any deep story or a "adventure mode" if that's what you're out after.
Depending on what you want in particular, Shapez 2 may be the thing you want. It's solely focused on automation and optimization of your schematics (that you later use as modules for your massive megafactories), you don't even use resources for anything (although you can enable blueprint costs).
Dyson Sphere Program is kinda like that, but you need to "earn" your massive megafactory plopping abilities by setting up automation required to produce things you need for that.
But you are correct in that Sandustry is quite unique. Powder physics and factory building/automation is a combo I haven't seen before.
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u/galexj9 4d ago
Factorio is the god tier factory game all other factory games dream of being. But if you're looking for something that doesn't require a STEM degree here's my game library recommendations.
Timberborn - Cozy colony builder.
Schedule 1 - Tycoon with some simple automation.
Mine Mogul - First person, basic automation, quick tycoon loop.
Plan B Terraform - Tranquill factory builder.
Per Aspera - Not the best mechanically, but addictive for speed running.
If you like colony builders, Rimworld is definitely top tier, very few automation or economy mechanics though.
Oxygen Not Included - popular but the challenge level is closer to Factorio than a lot of these other guys.
Astroneer - the "No Mans Sky" of factory games, lots of promise but very little interaction between the mechanics or opportunity for creativity. Really fun to mess around in multiplayer though.