Factory-Builder Mechanics

Core Mechanics

These are the basic building blocks needed to satisfy the core gameplay loop of the genre.

  • Resource patches
    • Extract raw resources from the environment at specific locations
    • Sometimes limited, sometimes infinite
    • Commonly trees, ores and water
  • Recipes
    • How different resources can be combined together
    • Raw resources become intermediates become end products (which have a genuine in-game use)
    • Recipes are very rarely reversible (or come at a high cost to do so), forcing players to consider which intermediate to transport
    • Example: iron ore (raw resource) can become iron plates (intermediate) which are turned into gears (intermediate) which are combined with iron plates to make belts (end product)
  • Assemblers
    • Often, select a specific recipe for the assembler to make
      • Sometimes inferred from inputs
    • Not all assemblers can make all recipes
    • Can often be upgraded
    • Often paired with inserters in some form to load and unload resources
    • Commonly assembling machines, chemical plants, cooking stations or so on
  • Transporters
    • Moves goods from place to place
    • Examples: belts, pipes, trains, bots
      • Belts and pipes are efficient and good for small areas
      • Trains move large amounts of goods in burst, but have a high investment cost
      • Bots are able to move goods in a more flexible and dynamic way, but require heavy upfront and ongoing costs
  • Storage
    • Stores pools of resources in one place
    • Has a limited capacity
    • Commonly varies by size, cost to produce, spatial footprint, and materials that can be stored
    • Mixed storage is sometimes possible, but almost always a noob trap
  • Resource sinks
    • Provides ways to consume resources
    • Can be thought of as "the point"
    • Commonly: researching technology, combat, maintenance costs

Advanced Mechanics

Game mechanics that are tightly integrated with the core loop and add rich complexity. These are optional, but commonly included in some form.

  • Distributed resource costs
    • Used to add a cost to actions
    • Generally required by basically everything, but has much weaker spatial constraints for transportation and distribution
    • Must be transmitted through the base
    • Typically modelled as electricity
    • Often something that is revisited, scaled up, and upgraded through the course of a playthrough
  • Fluids
    • Requires a parallel distribution and storage network (in contrast to solid items)
    • Ex: using pipes and tanks instead of belts and chests
  • Filters
    • Splits mixed streams of goods
    • Belt splitters, liquid filters and inserters (via selective pickup) can serve this purpose
  • Splitters
    • Divides a stream of goods into two or more parts, generally evenly
    • Ex: belt splitters, pipes
  • Prioritizers
    • One use of a resource, either locally or globally, is deemed "more important" than others
    • May be able to prioritize both input and output!
    • Goods will be diverted to the more important path until that path is backed up
    • Ex: belt sideloading, splitter priority
  • Bypasses
    • Underground belts and pipes, train intersections
    • Allows more complex logistical configurations
    • Always more costly than alternative
  • Spatial constraints
    • Features of the physical environment that must be worked around
    • Sometimes doubles as resource patches
    • Commonly cliffs, water, finitely sized planets, or simply "end of map"
  • Technology
    • process and spend resources to unlock new options
  • Production enhancements
    • Modules: boosts the effectiveness of the building they are installed in
    • Beacons: boosts some factor of nearby buildings
    • Upgraded buildings: higher cost, but better throughput or efficiency
    • Researched passives: "everything of type X is now Y% more efficient"
    • Alternative recipe paths: more complex paths may be more efficient, or make use of alternative feedstocks
  • Multiple transportation options
    • Multiple options for transporting goods that have distinct tradeoffs (setup cost, latency, throughput, batching)
  • Cyclic production pathways
    • Some outputs must be processed and reused as inputs
    • Forces more interesting and more challenging factory designs
    • Examples: Angel's farms, Angel's slurry filters
  • Byproducts
    • Some outputs of a factory process are undesirable
    • These must be reused for another process, recycled into something else, or desposed of at some cost
  • Pollution
    • Created by extracting, refining and consuming resources
    • Have only seen atmospheric pollution
    • Discourages excess production
    • Can reduce productivity of other resources or provoke combat
  • Stochastic outputs
    • Some factory processes don't always produce the same output, and instead produce one of several outpus randomly
    • Forces more robust designs, especially with regard to timing and surge capacity
  • Degrading products
    • Goods that have a "shelf-life", and become less useful or turn into waste over time
    • Most commonly used for food
    • Often adds storage constraints
    • Often requires carefully managing throughput of production
  • Hazardous goods
    • Goods that are dangerous to store, especially in excess
    • Punishes overproduction
    • Creates storage constraints
    • Examples: explosives, flammable goods, realistic electricity
  • Environmental process bounds
    • Some steps can only be done when conditions are in the right range
    • Commonly seen in Oxygen Not Included: specific temperature ranges, atmospheric gases, pressure ranges

Supplementary Mechanics

These features supplement the core gameplay loop by providing additional things to do or consider, but are not needed.

  • Exploration
    • Fog of war
    • Maps
    • Additional zones to build and explore in
    • Usually but not always paired with a player avatar
  • Combat
    • Adds another goal beyond research
    • Adds challenge and excitement
    • Often becomes more challenging as production grows (to avoid mindless exploitation)

Quality of Life (QOL) Features

These things make the game loop more pleasant:

  • Cut-copy-paste
    • Select groups of buildings (and their settings), and add them to your clipboard
    • Buildings that are cut are marked for deletion
    • Selections can be flipped and rotated
    • Paste these buildings to create ghosts (phantom buildings that are marked for construction)
    • Ghosts can then be built later by hand or via bots
  • Undo
    • Reverse previous actions or directions
    • Best paired with redo
    • Redone actions will leave ghosts, rather than actually placing the tiles
  • Pipette
    • Add a copy of buildings (and their settings) to your cursor
  • Blueprints
    • Save copy-pasted designs
    • Share them with friends
  • Recipe look-up
    • Figure out what items can be turned into
    • Figure out how items can be made
  • Research search
    • Search for terms in the research tree, and see what is needed to unlock various recipes
  • Production statistics
    • View how much of each resource you are producing and consuming over time
  • Alerts
    • Warn the player when something that requires urgent action has occurred
  • Labs
    • Prototype and measure designs in a sandbox environment
  • Production planner
    • Analyze theoretical performance and ratios of resource pathways
  • Map
    • Summarizes the area visually
    • Often paired with a small, always-on-screen minimap
    • Augmented with map markers, which are player-made indicators of specific locations (ideally text + an icon)
  • Notes
    • TODO lists are a common and important use case
    • An in-game way to record what to do next, add flavor, or explain why something was done this way
    • Ideally tied to a location
    • Sometimes map makers are repurposed, sometimes this relies on in-game signs, or is spelled out manually using building mechanics
  • Overlays
    • Display information about various important factors on the map or in-world display
    • Extremely useful to visually communicate the operation of various systems without cluttering aesthetics
  • Time control
    • Pause, speed up or slow down time
    • Pausing and slowing down is useful for accessibility and to respond to crises
    • Speeding up is used to accelerate through boring parts of the game
      • This is probably a design smell that should be dealt with rather than papered over
  • State indicators
    • See how machines are configured
    • See if machines are working
    • See what's inside storage
    • Usually toggled to reduce clutter

Meta Features

These are optional ways to enhance the game experience and add replay value. They do not live in the game itself.

  • Tutorial
    • Learn to play the game via a simple, relatively scripted scenario.
    • Good UX design and achievements may be able to remove the need for this
  • Modding
    • Tweak the gameplay, tuning levers, aesthetics of the game
    • Add more content and systems
    • Often a built-in manager for downloading and enabling mods
  • Small-group multiplayer
    • Play online with your friends
  • Map editor
    • Manually change the map
  • Controllable world generation
    • Change the rules of the game (combat or not, pollution or not, resource costs) to customize play experience
    • Change the quantity and distribution of resource patches and spatial constraints
    • Provide a set seed so others can play the same map as you
  • Alternate terminal goals
    • Achievements, score counters, etc.
    • Provides alternate metrics to optimize above simply creating the required products
  • Challenge scenarios
    • Specific world or factory conditions that make the game harder
    • Ex: ribbon worlds, death worlds, seablock, missing resources, etc.
  • Social media sharing
    • Easily share factory designs and entertaining moments with others
  • Wiki
    • Online repository of information about the game