Factory Town

Tedious

A fantastic factory building game, first of the two from this developer, the other being Factory Town Idle, which is a revolutionary game that's redefining its own genre. I love everything about this game. I can sit down and play it for 10 seconds or 10 hours, and no matter how much time I spend, it feels productive and relaxing. The music is calming, the world is cute, the people hop around, the train logistics and programmable switches are intuitive and easy to work with, and the game can be used to make some incredibly sophisticated product networks. What stands out the most about this developer is that despite being a 1 man operation, he puts out updates and new content faster than most large studios. The updates are significant. Other games they just shoehorn in a new side quest, add a couple items, and mess up the balance, then spend 3 months trying to fix their update. Erik's updates are already balanced, tested, include significant improvements to the UI, to the structure of the game, sometimes complete overhauls of the mechanics of a system, and the game immediately feels better, as if that's the way it should have always been. It's incredible. This game is incredible, this developer's work is sharp, professional, I've never had any of the games crash or break or bug out, and once I feel like I've run out of things to do I take a break for 6 months and come back to a whole bunch of improvements and new contents and it feels like a brand new game. Factory Town has been my best investment ever, and I bought Starbucks stock in 2009.

Need more games like this

This is a less stressful Factorio, though you need to really be thinking about your future supply routes as soon as you start the game. I'm less than 10 hours in but the distribution system is still a little confusing to me. *EDIT* I wanted to revisit this after logging more hours and provide some deeper thoughts for both the dev and those who are looking for guidance. For starters, if you are a fan of Factorio/Satisfactory/Captain of Industry and similar games where you control the full supply and manufacturing line at a very granular level, then you will be pleased with this. It’s not *quite* as deep as those games, in my view so far, but it should be sufficient to hold your attention. There is no “enemy” or combat or anything of that nature. This is purely about build and thrive. And that actually brings me to my primary quibbles: it’s pretty easy to thrive, based on my experience and the way I play. Your play style might result in a different experience. I mainly have the game up and check in on it while I am doing other things on my computer. I might go an hour before checking in to make sure things are still functional. There is no death spiral here, that I can see so far. The campaign mainly appears to be a scenario-driven tutorial on the game’s mechanics, quite apart from the basic tutorial you get early on with pop up tool tips. I jumped into a default sandbox mode and by the time I hit tech level 3 out of 10, my population was doing just fine. Resources were plentiful and manufacturing was humming. My supply routes were a little inefficient, but I was running with less than 40% of my available workers actively working. Once I figured out wagons, I didn’t even bother with minecarts as it appears they are limited in what kinds of items they can haul. Trains sound promising to me, but from a purely “is my population doing ok” standpoint, they weren’t needed. I mainly fulfilled my obligations to raise my tech tree level just so I could start toying around with the more advanced stuff. The summary of that is that there might need to be some balance and challenge tweaking in how quickly resources can be churned and coins earned. My other quibble is that this is rated as verified for the Steam Deck but that experience is going to leave most players wanting a mouse and keyboard. It’s great that the dev has adapted controller interfacing but it’s a little difficult to draw out large routes of roads/rails on the Deck’s controls alone. More often than not, so far, I have played it while docked and using a mouse/keyboard. All in all, it has me hooked for that gooey micromanagement goodness. The price is right, even if it isn’t on sale (I think the going rate is $20USD, thought I got it for less). It’s still being actively developed and that’s a major plus. It also looks like the dev is working on an idle-game variation, which I will be curious about.

Factory town contains a large number of items to produce and plenty of transport options. It's biggest drawback is the tedium of it all. Thus it's a recommend on sale only and only if you like the genre. Like many automation games the joy is in building a large network of goods and watching them flowing all around the map. It has a chill atmosphere with a soothing soundtrack and clean art style. You expand your colony (and thus workers) by delivering your choice of goods, giving you plenty of freedom to pick the supply chains to build rather than needing everything in every mission. The big negative here is that it lacks challenge. There are plenty of resources, many of which you can place yourself. Space is also plentiful meaning you never feel like you need to optimise your layout at all. A bit of trial and error is also needed to understand the mechanics, especially later technologies. Overall the achievements stats tell the story. By mission 3 (out of 8) 90% of players have quit, with only 2% of players completing the final 2 levels. This is best played one mission at a time every 6 months as a palette cleanser.

I've played the crap out of this game, and I love it. If you like conveyor belts and having stuff move around, and if you like building and doing things exactly the way YOU want, then this game is for you. There's no time constraints, no pressure, best of all.... NO ENEMIES!!!! That's right. I was going to get Factorio, once I saw you have to deal with enemy mobs, I said nope, then I saw Factory Town and picked it right up. This is THE first game like this, that has no enemy mobs to worry about. That was my biggest hang up with Fortresscraft Evolved. Like that game was great, but then he made a ton of changes that severely hindered game play so I no longer play that game. Factorio was next on my list but again, no option for peaceful mode, just more enemy mobs. Then came this perfect gem of a game called Factory Town. I have not one single complaint. It really is a great game and you can build and do everything at your own pace and lay things out how you want. One piece of advice I will give on the game when you are designing a layout. You want to plan ahead. In the town I've been working on I spread everything out really far from each other, because if I want to add to the existing design I can just add more buildings without having to tear things apart. The mistake I made with my first playthrough was I had everything really close to each other, so it was hard to change the existing design without having to take apart a lot of stuff.

Hi! Do you like watching Sims bounce from task to task? Boy howdy do I have a great game for you! It's meth. If you've come here from Minecraft, you're familiar with the art style and friendly look; music is chill as ♥♥♥♥. You'll get addicted the ability to control resources, input/output destinations. You'll find the Objectives in-line with your curiosity, and it'll spark a bit of dopamine. If you've come here from Factorio, you're already familiar with the Objective system. You'll enjoy that the resource output is quite literally feeding people and giving them stuff to make them happier. If you've come here from Ratopia, you're familiar with getting dopamine from making people happy. You'll enjoy the fact that, as everyone pitches in, efficiencies improve dramatically. If you've come here from Stranded: Alien Dawn, then you're familiar with caring for a community and helping it grow. Don't worry, it looks like Minecraft and the music is soothing and chill. If you walk away while it's paused, no one dies. You're not taking care of survivors, you're helping a community grow. You build automation to improve the community, there's no pollution generation, and no enemies to ruin things. If you're coming here from Necesse, then I've got FANTASTIC NEWS! THE TEXT IS LEGIBLE FROM THE COUCH! You'll need to do a little rebinding if you're not using an Xbox 360 or Steam Controller. THE DETAIL IS AMAZING. You go from Apples to Apple Jam to Cakes including Apples. There's an economy; sort of. You get to build a TON of automation for providing resources back to the community, and it's literally part of the objectives. Also, clearly defined objectives: just look at the left hand side! And they have a purpose: happiness allows you to build more houses which provides you coins, which can be used to literally improve resource gathering or crafting! and it's 3D! HIGHly recommend