Draft Steam Page - Emergence

Capsule Art

Short Description

Manage a bustling colony in this miniature organic factory builder. Survive changing seasons, floods and predators without cascading failures. Explore a diverse environment in search of new species to domesticate, and evolve to take advantage of nature's bounty.

Tags

automation, base building, resource management

Videos

Images

Long Description

Humanity has gone extinct: victim to its own hubris and waste. But life itself lives on, and a new form of civilization has begun to emerge: a symbiotic cross-species emergent intelligence. What was once a simple ant-plant-fungi system is now a sprawling microscopic metropolis as more and more species are domesticated and ultimately domesticated.

Guide this civilization as it grows, adapts and evolves in a challenging dynamic environment. Fight to build a robust, sustainable system, and fall in love with a factory builder unlike anything you've ever seen before.

Build a new world

GIF: A thriving, bustling factory is digging a canal system. The last connection is formed, and water floods in, irrigating crops.

The world is your playground: shape the earth, build elaborate terrace or canal systems, and float goods downriver. A light touch is key:

• sit back and watch as your units follow the signals that waft from all things
• create elaborate factories by carefully zoning areas for the plants and fungi that serve as your production and refinement facilities

Tend to their needs, prune back their uncontrolled spread, and reap the rewards of your careful stewardship.

Face giant threats

GIF: an anteater is gobbling up ants with a giant tongue, while it tramples all over carefully constructed factories.

But when you're only a few centimeters in length, the world is a terribly unstable place:

• a rain storm becomes a great flood
• predators are terrifying monsters
• a fallen tree can level an entire district
• a dead animal offers an unprecedented windfall of nutrients

Day and night become your metronome, while the changing seasons force you to completely rethink your entire economy. Unchecked, disease can ravage your populace, while your very resource stores are ripe to be raided!

You must learn to take advantage of your good fortune, while ensuring you can survive and adapt to the misfortune.

Deal with pollution

GIF: Waste is piling up. And up. And up! Then, the player is shown repurposing it as compost, and then fertilizer.

Of course, not all problems are mere bad luck. As your predecessors learned, the most insidious problems are often those of your own making. Simply dumping your waste works fine to begin with, but eventually these unmanaged externalities will begin to catch up to you:

• degrading the soil
• polluting water bodies
• simply piling up in ever-growing mounds.

Close the loop, reprocess and repurpose your waste, and turn the problem on its head.

Evolve to adapt to your environment

GIF: Exploring the evolution UI, being sure to linger on interesting options.

To grow, adance and overcome these problems, your colony-civilization requires new options. Split your species and create specialized strains uniquely suited to specific tasks. Select powerful evolutionary traits that come with both unique advantages and tangible downsides.

Metal extracting plants? Poisonous fungi? Spiders made for milking? With enough generations, anything is possible.

Assimilate new species

GIF: Capturing a spider. Containing it in a cage (oops it ate an ant). Raising baby spiders. Using spiders to produce silk.

But when you need something truly different, you must master new techniques, and expand into the untamed wilds. There, you will encounter completely new species (like mycorrhizae, carnivorous plants, flying bees and predatory spiders) and, through hard work and clever thinking, domesticate them.

Over time, they will become fully domesticated, providing radically new capabilities for your colony and unlocking the ability to shape both their preferences and the course of their evolution.

Join us, for together we are stronger.

Glossary

These definitions are intended to be relatively brief and opinionated. They are not authoritative!

Game Design

Key concepts and terms from game design.

Accessibility

How easy and/or comfortable a game is to play for players with a wide range of ability levels or impairments.

Vision, hearing and motor disabilties are the most common category here, but difficulty, time commitments and mental health concerns can also be reasonably considered under a broad banner of accessibility.

Achievements

Rewarded for accomplishing challenging or interesting in-game tasks. These are often associated with achievement points, awarded based on the difficulty of each achievement.

Can serve as an important form of tutorialization, as it lays out [goals] for players to chase after (and are a good spot for hints).

Achievements typically tie into out-of-game systems on Steam or consoles to track accumulated achievements.

Agency

The extent to which players feel like they can shape the broader narrative or mechanics of the game.

Art style

The techniques, colors, scale and elements that are used in the visual elements of a game.

Automation

Repetitive work that is done automatically by in-game entities and systems.

Challenge

Difficulty that is fun and rewarding for players to overcome.

Cohesion

The degree to which game elements (usually thematic or artistic) feel like they belong together as part of a greater whole.

Constraint

A limitation of the design space, which must (or should) be respected when doing game design.

Constraints can be:

1. External: imposed by problems beyond the game designer's control. Budget, cultural sensitivity and market demands are common examples.
2. Arbitrary: imposed by the designers themselves, in order to limit the design space in interesting ways.
3. Internal: implied via existing elements of the game, or the combination of other constraints.

While constraints are limiting, they're a powerful tool to create a more focused game and are great sparks for creativity.

Constraints exist on a continuum between soft (flexible, can be ignored with a good enough reason) and hard (must be respected at all times).

Constraints can be in tension with each other.

Cycle (mechanics design)

A set of elements of the same type that share strong mechanical (and often thematic) similarities.

Design-by-stumble

Making games is hard! Starting with an existing, successful game is a popular and effective strategy.

However, you should critically examine the genre of the game you are starting from, and identify clear areas to focus on and improve.

Otherwise, your game development process will proceed as if by random walk: changes made without a reason are as likely to be harmful as helpful, and your game will be unfocused.

Design space

The set of all possible games or solutions that obey all of the constraints.

Depth and complexity

Depth is a fuzzy term that gets at the notion of game richness: how many interesting choices are there, how much replay value exists?

Complexity is a similarly fuzzy term that attempts to capture a measure of the number of "moving parts" of a game, and how challenging it is to understand.

Depth is generally viewed as a positive attribute, while complexity is generally viewed as a negative attribute. Games which have high depth relative to their complexity are often considered elegant.

Dependending on their player base, games have a varying complexity budget. This fuzzy term represents each player's ability to keep track of rules, learn new mechanics and reason effectively about their choices. If this budget is exceeded, players will be frustrated and confused by your game.

Diagetic

A mechanic that is presented as occurring in the literal game world. For example, most user interfaces are presented as something that only exists for the player's convenience, but doesn't exist in the game. However, in Halo, the display is part of the soldier's visor, and thus literally exists in the game.

Antonym: non-diagetic

Double-edged

An upgrade or other mechanic that has both benefits and drawbacks. These are typically stronger than their strictly positive equivalents in order to be balanced.

Early game, mid game and late game

These are broad stages of a game, which proceed one after another.

Total complexity typically increases as the game unfolds, as the complexity budget is often limited by the rate at which players can learn and master new mechanics.

Focus (game design)

A game is said to be focused if it has a clear goal and its systems are built to serve that goal.

Flavor text

Writing (or sometimes other elements by analogy) that has no mechanical impact or explanation, and instead serves to enhance the theme and tone of the game.

Game feel

How satisfying, smooth, intuitive and natural a game feels to play. Games with great game feel start to feel like extensions of the player's body as they master the game.

Genre

A cluster of related games. These can be explained either by definition (where you list key properties of games in the genre) or by example (where you list games that fall into the genre and those that do not).

Hook (game marketing)

The unique selling point of a game, that draws interest and encourages players to try out and keep playing your game instead of the competitors in your genre.

Hook (game systems)

A reusable game mechanic that can be used to connect game systems, increasing cohesion and depth.

Interesting choices

Games are sometimes said to be a "series of interesting choices". In order for choices to be interesting, players must be able to:

1. Understand the choices they have
2. Understand the implication of each choice
3. Care about the impact that the choice has on the game
4. Decide differently based on game conditions

Choices are said to be balanced if they provide roughly equivalent benefits (or drawbacks) to the players.

Lens (game analysis)

A perspective on the design of a game. See the deck of lenses for an excellent set of questions to ask about your games.

Loop

A path through a game system that leads back to itself.

Each step in a loop can be reinforcing (positive feedback) or dampening (negative feedback), resulting in an overall reinforcing or dampening cycle.

Ludotography

The telling of a story through gameplay. From this video.

Mechanic

A rule about how the game works.

Narrative

The story of a game. Unlike most traditional works of art, narratives are often implicit or branching in games.

Noob-trap

Features that seem helpful or appealing to beginners, but actually aren't.

Using them is less effective in almost every circumstance than an alternative, or develops bad habits.

Plausibility and realism

Fictional worlds are plausible if they have a set of learnable, internally consistent rules. They are realistic to the extent to which these rules match those of real life.

Worlds that lack plausibility will not be immersive, and will not feel coherent.

Player avatar

The in-game unit that represents the player.

Player experience

What the player is actually doing, and how they feel.

Player goals

In-game objectives that players set for themselves that give them a reason to keep playing. These are often complementary to player fun: fun will keep players engaged and enjoying themselves from moment to moment, but chasing after and reaching goals gives a deeper satisfaction and sense of mastery.

Polish

Work done to improve how pretty, cohesive, and bug-free a game is. Games where these qualities are high are said to be polished.

Progression

The increase in player power and options over time. Progression exists on a continuum between vertical, which is focused on power growth, and horizontal, which is focused on expanded options.

Prototype

A quick implementation of a game design idea used to test a hypothesis about how a mechanic will work or feel in practice.

Quality of life

Features which improve game feel and reduce player frustration. This is often done by reducing the amount of manual repetitive work, alleviating limitations like storage space, or reducing the ongoing complexity budget required by game mechanics.

Randomness

There are two kinds of randomness: input randomness and output randomness.

Input randomness controls which options a player is presented with, while output randomness varies the effect of a player's choice. Both add challenge and surprise, but input randomness is typically less frustrating.

See this GMTK video for more.

Simulationism

A style of game design that attempts to accurately simulate real-world systems in an realistic fashion.

System (game design)

A collection of mechanics that work together to produce part of the player experience. Systems generally have loops back to themself, or hook into other systems in order to keep the player engaged and create depth.

Tension

Elements of the game design that are, at least on their face, contrasting or opposed. Tension must be handled carefully: tackled poorly, it leads to poor cohesion or focus. Tackled with thought and skill, tension can creating unique and interesting themes, tone or systems.

Theme

The setting, aesthetics and "fictional genre" of a game. This is the core of worldbuilding, and sets the basic rules of the fictional universe.

Can be described using:

• very broad terms like "sci-fi"
• more specific like "colonial fantasy focused on the war between burgeoning powers"
• hearken to specific media like "Diablo" or "Bladerunner"

This can be extended to discuss the big questions that a game is attempting to explore, like "what does it mean to be human".

Tone

The emotional weight and mood of a game. Often discussed in concert with a game's [theme]: "cheerful steampunk" is very different than "horrific steampunk" is very different than "gloomy steampunk".

Tuning levers

Parts of a mechanic that can be easily tweaked to modify the balance of a system.

Tutorialization

The practice of teaching new players how to play your game.

Upgrade

An improvement to a mechanic. Upgrades are usually but not always selected by players to give them a sense of agency.

Worldbuilding

The lore, places, people, aesthetics and internally consistent rules of your fictional universe.

World generation

Usually refers to the procedural generation of a game world, or parts of a game world, in opposition to the crafting of a world (or level) by hand.

Closely related to concepts of:

• randomness: a pristine world provides a particular set of options for a player to begin engaging with, and these options should allow the player to meaningfully engage given the mechanics available to them
• plausibility/realism: a procedurally generated world must make sense given the game's world building

Factory Builders

Terms defined here are standard elements of the factory builder genre.

Alert

A notification that lets the player know when something has gone wrong.

Assembler

A building or machine that can be used to process items via a recipe.

Balancer

Joins two or more item streams and evenly distributes items across them.

Commonly combined with balancers or built out of splitters.

Belt

A belt is a simple logistic entity which transports goods in a single direction. Multiple belts need to be chained together to provide effective transportation. Belts usually have a maximum amount of goods they can transport per unit of time. They can transport any type of solid goods and different goods can be mixed.

Notably, in Factorio, belts have two "sides", where each side can contain different types of items. The direction from which items are loaded onto the belts influence which side of the belt the items are put on.

Examples:

• Factorio: Transport belt
• Satisfactory: Conveyor belt
• Dyson Sphere Program: Conveyor belt

Bot

Bots are units which can automate specific player actions. They often require a lot more upfront investments than machines, but are a lot more flexible. Compared to machines, bots can move around freely. Some actions can only be automated through bots, e.g. constructing new entities.

Examples:

• Factorio: Construction robot
• Factorio: Logistic robot

Blueprint

Blueprints are placeholders for multiple entities to be constructed. Entity settings (e.g. recipes or other configurations) are preserved in the blueprint. They can serve as a planning tool for the player, but also be used as instructions for bots. Often, blueprints can be shared between players and/or be reused during the game.

Examples:

• Factorio: Blueprint
• Factorio: Ghost
• Satisfactory: Blueprint designer

Clipboard

Similar to blueprints, the clipboard allows the quick reuse of factory layouts. A set of entities can be marked to be copied and then pasted at a different position at a later time. Usually, the entities are not built directly, but only pasted as placeholders.

In contrast to blueprints, players can usually only have one layout in the clipboard. Previously copied layouts are simply overwritten.

Examples:

• Factorio: Controls/Tools (copy/paste/cut)
• Dyson Sphere Program: Mass Construction (Lv1) (enables copy/paste functionality)

Creative mode

A game mode where the player can freely test out designs and modify the environment in unconstrained ways.

Often incorporated into the game itself as a "sandbox" or "lab", not to be confused with the other genre-specific meaning of either of those terms.

Encyclopedia

A list of in-game elements (items, locations, mechanics) that explains what they are and key properties.

Intended as an in-game substitute for a wiki. Often contains flavor text, and serves as a primary mechanism to explain worldbuilding to players in this genre.

Filter

Filters allow only one set of goods to pass through. Can be combined with inserters to only transfer one set of goods or with splitters to split one set of goods to one side and all other goods to the other side.

Examples:

• Factorio: Filter inserter
• Factorio: Splitter (provides filter functionality)
• Satisfactory: Smart splitter (provides filter functionality)
• Dyson Sphere Program: Sorter (provides filter functionality)

Inserter

Inserters transfer goods from one entity to another. Often, inserters are required to insert goods into machines. Inserters are usually available with different ranges, either as separate entities or as configuration option.

• Factorio: Inserters
• Dyson Sphere Program: Sorter (provides inserter functionality)

Lab

A machine to research new technologies, unlocking new machines and other gameplay features. Usually uses science packs as input.

• Factorio: Lab
• Satisfactory: HUB terminal
• Dyson Sphere Program: Matrix Lab

Loader

An entity that can load or unload the contents of a container as fast as the input/output belt can handle. In many games (like Mindustry), this is built into assemblers directly and inserters simply don't exist.

• Factorio, where it was initially considered but ultimately not included

Logistic network

A network of connected logistic elements that can interact with each other. It's composed of:

• producers, who provide resources to the network
• consumers, who take resources out of the network and use them
• the connection between these nodes

A single entity might be both a producer and a consumer. In the same game there may be different separated sets of logistic networks. The consumers in the network (e.g. logistic bots) can access the producers in the network (e.g. logistic chests), but not outside of it.

Examples:

• Factorio: Logistic network

Map

An abstract representation of the geography of the game world. Typically stylized, and intended to communicate large amounts of information comfortably.

Unexplored areas are covered in fog of war, concealing them.

Notes

Player-written in-game notes. Often integrated with the map. Typically used for:

• marking important locations
• recording what to do next
• ideas for potential improvements
• explanations of why weird decisions were made

Serves as a combination of programming comments, map annotations and project management tools.

Overlay

Overlays are UI elements which allow the player to view additional information about entities or processes. They help convey information that is not easily visible by the in-game graphics alone. The player can switch between different overlays to access different types of information or disable them entirely.

Examples:

• Factorio: "Alt mode"
• Oxygen Not Included: Overlays

Pipette

The pipette is a tool to select an entity and/or its configuration directly from the screen. It works similarly to copy/paste functionality with the clipboard, but for a singular entity. This is usually a UI tool instead of a physical tool to build in the game.

Power

Power is a special type of resource that is required for machines to run. Power needs to be produced and then distributed to the machines. Often, there are different means of production (e.g. steam power, solar power, nuclear power) with different upfront costs and production rates. The distribution of power is usually separated from the distribution of other resources (e.g. through an electric network).

• Factorio: Electric system
• Satisfactory: Power
• Dyson Sphere Program: Power

Production statistics

Records how much of each resource you're producing and consuming. Advanced versions have sophisticated filting

Works well in a dashboard format.

Prioritizer

Joins two or more streams of inputs, causing the input or output to take priority:

• input priority: if output flow is greater than input flow, take from the stream with priority
• output priority: if input flow is greater than output flow, send goods to the stream with priority

Commonly combined with balancers.

Recipe

How items can be combined to make new items. Contains:

• input(s), including quantities
• output(s), including quantities
• processing time
• what assemblers can be used to make it

Recipe

Research

Research is the main means of progression. Researching new technologies unlocks more machines, enables more advanced processes or improves existing features. Research is usually very expensive to pace the game.

Examples:

• Factorio: Research
• Satisfactory: Milestones
• Dyson Sphere Program: Research

Resource

An item that can be processed further to produce different items.

There are different types of resources:

• Raw resource: A foundational resource that can be extracted directly from the environment.
• Intermediate resource: A resource that cannot be extracted nor used directly. It's an intermediate set towards the production of end products.
• End product: A resource that can be used directly for some in-game benefit.

Sandbox

Science pack

An intermediate resource that can be used to research technologies in a lab. Often, many science packs are required to unlock one technology. Sometimes, science packs are available in different types with different recipes, different technologies require different science pack types to be unlocked.

Examples:

• Factorio: Science pack
• Dyson Sphere Program: Science matrices

Splitter

Splits streams of goods into two.

Train

An entity to efficiently move big amounts of resources over large distances. Usually require a much higher upfront investment than belts, but are better suited for long distances. They are high latency, and move goods in clumped bursts. In some games there are also many other entities to guide the behavior of large train networks.

Examples:

• Factorio: Railway
• Satisfactory: Electric Locomotive

Undo

Reverse previous directions or actions. Ideally combined with a redo functionality.

If buildings exist / don't exist when they need to, marks structures for deletion, or creates ghosts in their place.

Ecology

These terms come from the science of ecology and its related fields.

Nutrient cycle

The recycling flow of nutrients between organisms, decaying matter and inorganic stores.

Soil

Dirt, but viewed scientifically. Useful for growing stuff.

Soil has four main components, which vary in water storage capacity and drainage.

1. Sand: large particles. Drains well, but water storage capacity suffers.
2. Silt: medium particles. Pretty balanced.
3. Clay: small particles. Drains terrible, but with great water storage capacity.
4. Organic matter: used to be living stuff, carefully prepared and mixed in the soil. Great drainage and water storage, but decomposes.

Water cycle

The recycling flow of water: from rain to lakes and rivers and soil to plants and animals to eventual evaporation.

Water storage capacity

How much water remains in soil after being flooded and drained. Too low and your plants will be susceptible to drought.

Water drainage

How quickly water can drain out of soil. Too low and your plants will be susceptible to flooding.

Emergence

These terms are specific to the game design of Emergence. Even if they have an external meaning, when used in this book, they will reflect this meaning.

Assimiliation

Capturing and domesticating a species, giving you access to it as part of your colony.

Building

An inorganic structure that is not alive.

Life cycle

The collection of life stages of an organism, and the pathways between them.

Life stage

A form in an organism's life cycle. This controls its appearance, capacities, needs, and which life cycles it can transition to.

These are modelled in discrete steps to improve clarity and reduce complexity for players.

Milestone

Per-playthrough accomplishments. Contrast to achievements, which are unlocked a single time for each player.

Organism

A living creature (plant, animal, fungal or otherwise) with life cycle. Organisms can be split into units, which move, and sessile organisms which do not.

Signal

Every physical object in the game emits signals that correspond to their identity. These spread over time, and are used for pathfinding and work prioritization. There are three flavors of signal:

• presence
• supplying (a "push" signal)
• requesting (a "pull" signal)

Depending on their needs and preferences, units will proactively pick up items from buildings that are supplying items, and move them to buildings that are requesting items of that type (or simply storing those items). Alternatively, units will proactively carry items away from buildings that are supplying them.

As a result, signals serve as both a pathfinding tool and a logistic network to transport goods through the factory.

Strain

A genetically homogenous subset of a species. These have their own upgrades and signal properties.

Sessile organism

An organism that cannot move. Complement to a unit, and a subset of a structure.

Structure

Each structure occupies one or more tiles, excluding any other structures from its space.

Unit

An organism that can move, plan and act. Complement to a sessile organism.

Work

A task that must be completed by a unit, measured in seconds to complete. Tasks can be left partially complete, and can be picked up by other workers later. Work always occurs at a fixed location, usually a structure.

Risk Assessment

This page keeps track of risks that we might face during development so that we can mitigate or even eliminate them.

Organizational Risks

Feature Creep

Feature creep refers to the continuous addition of features that goes way beyond the initially planned scope of the game. We are quite vulnerable to this for multiple reasons:

• The game genre and theme invites for many complex features and mechanics that can be combined freely. It's very easy to come up with additional ideas that would fit well into the game.

• As an open source project, we are going to have many different contributors with different backgrounds. Everyone might have their own ideas that they want to integrate into the game.

To mitigate this risk, the following will be important:

• Clearly document the vision of the game in the design book. This will help to align all contributors on what we want to build.

• Organize the bigger development plans in GitHub projects and/or milestones. Closely align this plan with the vision laid out in the design book.

• Focus on the core game loop first and then iteratively plan the next set of features we want to add. Keeping the scopes small for each iteration will ensure that we don't end up starting too many projects at once.

• Focus on the player experience. Get a playable version ASAP and then improve based on the player feedback, while being mindful of the larger vision.

Financial Instability

As an open source project it will be harder to generate funding for the work we cannot do ourselves. As an indie studio, there is also the uncertainty how popular the game will be in the end. If we have full time contributors, it's important that we can sustain their work in the long term.

A Patreon model or GitHub sponsors could help with this.

Rip Offs

Since the game is open source, other individuals or companies could sell the game without any major contributors. They might also re-bundle the game with different assets. This could hamper our own ability to sell the game.

One possible mitigation would be the use of different licenses for some aspects of the game. For example, we could use CC non-commercial or share alike licenses for assets and copyleft licenses for non-reusable code. However, this could constrain code reuse for good faith individuals and would also require the consent of all contributors.

"Piracy"

Because the game is open source, players could simply compile it from source for free instead of buying it. While this is completely legal and technically piracy, it could decrease our sales.

If this is going to be an actual problem remains to be seen. Non-technical players probably won't want to go through the hassle to compile from source (even though it's quite easy in the current state). Some players may also want to buy it on Steam simply to have all games in one place and for achievement tracking.

Contributor Fluctuation

As an open source project, we can rely less on the availability of individual contributors. Sometimes life happens and the activity of some people might drop significantly, maybe without prior notice. Some contributors will end their work on the project entirely and move on to other projects. We will also get new contributors that might need some mentoring to get productive.

If we have one or more full time contributors, this could help mitigate this risk. Useful documentation can help to get new contributors up-to-speed more quickly. Code reviews and reliable CI workflows can help to maintain quality and consistency in our code base.

Skill Bias

It's very likely that we are going to have way more people comfortable with programming than other fields. Especially art assets and animations might become a bottleneck for development.

This could be mitigated by contract work, but this could introduce a significant financial burden to the project. Otherwise, we should try to attract more artistic contributors.

Technical Risks

Bevy is still Experimental

While Bevy is already being used in production and has an impressive development speed, it's still in its early stages compared to other game engines. Some features that we are going to need might still be missing or more difficult to implement. There are way less assets and resources ready to grab for prototyping or accelerated development.

Fortunately, we have some contributors who are very experienced with Bevy. For our game we are also less reliant on features like a visual editor, because we can procedurally generate the world.

Performance-Sensitive Game

Factory builders and automation games are usually computationally expensive. There are often large maps, tons of machines/structures and potentially many units with an AI.

Hopefully Bevy can help us to use all resources efficiently.

Game thesis: Emergence

Following the genre analysis, let's examine how Emergence fits within the factory builder genre.

Game Thesis

With a biologically inspired setting and game mechanics, Emergence attempts to fill a unique niche in a very successful genre that is low on genuine innovation.

Factorio, a smash hit indie game, succeeded because of its:

• relatively intuitive, easy to control UX
• satisfying, simple audio
• clear graphics
• rich and interesting contraption mechanics
• interesting engineering puzzles through well-designed production chains
• rich opportunities for optional optimization
• clear, well-paced progression
• thriving modding community
• impressive performance
• intriguing fantasy: build a factory on an alien world and advance in technology

However, competitors in the space have often failed to catch audience's attention in the same way. Few have failed to capture the core gamplay loop to the same level of proficiency: they may have production chains, but working them out is much more straightforward, and the tools provided for optional optimization are limited. Additionally, getting the details right (particularly around UX, contraption mechanics, progression and performance) is remarkably hard.

Just as importantly, these competitors are by-and-large unimaginative, both in theme and mechanics. Belts, inserters and machines in a generic sci-fi environment are all well-and-good, but fail to capture the imagination of new audiences, or stand out from the crowd. Even when working within the established genre, many still fail to provide exciting goals to work toward. Power armor and cars and nuclear reactors are cool, and they keep players pushing forward.

By taking the rich and fun core mechanics of factory builders, adapting them to a unique and compelling theme, and adding a unique mechanical focus on resilience, Emergence looks to appeal to a loyal audience ravenous for something meaningfully new.

Key Design Constraints

These are self-imposed, and chosen to create a more compelling and cohesive game:

• Players should be able to look at a screenshot or video of an inspiring contraption, and replicate that in their game.
  • For a given factory design or contraption, all the moving parts should be visible and identifiable
  • It should be apparent, then, how each contraption works and how the resources "flow" through it
• Relatively light tone, playful art style
  • Solarpunk, not Zerg
• Colonies should always feel like bustling organic hives and farms, not mechanized factories.
  • The thematic focus z`should be on "nature reclaiming" instead of "industry civilizing"
  • Reflavored machinery (belts, gears, electronics) and human construction styles (houses, right angled construction, planks) don't cut it!
  • An emphasis is put on the survival of the colony as a whole, not any individual member
• When designing your colony, robustness is valued over finely tuned optimization
  • Robustness to refactoring
  • Robustness to predictable environmental changes
  • Robustness to infrequent threats
  • Robustness to changes in supply and demand
• Optimal play should involve (but not require):
  • Adapting to the local environment
  • Dealing with all waste products
• Game mechanics are inspired by real world ecology, but making a clear and fun game with interesting choices comes first, even if that means bending reality somewhat

Design Strengths

• biology serves as a great source of easy-to-explain inspiration for unique game mechanics
• compelling and unique thematics
  • opportunities for subtle political/moral storytelling on importance of sustainability and dangers of pollution
• disruptions offer a unique opportunity for players to explore more robust factory designs
• disruptions can create much more interesting emotional pacing in a genre that struggles with flatness
• tiny scale offers interesting mechanical and experiential possibilities that will feel new and interesting
• emphasis on sustainability pushes designers and players towards more interesting resource refinement pathways
• domesticating new species offers a natural and high impact path to adding more options for players
  • this can be done as horizontal progression, allowing new players to jump into whatever interests them most
• lack of player avatar reduces frustration of inventory management and walking around
• modded Factorio has really nailed much of the UX and QoL features that we needed, and offers a clear base to learn from

Design Challenges

• trap of realism
  • the availability of ecology and biology and ecology risks designers targeting realism over player experience
  • the world must be plausible, not realistic
  • for example, realistic evolution systems are likely to be fiddly and frustrating and distracting, rather than rich and interesting
  • some audience segments may be upset by "unrealistic" mechanics
    • mods are a helpful outlet for them
• scope creep due to abundance of fascinating ideas
  • game design must create reusable systems with excellent hooks
  • project management must focus on polishing and shipping complete systems
• design risk when testing new mechanics
  • needs aggressive prototyping
• visual clarity is hard when allowing for player-driven species modifications
  • can we force each high-impact choice to modify exactly one element of the unit in a modular way?
• combat is a natural fit for the thematics, but is often clunky or frustrating in this genre
  • disembodied control helps
  • loose control over units (this is not an RTS) may be frustrating
• UX challenges when experimenting with new interaction paradigms
  • zoning
  • hex tiles
  • debugging unit behavior
  • more than 2D layouts?
  • tunnels?
  • information about soil composition?
  • information about signals?
• potential high performance costs of some mechanics
  • pathfinding
  • water flow
  • decomposition
• animation of units in a tile-based setting is an open question
• unit collision / interference is an open question

Genre Analysis: Factory Builders

Defining Games

• Factorio
  • colonize an alien planet and launch a rocket
• Satisfactory
  • open world first person factory building
• Shapez.io
  • abstract factory puzzles
• Dyson Sphere Program
  • gather resources from an entire solar system

Defining characteristics

• automated resource extraction and refinement
• logistical challenges driven by spatial constraints
• optional optimization of existing systems (generally optimizing resource throughput)
• gated technology progression
• problems/puzzles/modules flow into each other (as opposed to puzzle games or zachlikes where they are explicitly independent)
• partially self-directed goals
• challenge can be overcome by spending time waiting
• highly moddable
• procedurally generated world

Why is this genre fun?

• puzzle like, but complete solutions are easy to achieve
• optional optimizations on top of said solutions
• satisfaction of watching your contraptions run
• satisfaction of taming the wild
• interesting, unexpected failures due to unexpected interactions or subtle bugs in the player's design
• gameplay can be extended, enhanced, or changed through mods or built in options
• hits on "engineering creativity" in a way that other games don't
  • engineering creatvitiy is more about coming up with solutions within constraints. It's not a blank canvas. It's based on analytically evaluable metrics
• scratches similar itches to programming, but with clearer gradients and fewer frustrations
  • great debugging: can see what's working and why with exceptional visualization
  • basic solutions are straightforward
  • very weak syntax constraints, very intuitive syntax
  • solutions generally do not need to be as robust as in the real world
  • tech progression doesn't break previous (natural) assumptions
  • good quality of life tools and docs

Adjacent Genres

This list is roughly ordered by the closeness to the genre.

• Zachlike puzzles (automation heavy puzzle games)
  • Opus Magnum, Incredible machine
  • Greater focus on additional (secondary) optimization constraints (which are provided by the game)
  • Micro-optimization as an entire game
• Base and city builders
  • Sim City, The Sims, Cities: Skylines, Dragon Quest Builders
  • Build out a complex and delightful area, but with no / little automation
  • Most of the actual functioning of your constructions is abstracted away
• Colony sims
  • Rimworld, Dwarf Fortress, Oxygen Not Included
  • Balance complex systems, but with a focus on the needs of your workers, not scaling production
  • More about the emergent push and pull of life in the colony. Less about steadily pushing towards some goal.
• Idle games
  • Cookie Clicker, Candy Box
  • Automate everything, but without the complex chains
  • Additional mechanics and optimization opportunities unfold over time
• Train simulators
  • Open TTD, Mini Metro
  • Focusing almost entirely on logistic networks powered by trains
• Real Time Strategy
  • Starcraft, Warcraft III, Red Alert
  • Command units, build bases, and extract resources
  • Very little automation: resource production is almost entirely abstracted
  • Much more time pressure!
• Level builders
  • Y'know, like Mario Maker
  • Focused on creating interesting experiences and, in some cases, creating fun and interesting contraptions
• Tower defenses
  • Dungeon Warfare 2, Bloons TD, Gemcraft
  • In high quality games, there are strong optimization and contraption elements

Blended Genre Games

These games are all factory builders combined with the genre(s) in brackets.

• Mindustry (tower defense, RTS)
• Hydroneer | Astroneeer | Atrio (exploration)
• Automachef (Zachlike, cooking game)
• Infinifactory (Zachlike)
• Timberborn (city builder)
• Minecraft (survival crafting / creative sandbox)

Progression Loop

• acquire goal (generally something to produce)
• determine recipe
• (optional) unlock tech prerequisites
• find relevant inputs (raw resources or previously produced items)
• (optional) if necessary, rework existing parts of the factory to produce relevant inputs
• build prototype
• (optional) optimize and scale prototype
• integrate with larger factory
• reap fuits of your labor
• (ad hoc) discover and fix issues with previous designs

Sources of Challenge

• player-driven optimization
• determining production chains
• physical layout of factory elements (making sure they reach each other and all fit, etc.)
• transport logistics (moving things around the factory)
• refactoring previously constructed parts of the factory as new requirements (or better methods) are discovered
• returning to your factory after a break, and needing to refresh yourself on how it works
• (optional) combat disrupting operations
• (optional) temporal variation disrupting operations, often by creating instability in resource supply or demand

Design Tensions

What goals of the genre are in tension with each other? Note that many of these design tensions are not unique to factory builders.

• mechanical complexity vs meaningful richness
• helpful innovations vs trivializing the game
  • unlocking new tech can sometimes remove interesting challenges instead of creating interesting opportunity for improvement
  • (insert roast of Factorio's logistics robots here)
• disruption forces interesting changes vs frustration and sadness to see your stuff get wrecked
• long play time vs tedious waiting around
• giant automated bases vs computational limits
• joy of optimizing and creating big factories vs uncomfortable implications of industrialization and colonialism
• accurate simulation of reality vs clear and interesting puzzle situations

Common Problems / Room for Improvement

• mediocre combat
  • poorly integrated
  • frustrating
  • snowbally
  • thematically incoherent
  • difficult to balance
  • limited depth
• poorly managed complexity in UX
• poor tutorialization
• bland, unoriginal aesthetics
• unoriginal contraption mechanisms
  • everyone uses inserters and belts
• boring and low-impact environmental variability
• copy-paste of optimized designs
• treadmill-style tech progression: same mechanics, but with a different coat of paint and "numbers go up"
  • driven by lack of end products
• terrain modification that makes the world less interesting
• no meaningful penalties for overproduction of resources and mindless expansion
• frustrating control schemes, especially in games with a player avatar
  • also results in difficulty seeing the whole factory at once
• missing QOL features

Drivers of Player Churn

• overwhelming UI and bad control at start of game
• players are intimidated by engineering
• large portion of base is destroyed/disabled
• positive feedback loops on failure
• difficulty recovering from failure states
• no clear goal at any point
• tedious tasks
• poor pacing
• performance issues

Expected Business Model

• early access
  • incorporates player feedback
• live service development
• (optional) modding
• (optional) small group multiplayer
• (optional) expansions
• NO microtransactions

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

Mapping genre mechanics to Emergence

Core Mechanics

• Resource patches
  • environmental resources are typically (but not always) continuous, rather than discrete
    • still clumped, but no clear boundaries
    • ex: nitrogen can be extracted from soil, but will be richer in some locations
  • all resources can be obtained renewably, with the right strategy
  • soil contains various concentrations of nutrients (nitrogen, phosphorus, potassium)
  • soil is physically made up of sand/silt/clay/stone/organic matter
  • water is vital for virtually everything, and can be found in rain, streams, lakes, organic items and soil
  • energy is similarly vital, but can be found in different forms that are edible to different organisms
    • ultimately gathered via photosynthesis
• Recipes
  • quite standard overall
  • emphasis on byproducts and consequences of unmanaged waste
  • circular processing
  • some items can decompose over time without action
• Assemblers
  • simple items can just be assembled by units at a crude shelf made of dirt (cheap) or stone (durable)
  • more complex items involve the use of dedicated plant or fungal buildings with selected recipes
• Transporters
  • ground units carry items and do work flexibly, but are physically grounded
  • water flows can be used to carry goods downriver
  • water flows can be expanded with player-dug canals
  • large quantities of goods can be transported via large, high-momentum ground units
• Storage
  • simple one-resource piles that are exposed to the elements
  • sheltered storage buildings made of stone, plants and fungi
  • shelted storage will reduce rate of decay, and mess due to rain and other effects
  • units, assemblers and storage work together in a fashion directly analogous to Factorio's logistic network
• Resource sinks
  • lossy conversions: energy and water will commonly be lost during resource transformations
  • resource upkeep: energy and water will commonly be lost to keep things alive
  • guided evolution: research analogue used to modify and enhance existing species
  • domestication: research analogue used to add new species to the colony
  • hive mind: research analogue, used to unlock new features in the lab
  • ???: some kind of final goal to work towards building

Advanced Mechanics

• Distributed resource costs
  • water is used by everything, with rate varying by temperature and humidity
    • ultimately replenished by rainfall
    • distributed via:
      • canals
      • mycorrhizal networks
      • water droplets
  • energy is used by everything, with rate varying by amount of work done
    • ultimately gathered via photosynthesis
    • distributed by:
      • items
      • mycorrhizal networks
• Fluids
  • transported via plant and fungal networks
  • transported via canals
  • can be pumped
• Filters
  • units are capable of differentiating between items
  • some units won't care about some items via signal preference tuning
  • simple mechanical filters sort items into classes
    • item size
    • floats
    • blows away
  • plants are capable of sophisticated filtration of solutions
• Splitters
  • streams that split
• Prioritizers
  • nonlinear signal feedback loops?
  • stream geometry?
• Bypasses
  • underground tunnels
  • overpasses
  • catapults?
  • bridges?
• Spatial constraints
  • rocks
  • trees
  • bodies of water
  • litter from extinct humans?
  • modifying the topology etc should be possible, but very expensive
• Technology
  • guided evolution: research analogue used to modify and enhance existing species
  • domestication: research analogue used to add new species to the colony
• Production enhancements
  • upgrades: done via guided evolution, affecting all organisms of that strain
  • enhancements: higher quality fertilizers can be produced and applied automatically via workers
• Multiple transportation options
  • Many species, and species variants
• Cyclic production pathways
  • Core mechanic
• Byproducts
  • Core mechanic
• Pollution
  • thematically essential
  • needs much richer (and more plausible) model of pollution
  • effects should be varied and depend on intensity of pollution
  • polluting should be easier than dealing with waste products properly
  • pollution can serve as yet-another important driver of temporal variation, as it builds up and must be dealt with
  • several kinds:
    • solid waste
    • water pollution
    • soil pollution
• Stochastic outputs
  • Inherent in advanced tech
• Degrading products
  • Organic materials only
  • Most food
• Hazardous goods
  • Combat-focused items
  • Advanced tech
• Environmental process bounds
  • inherent to using living organisms as assemblers (and workers)

Supplementary Mechanics

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

• Exploration
  • important but not essential
  • fairly standard implementation
  • needs more interesting world generation
  • water distribution and topography are key
• Combat
  • natural but not essential
  • must be careful to avoid snowballing effects
    • design with negative feedback loops like hunger satiation

Creative Automation

The core experience of factory builders is that of creative automation. This is an important idea, so let's break down exactly what that means, and what supports and interferes with that experience.

What is automation?

Automation is simple enough: things happening in a repetitive fashion without manual intervention. This might be cars being riveted in an assembly line, the grinding of wheat into flour, or even the experience of watching crops grow.

Automation is satisfying in the same way that contraptions are: you get to see the intricate parts working together in harmony, marvel at the complexity, and zoom in to understand how each part works.

Good contraptions are:

• full of interesting sounds and motions
• work together to achieve a common goal
• able to be understood by analyzing each part in isolation
• complex enough that they cannot be understood immediately

However, automation can be distinguished from pure contraptions because it accomplishes a goal. These are not pure toys, endlessly pushing a ball up a hill. Instead, they perform a task: commonly working with resources. Resources are produced in some way, then transformed, and ultimately consumed to achieve some goal.

What makes games "creative"?

Creativity in games is ultimately about self-expression: the ability to change parts of the game world to reflect players' identity or vision for how something should look or work.

Successful creative games share four common factors:

• interesting goals
  • these can be set by the game, but cannot have a guided path to get there
  • achievements, tech unlocks, emergent gameplay needs and cosmetics are all very common drivers here
  • predefined quests and linear stories often reduce player creativity!
  • secondary objectives are really helpful to expand the space of interesting solutions
• multiple distinct paths to reach those goals
  • players must be able to meaningfully change the mechanics or aesthetics of the world, their base or their avatar
  • multiple solutions to any given challenge should be possible!
  • solutions must be meaningfully different: simply changing the coat of paint rarely drives creativity
• low pressure
  • the player must be given the time, wiggle room emotional space to explore their options and make suboptimal choices
  • creativity often only comes after basic mastery over the game mechanics have been achieved
  • as a result, high pressure games can become creative!
• compelling aesthetics
  • creativity is often driven by the desire for beauty
  • engaging themes encourage players to roleplay, getting into character to achieve a cohesive look or feel
  • strongly opinionated character / world design can reduce creativity if there's not "variation on a theme" options as players are reluctant to break existing cohesion

What makes automation creative?

Automation is easy to create, but what makes it creative? Let's use those four factors above, and analyze factory builders and adjacent genres.

Interesting goals

Factory builders have a single goal baked into the genre: accumulate more resources. This is a great start, and can be used to motivate players as they begin to play the game. But eventually this starts to feel hollow: what's the point of a pile of money if there's nothing to buy?

To motivate players, you need interesting resource sinks and new forms of challenge. The best resource sinks feed back into the game loop: unlocking new options (technology) or enabling new options for automation (end products).

Secondary objectives are incredibly important for interesting creativity, but naturally emerge from the standard gameplay setup of factory builders. The basic set of goals are:

• throughput
  • this is the primary objective for most players
• fixed costs
  • resource cost of end products used
  • space used
• marginal costs
  • amount of each resource required
  • power use
• technology level required
  • this forces players to refactor their designs over time
• latency
  • rarely explored!
• robustness
  • rarely explored!

Together, these form a rich Pareto frontier of solutions, each of which can be considered "optimal" under some set of tradeoffs between these goals.

Auxiliary systems (like exploration or combat) can also provide great opportunities for player goals! Traditionally, cosmetic self-expression has been a very weak motivator in this genre.

Distinct paths

Goals in factory builders typically take the form of "turn these raw resources" Simple factory builders often have a limited number of options, both in terms of recipes, and in terms of how ingredients can be transformed. Expanding those choices is the obvious fix, and can help!

However, this effect can be enhanced by ensuring that each alternative path occupies a different point on the Pareto frontier of objectives described above. Paths where one solution completely dominates the other by being strictly better than another in all objectives are only an illusion of choice, and end up feeling very frustrating to players.

When designing distinct paths in factory builders, designers must be incredibly aware of their complexity budget. In order to avoid overwhelming players, designers should:

• gate complexity (typically behind tech)
• provide clear tradeoffs between options
• provide quality of life features that make understanding and analyzing the options easier

Low pressure

By default, factory builders are a pretty chill genre. Messes are easy to clean up, and there's no external pressure.

But this can lead to a very emotionally flat game experience for players. Adding time-varying challenge (such as via intermittent combat) is a great way to fix that problem without removing the space that players need to be creative.

Compelling aesthetics

Currently, the aesthetics in the factory builder genre are pretty uniform: belts and inserters, machines and trains. These are incredibly evocative, and make for great contraptions. This prompts interesting creativity, as there's an intuitive fantasy of "making a bustling factory".

However, the lack of diversity makes it hard for players to create their own aesthetic goals.

Creative Automation: Case Studies

The terms and categories here are taken from the creative automation page: read that first!

Emergence

Conclusion: Creativity will be low until more systems are in place, but potential is excellent. Clear and satisfying aesthetics will be key to creating a compelling contraption. Disruptions should be tunable to ensure every player can reach an optional pressure level.

Interesting Goals

Standard factory building goals are present, but an emphasis on sustainability and resilience add even more goals to consider.

Stronger spatial and temporal variability increase the importance of considering tradeoffs and tailoring solutions to conditions.

Distinct Paths

Initial prototypes will be quite weak, simply due to scale.

Adding more systems and organisms will enhance this substantially.

Low Pressure

Aesthetics are well-suited to chill alien cottage-core vibes. Disruptions are planned as an important gameplay mechanic: need excellent tuning levers to ensure that space for creativity isn't removed. Cascading failures shouldn't be too severe by default.

Compelling Aesthetics

This is one of Emergence's key strengths. Unique fantasy that lends itself well to a bustling, automated hub.

Aesthetic differentation will require more content than MVP.

Potential for very compelling contraptions. Audio and timing and visual clarity will be tricky but essential to creating good contraptions.

Factorio

Conclusion: top-tier creative automation, especially in modded games. Lots of options that differ in interesting ways. Limited aesthetic choices.

Interesting Goals

Science construction is interesting and clear. Secondary optimization objectives are often meaningful.

Trains and bots are great end products: powerful and intrinsically satisfying. Player upgrades like cars and suits serve as additional chase goals. While combat is frustrating, it serves as a clear motivator in games where it's enabled.

Distinct Paths

Micro-optimizations have tons of diversity. Layouts, bots vs belts vs trains, modules and more.

In base Factorio, there's very limited branching in recipe paths, which leads to limited choice. Dramatically improved in mod packs like AngelBob's.

Low Pressure

Passes with flying colors. Biters can impact this, especially early game. Most people turn them off though, or keep them at a difficulty where they're not a serious challenge.

Good feedback loop with biters where struggling players can simply divert resources to defense, or slow down production.

Compelling Aesthetics

Great theme, compelling contraptions.

Animations of inserters, moving belts, and sounds of assembling machines are standout elements.

Stardew Valley

Conclusion: Decent creativity, very limited automation with no diverse paths and weak secondary goals. No good resource transformation chains. Everything just turns into money.

Interesting Goals

The Community Centre goals provide great open-ended freedom. Once those are complete though, the player can feel quite aimless.

Little gameplay incentive to produce more diversified products. Once you've completed a bundle, you can largely just turn everything into cash. Often results in players planting highly profitable monocultures.

Good aesthetic variation (cow farm! crab pots! fruit trees!) but options are often blatantly imbalanced.

Distinct Paths

Automation overall is weak and frustrating. Lots of manual labor with no way to automate end-to-end incentivizes homogenous designs. Effectively no recipe diversity or room for micro-optimization beyond farm layout.

Solution space is too simple: often only one or two optimal solutions!

Build diversity is low impact and low dimensionality: very few meaningful choices.

Low Pressure

Literally the point of the game.

You can see creativity disappear in the speedruns, where pressure is artificially added.

Compelling Aesthetics

Lots of good aesthetic variation, and a compelling theme! Distinct playthroughs often get creative variation almost entirely due to the strength of aesthetics.

Forager

Conclusion: Very dull automation, very limited creativity. Very mindless.

Interesting Goals

Almost none: follow the preplanned achievements and make number go up.

Distinct Paths

Very few options. Suffers from many of the same problems as Stardew Valley, with lots of manual labor and no way to chain machines together.

Low Pressure

Extremely low pressure: it's an idle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Decent game feel, but very homogenous with no variation on the theme.

The Incredible Machine

Conclusion: Great creativity, but no sense of progression and these are simply contraptions rather than automation.

Interesting Goals

Lots of interesting goals, but secondary goals are basically missing.

Campaign is effectively introductory: map editor mode is the real creative sandbox.

Solving challenges created by other players is often the point.

Distinct Paths

Incredible for this. So many wild gizmos, and possible creative physics-driven interactions.

Lack of secondary goals hurts feeling of distinctness. Could be dramatically strengthened with innovations from Opus Magnum.

Low Pressure

Yep! It's just a puzzle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Fantastic: great game feel in the contraptions.

Fun, silly, intuitive components.

Opus Magnum

Conclusion: Awesome creative automation, but these are mostly just contraptions without a larger purpose.

Interesting Goals

Pre-baked puzzles, but with really explicit and interesting multi-objective optimization:

• space
• cycles
• cost
• instructions

These are made explicit to the player, and histogram leaderboards encourage competitive optimization.

Distinct Paths

Fantastic: lots of recipe paths, fantastic constraints and tradeoffs on how to move things around.

Low Pressure

Great, it's a puzzle game.

Compelling Aesthetics

Clean and clear aesthetics, cohesive if mostly abstract theme, great whirring and moving contraptions.

Oxygen Not Included

Conclusion: Good but not great creative automation. Automation options take a long time to unlock. Too many challenges have Best Solutions.

Interesting Goals

Challenges are largely "satisfy", not "optimize". Figuring out how to:

• get food
• get water
• get power
• produce oxygen
• manage excess heat

is interesting as a new player, but can be dull once the mechanics are understood. Very little incentive to actually fine tune working processes.

Distinct Paths

Lots of good options for each path, mostly restricted by world gen.

Some setups are simpler / more efficient / more reliable (hi Self-Power-Oxygen-Machines) and end up completely dominating over more interesting ones (like Morb farming).

Duplicant behavior can be hard to understand and optimize for in frustrating ways.

Limited tools for genuine automation until quite late in the game.

Low Pressure

Great: intermittent emergency failures don't detract from long periods of tweaking and daydreaming.

Generous pause functionality (you can pan and investigate) is essential to making this work.

Compelling Aesthetics

Minecraft

Conclusion: Solid creative automation. Often hard to find goals.

Interesting Goals

Distinct Paths

Low Pressure

Compelling Aesthetics

Terraria

Conclusion: Limited tools for creative automation. Very little point in doing so.

Interesting Goals

Distinct Paths

Low Pressure

Compelling Aesthetics

Atrio: The Dark Wild

Conclusion: Great aesthetics. Tools to add diversity to automation take a very long time to unlock and goals are hard to come by.

Interesting Goals

Distinct Paths

Low Pressure

Compelling Aesthetics

Shapez.io

Conclusion: Limited options for performing each step. Pretty but uninspiring aesthetics: highly abstract and so there's little to express yourself with.

Interesting Goals

Distinct Paths

Low Pressure

Compelling Aesthetics

Mindustry

Conclusion: Creativity is driven by combat and variation in map design. A bit forced, but still good!

Interesting Goals

Distinct Paths

Low Pressure

Compelling Aesthetic

Player Actions

Emergence uses an indirect, "god style" interaction paradigm common to colony sims. You do not have a player avatar, nor can you directly order units to move as in Real Time Strategy games.

Players have several actions at their disposal. Generally, they must first use their selection tools to select an organism, tile, building or group thereof.

Then, they can use a handful of tools to alter the game world directly:

• zoning, which control which structures should be in which location
• terraforming, which controls the height of each tile and the soil composition of each voxel
• recipe selection, which changes what buildings are producing
• signal configuration, which modifies the signal production and preferences of a strain

Players also have some options that are simply used to control the information being displayed:

• selection details
• camera control
• map
  • notes
• overlays
• recipe lookup
• simulation sandbox
• encyclopedia

Finally, the player can engage in research to enhance or unlock new options.

Selection Tools

Zoning

Once the player has a set of tiles selected, they may zone those tiles, changing what buildings (if any) should be there.

On its face, this mechanic is very similar to standard construction mechanics in RTS or base building games. The player selects what they want where, and eventually this happens due to the actions of the workers.

However there are three key distinctions:

1. Living structures (plants and mushrooms) can spread on their own accord. After all, they're alive!
2. Zoning can be used to declare that a tile should be kept clear.
3. Zoning persists after a building has been created, and units will attempt to rebuild it if destroyed.

Signals and priorities

Zoned areas will emit producer or consumer signals if the contents of their tile is incompatible with their target. Like all signals, this will build up over time (and eventually) saturate, causing local units to eventually get to the task.

Like in colony sim games, players can set a priority for each tile's zoning. However, this is not a global priority! There is no guarantee that all tasks with higher priority will be completed before lower priority tasks begin. Instead, the zoning priority increase or decrease the signal strength of the zoning.

Terraforming

Research

Research is the primary mechanism of progression in the factory builder genre. Raw resources are transformed and then consumed to unlock new options and receive permanent boosts to effectiveness.

Research serves many goals:

1. Provide a meaningful, nearly limitless sink for raw resources.
   1. Most other resource sinks ultimately improve the rate of resource extraction and refinement!
2. Gate complexity, by slowly unfolding options throughout the game.
   1. This feels more meaningful and is less patronizing as players can choose the order, and control the rate of unlocks.
3. Provides a sense of progression and rewards players for their successes.
4. Provide players with an outlet for mechanical creativity, by allowing players to choose how their playthrough unfolds.
   1. In most games, this effect is quite limited, as you are steadily unlocking a fixed tree with limited actual freedom.
5. Showcases late-game mechanics to let players plan and get them excited about how cool it's going to be.

In Emergence, there are three distinct forms of research: domestication (capturing new species), guided evolution (refining and branching existing species) and technology (unlocking new recipes and buildings, and increasing information). These are primarily split for thematic cohesion, but that choice also serves to increase system richness and add more interesting and distinct end goals.

Domestication

When the player domesticates a species, they domesticate it, learning how to care for and reproduce it, and bringing it into the broader multi-species hive.

Domestication serves several gameplay purposes:

1. Gate wildly different technology in a visually distinctive way.
2. Tutorialize the process of caring for a new species.
3. Give players a reason to care about and get excited by the flora and fauna they see around them.
4. Encourage players to explore new areas.

In order to domesticate a species you must:

1. Optionally, study the species in the wild for a time.
   1. When a scout observes key life cycle events, the corresponding section of their encyclopedia entry is unlocked.
   2. These are also unlocked when the event happens inside a research reserve.
2. Capture a number of specimens of a species.
   1. These must be placed inside a research reserve. Research reserves are closed areas that:
      1. Have at least one research outpost building.
      2. Have no other crafting buildings in them.
      3. Are fully isolated, except via gates.
3. Keep that population alive until a threshold of biotic mastery is reached.
   1. Progress advances each time a new individual is born there while the research outpost is staffed.
   2. Progress also advances steadily for each individual kept alive in the research reserve.

Once you have domesticated a new species, you unlock control over guided evolution for that species, and can build reproductive structures for that species. Non-wild strains of this species will be cooperative, following signals or performing other actions to assist the colony.

Implied Constraints

• players should be able to tame almost anything they meet
• players must be able to clearly differentiate between tamed and wild organisms of the same type
• species must be mechanically and visually distinct
  • you cannot have 3 species of dragonflies!
  • this is because players must be able to clearly tell when an encountered species is new to them
• there must be a moderate number of species in the game
  • with too few species, players will get bored
  • with too many species, finding and understanding each species will explode complexity and development costs
• exploration becomes an important game mechanic
  • map cannot start fully visible
  • different species must live in different regions
• each species must have an interesting life cycle that players must learn about and master
  • survival, feeding and reproduction are the obvious choices
  • unique / interesting / challenging behavior is also a good option
• progression must be robust: there must be many paths to the same resources and comparable tools
  • each pathway should feel meaningfully distinct: this plays well with unique life cycles
  • Against the Storm and Oxygen Not Included do a fantastic job of this

Guided evolution

Guided evolution allows the player to modify species that are part of their hive. In this menu, players can:

1. Unlock mutations for a species.
   1. These can add new options for the species.
   2. These can also dramatically improve the species in some axis to open up a new role for it.
2. Create a new strain of a species.
   1. Strains are part of the same species, and share an unlocked upgrade pool.
   2. Each strain can select a different set of mutations.
3. Assign mutations to a specific strain.
   1. Choices are not locked in, but changing them comes with a cost.
4. Configure other strain-level settings, such as signal responses.

The mechanics for assigning mutations are fairly simple:

1. There are some number of slots for each species, typically corresponding to some visible part of their body.
2. Each strain may select up to 1 mutation for each slot.

Unlocking mutations costs biotic mastery for that species, as outlined in domestication. Creating new strains and changing strain-level settings (other than to select the first mutation for each slot) comes with some cost to avoid thoughtless twiddling. The total numbers of strains of each species is limited by your unlocked technology.

Controlling which strain is produced

Each species has its own way to select which strain of an organism is born. For sessile organisms, this is selected at construction time, and any natural reproduction will produce organisms of the same strain. For egg-based units, this is selected at the hatchery, and naturally hatched eggs will produce a random strain.

Unlocking mutations

Mutations are unlocked by spending biotic mastery (see domestication), in a free choice fashion. Biotic mastery can be banked, up to a generous cap.

Not all mutations can be chosen initially: these are broken down into tiers to gate complexity. Higher tiers can be unlocked with technology.

Designing strains

Each species has a small number of mutation slots (3-5), corresponding to a different part of its body. You can have up to one active mutation in each of these slots.

Mutation design

Mutations are ultimately about specialization, not improvement. Each mutation should come with a tradeoff: no mutation should be strictly positive, although all should be power-positive over the base form. Generally, these should be designed to either solve a problem encountered when trying to use the organism in your factory, or present an oppportunity at the cost of a new problem. Particularly important problems should be solvable through mutations in different slots to avoid lock-in.

At higher tiers, variations on existing mutations may be found that offer weaker or stronger tradeoffs, or come with an entirely new drawback.

Realism

This, unsurprisingly, is a wildly "unrealistic" model of genetics and crop / livestock breeding. It is, however plausible, as it feels like genetics and synergizes with the game's aesthetics.

Very briefly, there are some key facts about real genetics, and why they make bad game mechanics:

• genetics involves random mutation
  • yes, and output randomness is generally frustrating
• most mutations have no effect
  • wow, so exciting
• strains aren't genetically homogenous
  • this is extremely hard to convey to players
  • this is very frustrating at a scale of hundreds to thousands of organisms
  • this is likely to have a significant performance cost
• not all functional mutations are visible
  • yes, but players need to be able to tell what's going on
• cross-breeding is complicated and involves carefully selecting lines and genetic analysis
  • yes, and that's not what this game is about
• traits typically show complex genetic patterns of dominance and recession and polygenetic origins
  • yes, and that's not what this game is about
• eusocial insects have really complicated chromosomes!
  • yes, I know: if it adds gameplay value we can make a nod to that
• eugenics is Very Bad
  • yes!
  • plant and animal breeding is generally accepted as ethical however
  • don't capture people and subjugate them to the hivemind and force them to breed, okay?
    • unless they're into that

Again, this game is inspired by biology, not a model of it.

Implied Constraints

• each upgrade must be visually distinguishable
  • this follows from the key design constraints
  • this may wait until a larger art budget is acquired
• strains must be visually distinguishable
• this should be done via player-driven color selection
• all combinations of mutations across different slots should be compatible
• incompatible mutations must belong to the same slot
• mutations should typically represent an increase in power over their base version
• unlocking new mutations should be exciting and worth the resource investment
• every upgrade slot should have at least one "generally good" upgrade
• mutations within the same slot should have clear tradeoffs between them
  • double-edged upgrades are particularly good for this

Technology

Technology represents acquired knowledge of the colony. It can be used to unlock 3 categories of upgrades:

1. New buildings.
2. New recipes.
3. Player tools.

Improving technology is fairly straightforward:

1. Select a technology choice whose prerequiste technologies have already been researched.
2. Produce tech points of the appropriate varieties until the technology is paid for.

Acquiring technology points

Emergence leans directly on genre conventions for technology research. There are several varieties of technology points. These are produced via a research recipe, which is crafted at a specific research building using research ingredients. When the recipe is complete, tech points of the correct variety will be supplied. These recipes cannot be crafted if there is no use for the tech points.

We diverge from base Factorio in several ways however:

• each variety of science requires a unique research building
• research recipes can have other crafting requirements, such as requiring workers, only being able to be performed in the dark, or needing cold temperatures
• research buildings are sometime reused to craft other recipes

Building and recipes

These make up the majority of the technology upgrades. Each of these upgrades either:

• unlocks a useful end product or structure, and any new recipe needed to create it
• provide an alternative way to create an already useful good

Critically, new recipes are never unlocked without a use. This avoids "dead" upgrades, and encourages players to immediately play with the research they unlocked.

Player tools

Several categories of upgrade belong here:

• basic upgrades
  • alerts
  • undo/redo
  • pipette
  • clipboard
  • basic encyclopedia
  • terraforming
  • map
• informational upgrades
  • local, regional and global production statistics
  • recipe lookups
  • organism statistics
  • soil and water statistics
  • signal overlays
  • geographical status overlays
  • unit goals and actions
  • expanded encyclopedia entries
• simulation sandbox upgrades
  • this is a special creative mode, used to test designs quickly and at no cost
  • time is paused while in this mode
  • further upgrades unlock the ability to further modify environmental conditions, speed up time, get more space and so on
  • production planner capabilities belong in this tree
• quality-of-life upgrades
  • blueprints
  • customizable alerts
  • map notes
• complexity upgrades
  • domestication
  • guided evolution research
  • maximum number of strains of each species
  • tame and perform guided-evolution research on multiple species at once
  • complex game mechanics unlocked via guided-evolution research
  • research queues

Types of Technology

Technology is split into several variants in order to provide more diverse resource sinks and gate technology behind mastery of prerequisite systems. Each variety presents a puzzle that teaches a lesson about an area of the game through the ingredients required and the crafting requirements of the research recipe.

Some technologies may require multiple distinct varieties of research, and may depend on research from other trees.

Food Research

Uses: unlock new meals, and more efficient ways to store and process food.

Ingredients: mushrooms and fruit

Recipe building: kitchen

Crafting conditions: 1 worker

Lessons: generate a surplus production of food.

Agricultural Research

Uses: unlock domestication and guided evolution, improve agricultural production

Ingredients: compost, seeds and water

Recipe building: research station

Crafting conditions: bright sun, 1 worker

Lessons: learn how to create basic resources for agriculture

Construction Research

Uses: unlock new buildings, building materials and terraforming

Ingredients: dirt, wood and adhesive

Recipe building: workbench

Crafting conditions: 1 worker

Lessons: sustainable production of mid-tier building ingredients

Logistic Research

Uses: unlock better ways to move goods and units around

Ingredients: daub and rope

Recipe building: manufactory

Crafting conditions: 3 workers

Lessons: assemble goods from a more complex production chain

Pure Research

Uses: unlock overlays and other informational / QoL upgrades

Ingredients: anything, but with a hard cap for each item type

Recipe building: playground

Crafting conditions: 1 worker

Lessons: try out new things!

Production chains

In a factory builder, resources are extracted, transformed and used to build more things. They are extracted as raw resources, are transformed into intermediates, and ultimately turned into useful end products.

The paths that these items can travel on is dictated by the recipes available to the player.

Analyzing production chains

When designing production chains for a factory builder (or frankly, any game with crafting), the most essential thing to consider is the recipe graph.

You can construct the recipe graph by placing the items in the game as nodes of the graph, and then drawing an edge from each of the inputs in a recipe to its outputs. We can also color this recipe graph into three parts that roughly correspond to raw resources, intermediates and end products. Raw resources have no parents, end products have no children*, and intermediates have both.

As an aside, these are actually directed hypergraphs. Hypergraphs may sound scary, but they're pretty simple: they're simply graphs that connect nodes to each other via edges, but the edges map between groups of nodes rather than individual nodes. "Directed" simply means that the edges have a direction to them: you can't turn electricity back into coal!

Unsurprisingly, this gets quite intimidating for most games! Instead, it's more useful to:

1. Consider smaller parts of the graph at a time.
2. Reason abstractly about the properties of these graphs, and their effect on gameplay.

Let's go through some of the relevant properties of production graphs!

Number of nodes (vertex count)

This is a simple measure of the complexity of the game's crafting system. If there are more items to find and make, there's more game to both learn and play.

Increasing this value increases playtime and diversity at the cost of complexity and development costs.

Number of connected components

Imagine the recipes as physically connecting various parts of your graph, and then try to pull it apart. How many parts can you split it into without breaking any of the edges?

The number of connected components is very high relative to the number of nodes in most farming games, survival crafters and other simple crafting systems. This means that you don't need to reason too hard about what else you could use your resources for, but limits the cohesion of the game's various systems and resource trees.

Distance between nodes

This describes how many steps it takes to get from a desired set of raw resources to an end product. When considered globally, this is the graph diameter.

This is often very low in simple crafting games, capping out at one or two. Colony sims generally have chains of length one to three, and even most factory builders end up with a chain length of one to four.

Increasing this has a massive complexity cost, but adds a lot of depth. Increasing this well (from a game-design perspective) requires some combination of:

• simpler, less effective early recipes to slowly teach the player
  • this is the strategy taken by the AngelBob's mod pack for Factorio: iron plates can be produced in many different ways, and only slowly becomes more complex
• good uses for intermediate steps in the chain, either as end products, or via heavy branching
  • this is also used in AngelBob's: sulfur is complex to make but exceedingly useful
• exceptionally good tooling that displays the entire production tree needed for each recipe
• exceptional patient and/or masochistic players
  • this is the strategy taken by Pyanodon's mod pack for Factorio

Number of incoming edges

How many different ways can I make this item? In simple crafting games, this is almost always one, or a class of equivalent goods (different types of metal are common) can be substituted.

Even in factory builders, this can often be quite small: one is common for base gameplay, and even modded rarely has more than three or four options.

When this is 1 everywhere, the recipe graph is a tree.

Number of outgoing edges

What can I do with this item? The higher this is, the more options there are for your ingredient.

Items that only have one outgoing edge should always be transformed into their output when possible: there's no alternative use for them.

Cycles

Does the recipe graph loop back onto itself? This might represent either a reversible transformation (like water into steam), or a more complex cycling production chain.

Cycles are both interesting and risky: if after one complete cycle you have more of any resource it can be used to amplify that resource. Note that this is not necessarily a problem! Recipes take time to craft, and other resources (including power) or time may be depeleted.

But if amplifying cycles are poorly designed, they can become imbalanced, and distort the rest of the economy of the game.

Ratio of raw resources to intermediates to end products

In simple crafting games, raw resources and end products are abundant, and intermediates are rare. But in logistics-heavy factory builders (like modded Factorio), intermediates dominate, as they present interesting puzzles.

The absolute number of raw resources cannot become too high in most cases, otherwise it becomes difficult to find the appropriate resources (although a high number of input nodes helps this problem dramatically).

Similarly, increasing the number of end products is quite hard! End products have the highest complexity budget

Graph constrictions

In more heavily connected recipe graphs, areas where the graph narrows become particularly important. All possible paths between the two regions must travel through the connected area.

This can be helpful to manage complexity, but can lead to predictable gameplay and increases the importance of narrow graph regions.

Constrictions can be quantified by examining the vertex connectivity and edge connectivity of neighborhoods.

Production chains in Emergence

In Emergence, we're looking for production chains that are:

• interesting
• robust
• moderately complex

We have a lot of complexity elsewhere, as players must respond to changing conditions. As a result, simply adding more and more items, and increasing the depth of the production chains is unlikely to be the right choice.

Instead, we want the following key properties:

• many cycles: everything should be able to be broken back down, either physically or via decomposition
• heavy substitutability: powered by graph constrictions to key intermediates
  • raw resources can ultimately be traded off for each other, because you can make the critical intermediates in many different ways
  • similarly, not all recipes must be unlocked
  • example intermediates: fiber, mud, salt
  • intermediates branch back out to produce end products and advanced intermediates
• conservation laws conserve elemental composition: excess elements become waste products
  • nutrient waste fertilizes soil under the building
    • this can be automatically recaptured and distributed via mycorrhizae
  • water waste drains into the soil under the building
  • inorganic waste must be removed
• add complexity through additional restrictions on items rather than long production chains
  • storage challenges
  • transport costs and restrictions
  • spatially constrained production

Recipes

Recipes operate in batches, and define:

• how many inputs are required
• how many outputs are to produced
• how long each batch takes to complete
• which assemblers can be used to produce it

Raw Resources

These are the simple, fundamental materials that intermediate and end products are made of. Raw resources cannot be derived from another raw resources: they are "elemental" in that way. The total amount of each raw resource (other than water and energy) is conserved at each resource processing step.

Different areas of the map will have different quantities of each resource to begin with.

Core

Resources that should be added in an MVP demo.

Light

Acquisition: It comes from the sun.

Uses: Used by plants to capture energy, and provide calories to entire colony.

Handling properties: Cannot be tranported. Blocked by shade.

Storage properties: Cannot be stored.

Path to renewability: The sun really does just keep burning.

Downsides of excess: Heat, sun scorch of plants.

Water

Acquisition: Gather from lakes, rivers, soil and rain.

Uses: Essential for sustenance of all life. One of the primary transport mechanics of goods.

Handling properties: Sinks into soil. Flows downstream. Cannot be carried directly, as it is a fluid.

Storage properties: Evaporates over time.

Path to renewability: Rainfall, incoming streams.

Downsides of excess: Washes away goods. Drowns structures over time.

Dirt

Planned to split into sand/silt/clay/organic matter after the MVP.

Acquisition: Dig up the ground.

Uses: Build simple structures. Grow plants and fungi.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Filter particles out of streams from outside of map.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Stone

May split into igneous/sedimentary/metamorphic rock if enough distinct uses arise.

Acquisition: Dig up the ground.

Uses: Build more durable structures.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Mines.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Nutrients

Planned to split into at least nitrogen and phosphorus after the MVP.

Acquisition: Found in soil. Can be recycled.

Uses: Essential for growing organisms.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: If left on ground, will be absorbed by soil.

Path to renewability: Recycling.

Downsides of excess: Nutrient toxicity stunts plant growth.

Planned

Nutrients - Nitrogen

Acquisition: Found in soil, nitrogen fixing organisms.

Uses: Essential for vegetative growth.

Handling properties: Solid, but water soluble.

Storage properties: Water will wash away. Fire / explosion risk?

Path to renewability: Nitrogen fixation.

Downsides of excess: Nutrient toxicity stunts plant growth.

Nutrients - Phosphorus

Acquisition: Found in soil.

Uses: Essential for fruiting and more advanced growth options.

Handling properties: Solid.

Storage properties: Solid.

Path to renewability: Mining.

Downsides of excess: Nutrient toxicity stunts plant growth.

Dirt - Sand

Acquisition: Dig up the ground.

Uses: Dirt with high drainage, poor water retention.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Filter particles out of streams from outside of map.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Dirt - Silt

Acquisition: Dig up the ground.

Uses: Dirt with moderate drainage, moderate water retention.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Filter particles out of streams from outside of map.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Dirt - Clay

Acquisition: Dig up the ground.

Uses: Dirt with poor drainage, high water retention.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Filter particles out of streams from outside of map.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Dirt - Organic Matter

Acquisition: Decompose plants.

Uses: Dirt with high drainage, good water retention.

Handling properties: Solid object.

Storage properties: Solid object.

Path to renewability: Grow more plants.

Downsides of excess: Piles up cluttering movement.

Speculative

Nutrients - Potassium

Acquisition: Found in soil.

Uses: Used heavily for transport and signalling structures.

Handling properties: Solid, but water soluble.

Storage properties: Water will wash away.

Path to renewability: Mining.

Downsides of excess: Nutrient toxicity stunts plant growth.

Iron

Lime

Sulfur

Stone - Sedimentary

Stone - Igneous

Stone - Metamorphic

Intermediates

Intermediates are items that cannot be extracted directly from the environment, but have no direct mechanical use.

End products

End products are items that are useful in their own right.

Example Production Chain: Leafcutter Ant Cultivation

This document details a very simple production chain inspired by leafcutter ants.

See the chapter on organisms for general discussion of how organisms grow, reproduce and die. See the chapter on logistics for general discussion about collecting and transporting items.

Step Zero: Acacia Grows

Acacia plants grow, producing acacia leaves.

Recipe: sunlight + water + soil nitrogen -> acacia leaf

Plants automatically produce this recipe. Produced items are placed in their output. When the plant's output is full, it advances to the next growth stage.

Plants in higher growth stages produce leaves more quickly, and have a higher output cap.

Step One: Gathering Leaves

Ants gather acacia leaves from wild or cultivated acacia plants.

Gathering takes items from the plant's inventory. The amount of time taken to collect items can be modified by the storage container, the item type, and the worker.

Each ant can only carry a fixed number of items at a time.

Step Two: Feeding Fungi

Ants take the acacia leaves, and transport them to the leuco (see this note) mushrooms.

Step Three: Soil Amendment

Acacia leaves are added to the inventory of the soil tile under the leuco mushrooms.

Step Four: Decomposition

Items stored in the soil will decompose over time, but leuco mushrooms will cause stored items nearby to decompose faster.

Step Five: Fungal Growth

Like all sessile organisms, leuco mushrooms will gather resources.

Recipe: soil organic matter -> mushroom chunk

Step Six: Harvesting Fungi

Excess mushroom chunk are harvested by ants, taking it out of their output inventory.

Step Seven: Consuming Fungi

Stored or carried mushroom chunks are consumed by ants when they are hungry.

Organisms

Organisms are living things. In Emergence there are several kinds:

• plants
• animals
• fungi

Every species of organism has a life cycle, which determines how it reproduces, grows, changes and dies over time and with the environment. These is broken into discrete life stages connected by life paths, in order to improve clarity and manage complexity for players. The life cycle describes these stages, their properties, and the paths between them.

Organisms can be divided into units which move, and sessile organisms which do not.

Life Cycles

As organisms grows and responds to its environment, it will change between life forms. A blade of grass may (in gameplay terms) begin as a seed, become a sprout, and then finally become an adult plant, which is capable of producing more seeds. A dragonfly may begin as an egg, hatch into a larvae, become a nymph and finally become an adult before laying more eggs. A tulip may begin as a bulb, become a sprout, flower, produce other seeds, and then return to its bulb form over winter.

As you can see by these examples, life cycles are a versatile tool for communicating important changes to players and can be quite elaborate, with multiple paths from a given state.

Life cycle graphs

We can represent these changes via a state machine graph, where each node is a life form, and each edge is a life path. Each path between forms is triggered by certain conditions: enough time, enough consumed food, cold temperatures, long light exposures, flowers were pollinated or so on.

Sessile organisms: plants and fungi

Sessile means "does not move". In Emergence, these organisms may be plants or fungi, and take the role of buildings or machines in other factory builders.

Growth

Sessile organisms are modelled as automatically producing assemblers, gathering resources from their local environment to load the inputs to their recipes.

As they complete recipes, they will both produce outputs and typically progress towards the next stage in their life cycle. These are distinct pools to avoid frustrating complexities around overharvesting of outputs: simply harvesting all of the available outputs will not harm the organism.

Typically, once a product has been created enough times, the organism will advance to a larger life stage, producing more outputs over time. This creates an incentive for the players to keep organisms alive for longer time periods, and creates a satisfying feeling of actually growing plants and fungi.

Upkeep

Simultaneously, sessile organisms will be able to enter a wilting state, caused by failures in nutrients, water or light. If they go too long without completing a recipe they will wilt. If they go too long in the wilting state, they will die.

If the output inventory is full, sessile organisms will still craft items, but some fraction of the resources spent will be immediately returned to the soil. This is subtly distinct from crafting without consuming resources: this mechanism can only occur if there are adequate resources available at all. As a result, organisms with a full inventory will still have to be in suitable environments: they don't enter a strange stasis.

When wilting, production rates are reduced until a certain number of recipes have been completed, punishing players for entering this state, and representing the investment needed to repair the damage dealt.

Harvesting

Once an output has been produced, worker units can perform work at this structure, gathering the outputs one at a time. Gathered outputs become held, and can then be transported to their destination.

Fertilizing

To add nutrients to a plant or mushroom, units typically amend the soil, rather than providing the nutrients directly to the sessile organism. This requires work, and will convert discrete items into their raw forms that are stored in the soil.

Reproduction

While each sessile organism will have its own reproduction strategy, all will spread on their own. This can be done by:

• seeds or spores
• vegetative spreading

Units

In Emergence, units are organisms that move, plan and act.

Like all organisms, they require resources to survive. However, unlike sessile organisms, they do not shrink when starved of resources. Instead, they simply die.

Work

Units can perform work when prompted, crafting to transform ingredients, amending soil, gathering resources from plants or so on.

The amount of work required for each recipe is measured in seconds, although various modifiers may make this faster or slower.

Water

Meaningful water is one of the defining elements of Emergence. It is:

• an essential factory resource
• a key aesthetic pillar
• a logistical challenge and opportunity
• defines both macro (biome) and micro-scale environmental variability.

Prior Art

While water is in a large number of games in the builder meta-genre, it rarely has a real mechanical impact (or behaves in meaningfully water-like ways!). Instead, it is used:

• for aesthetic effect (Against the Storm, Factorio)
• as a reskinned resource (Mindustry, Against the Storm, Factorio)
• as a medium for first-person transport (Raft, Stormworks)

Some games do a better job though: let's focus on a few particularly relevant examples.

Factorio

Water is a resource. It can be extracted endlessly and rapidly, and shipped huge distances. It's vital for power production (both initially and in the late game), but in base Factorio it's only used after that for oil production.

Water is also an obstacle, both for the player's factory and the biters. It serves as both a natural defense and limit to factory growth. This can be overcome by building landfill, a mid-game tech that allows players to replace water with land.

This defense vs expansion tradeoff is by far the most interesting tension in how Factorio uses water. Players want to build beside water to reduce the cost of defending a base (and have water for steam for power production), but this will shape how their factory must grow.

Ultimately this doesn't end up mattering a ton, as marginal costs to longer distance transportation of goods is quite low.

Critically though, the utter impassability of Factorio's water severely hamstrings their map design. Only lakes can exist, as river networks would completely stop the ability for players to ship goods, explore or be attacked by biters. Islands would be simply unreachable.

This means that interesting potential mechanics (choke points! river shipping! ocean liners! islands with unique resources!) are unexplored, and water ends up feeling largely cosmetic.

Sea Block

The AngelBob's mod pack for Factorio, especially in its SeaBlock form, does much more interesting things with water:

• as a thematic element: surrounded by water, you must find a way to make something from nothing
• as a source for hydrogen and oxygen
• as a source of raw resources, by purifying or evaporating water
  • mud, geodes, slag
  • purified, mineralized and salt water
• as a waste output from processes
• as a way to eliminate excess resources by transforming solid waste into a water type and then eliminating via clarifiers
• as an input for renewable plant growth (which then feeds animals or can be used directly to make key goods or power)
• as a solvent for chemicals like sulfuric acid
• to add serious costs (but not spatial constraints) to expanding the factory footprint

Timberborn

Timberborn has by far the most sophisticated water dynamics in the genre to date. Key features:

• seasonal variability: water flows most of the time, then stops for a modest drought
• steady evaporation
• controls where and when crops can be grown
• beavers must drink water to not die
• flows downstream, and dynamically responds to height changes
• can be stored, either in open pits, via dams or in dedicated storage structures
• irrigation
• some buildings and crops require shallow water
• bridges of limited length to cross water
• limits navigation and complicates logistics

However, it has several key limitations:

• serious aesthetic issues: dried terrain looks horrible
• most of the interesting tools to control water flow (digging holes, pumping water, irrigation) are limited to late game
• drought mechanics are frustrating: limited ability to respond but strong ability to predict, leaving you to slowly watch as your population dies when things go wrong
• immersion challenges: growing crops doesn't take more water, no floods, no rainfall, water from nowhere
• river-centric design with high water sources seems quite fragile: hand-authored maps only

Oxygen Not Included

In ONI, water is an essential resource. It comes in three forms: water, polluted water, and salt water and is regularly converted back and forth between them.

It is used for:

• sanitation
• crop production (optional)
• oxygen production (optional, but very effective)
• heat exchange
• luxury end products

Water can carry germs, and is routinely recycled as part of gameplay to avoid spreading germs. Water also has a temperature, and water's role as a heat exchange fluid is quite important in the early game.

Water leaks through some soil types, forming irritating puddles that must be cleaned up.

Water can also be frozen, forming various types of ice (each with their own freezing point!) or boiled, creating steam that can be used to drive engines (or accidentally kill your workers).

For better or worse, the water mechanics in ONI wildly violate conservation laws: it is possible to create water from nothing, and destroy it. To resolve this, geysers are a key feature, continually producing water. They can however be blocked to limit production.

Gameplay value of water

Water must:

• be finite but renewable
  • varies heavily by biome
  • some types of water may be scarce while others are abundant
• be an important source of external temporal variability
  • weather
  • seasons
• be an important source of external spatial variability
  • geography shaping water dynamics
  • biomes
• present meaningful barriers to exploration and logistics that can be overcome
  • units cannot cross deep or extended water
  • units move more slowly in shallow water
  • units can cross water via bridges (limited span), terraforming (expensive) or water transport (spiky, complex)
• offer meaningful opportunities for logistics and defense
  • goods can be carried on the water
    • goods should naturally float downriver (implying a water velocity)
    • goods should also be able to be ferried up river or across relatively still bodies of water at higher cost
  • moats! flood traps! navies!
• be able to be meaningfully observed and understood by the player
  • weather and season cues
  • selection details
  • overlays
  • surface water visualization
• be able to be meaningfully manipulated by the player, especially in the mid and late game
  • terraforming allows players to durably shape the landscape, at fairly high time investment
  • as water flows downhill, players must be able to raise water to higher levels reliably
• can be stored
  • surface-area based evaporation mechanics mean that deep holes are effective natural storage
  • lower loss storage should be possible, but expensive
• can be transported
  • canals work great for both irrigation and transport
  • more flexible (upstream, dynamic) mechanisms should be possible but expensive
• reach a stable equilibrium, even as water is added or removed from the system
  • surface-area based evaporation mechanics do an excellent job stabilizing this
  • draining to the ocean / filling up from the ocean also stabilizes this effectively

Water should:

• play other meaningful roles in factory production chains
  • solution and evaporation of solids
  • to create mud
  • cooking
  • washing and purification
  • fertilized water distributed via irrigation
  • circular processing is a key element
• be a useful trigger for conditional effects that players can use to respond to changes
  • seeds that only germinate in water / plants that only become non-dormant when wet
  • goods that begin to float and move when submerged
  • specialized storage that allows stored goods to float when submerged
• be fairly expensive to transport from place to place (to preserve spatial variability)
  • canals are the main exception to this - they require significant investment though
• be somewhat expensive to store for long periods of time (to preserve temporal variability)
• flow downriver even over shallow gradients
  • this creates much more natural river designs
  • implies continuous water height
• flow relatively quickly
• be required by plants to grow
  • roots are the primary mechanism of gathering water
  • not all plants require the same type of water
  • manually watering also works though
• flow through canals and other player-made paths

Water should not:

• create extreme levels of disruption
  • no extreme floods (without very strong tools to mitigate it)
  • stored goods are never washed away
• create disruption that requires constant manual work to respond to

Aesthetic and versimilitude constraints

Water must:

• create lakes
• create rivers
• create marshes
• move laterally, flowing downhill
• have plausible sources
  • recipes that create more water than they consume should be treated with extreme caution
  • sinks are much less concerning: evaporation is widespread, and water is often incorporated into products
• fill up during the rain
• dry out over time (faster from wider pools)
• be able to support crops on rainfall alone
  • follows from the fact that plants need water
  • WARNING: this does not work reliably with the current set of water mechanics: plants growing on hills generally die
• cause loose goods to float

Water should:

• create waterfalls
  • WARNING: this needs serious design, as it is not at all supported currently
• interact naturally with oceans
• create tidepools
• support tides
• leak out of imperfect holding vessels
• vary by biome
  • in Terraria, weather is dictated by the biome
  • in Minecraft, climate dictates which biomes go where
• meaningfully interact with soil type in plausible ways
• come in different flavors: salt water, muddy water etc.
  • WARNING: this needs serious design consideration, fluid mixing is hard
• carry dissolved / suspended solids
  • WARNING: this needs more design
• cause organisms to drown
  • organisms should only drown when they are overtopped completely
• push light organisms with the current

Water should not:

• have waves
  • this level of simulation is too fine-scale, and will create pointless disruption with poor tools to manage it
• behave erratically (flickering, oscillations, teleporting etc.)
  • visually distracting
  • severly detracts from aesthetics
  • likely to cause weird exploits

Base water mechanics

Emergence uses an unconventional (for a video game) approach to modelling water: ground water dynamics. This allows for intuitive emergent behavior, good hooks (especially for plant growth!) and a ton of creative power relative to the simplicity of the design.

Water is stored on a per-tile basis. Water first fills all available pore space in the soil as surface water. Above that level, it overflows as surface water. The characteristics of soil and surface water differ dramatically, creating a meaningful (and intuitive) nonlinearity in behavior. Water characteristics also vary by soil type, allowing for meaningful emergent distinctions between different soil types (and thus biomes).

Water has momentum: the velocity of the water at a tile is determined in part by how fast it was moving before it moved into the tile it was added to. This enables us to make straight rivers faster, and makes critical overflow and top-up mechanics more reliable.

Lateral water movement

Water flows from high to low. The rate at which this flow occurs is proportional to the difference in height of the water column.

The overall effect creates a flow velocity, which can be used to transport floating goods, push units and more.

Creating water

Precipitation

Precipitation is similarly simple: on each tile, add water based on the current weather. This operates to refill water reserves that are far from rivers and oceans.

Emitters

Emitters are point sources of water, constantly pouring forth from the ground.

Emitters can be produced by players, but these are dramatically weaker (and come at a high cost) relative to built-in emitters.

Tidal inflow

Water can flow into the world via tides.

This produces huge amounts of water across the entire coast, but the water is only salt water.

Destroying water

Crafting

Water can be used by plants to perform photosynthesis. This is the primary use and sink of water. Water used in this way is drawn in by roots, which have both an area (typically a radius) and a depth.

Water can also be stored in item form using reusable containers, and carried back and forth. Water used for crafting must be supplied in this form. When these containers are emptied, they add water to the tile that they are on.

Evaporation

Evaporation is simple: water is removed from each tile. This varies with:

• the presence or absence of surface water
• the soil type (if no surface water is present)
• the light level on each tile (which in turn varies with local conditions, time of day and weather)

Because surface water evaporates at a much faster rate than soil water, this leads to a substantially stable equilibrium with rivers and islands. As the amount of water increases locally, the rate of evaporation also increases automatically, creating a local balance.

Drain to ocean

When water flows into the ocean (because the water level is lower there than anywhere else), it is simply destroyed: oceans are very big!

This acts as an ultimate water sink, and avoids flooding the map, even with very powerful rivers.

Storing water

Holes

Water can be deliberately stored in holes in the ground. This is cheap and relatively effective (especially deep, shaded holes) but can be challenging to extract again and make use of.

In containers

Water can be captured by more expensive, disposable sealed containers, which can then be stored in standard item storage. This is lossless, but not very dense and quite expensive.

This is intended purely as a buffer for crafting.

Storage tanks

Storage tanks can store large volumes of water without water loss.

They can be moved, but are super heavy (requiring multiple crabs to move). Unsurprisingly, they're lighter when empty.

Moving water

In pots

Basket crabs can choose to wear a heavier earthen pot, rather than a basket. These are water-tight and can carry fluids.

When a basket crab wearing a pot travels under water, its pot automatically fills.

In containers

With the help of an organic, consumable sealed containers, water can be transformed into a solid item. These can be used directly in crafting recipes, but can also be broken, releasing water into the ground.

In storage tanks

Storage tanks can be shipped using large, dedicated workers in a matter very similar to tanker trains. This is a great way to transport huge volumes of water, but is significantly challenging logistically and results in bursty transport.

Canals

Canals are the primary way to move water across the map. These flow downhill, and while they require significant and disruptive engineering effort, they are entirely passive. Some water is lost due to evaporation, but this can be substantially mitigated through shading.

Fountain reeds

Fountain reeds are the primary vertical pump: they draw in shallow water from a large region, and spit it out in a vertical fountain. By default, this has minimal effect: it creates a bit of water churn.

With upgrades though, this can be tilted to the side, allowing you to move water up terraces.

Converting water

TBD.

Floating goods down-river

Litter which is sufficiently light floats on the surface of the water, travelling in a rate (and direction) proportional to the flow velocity. Each tile may only have one litter pile on it: litter that exceeds the stack size of the item (or is of a different type) piles up.

This effect is slightly randomized to reduce log jams and create a more visually appealing effect.

Adding floating goods to rivers

Litter on the ground will automatically start floating once the tile floods.

While this can happen accidentally, the primary mechanism for adding goods to rivers is via chutes. Chutes have an item filter, which control which item they are requesting. Once items are added to the chutes, they are dropped at their output tile as litter.

Water striders can be loaded directly by adjacent workers.

Removing floating goods from rivers

Nets collect any floating litter that attempts to move into their tile. However, they let water pass through unhindered. They have storage inventories, and can become full.

Units can also reach floating goods as long as they are in adjacent tile. This is an effective distribution mechanism for last-mile transport.

Filtering and sorting floating goods

Streams of goods that contain only a single kind of good are generally much easier to work with. Mixed streams may be created either by accident (through random junk accumulating in your river), or deliberately, when we need to move multiple types of goods through a single waterway.

There are four fundamental operations a player may want to perform. Let's go over how they might accomplish each:

• allow list: remove all floating goods except those that match the provided filter
  • WARNING: no good mechanism exists yet
• block list: remove only floating goods that match the provided filter
  • use a narrow stream, and create a demand for the good on the shores. Workers wait beside the shore, grabbing goods
    • very simple, no tech needed
    • fails if there are not enough workers (or demand is stopped)
    • only works with narrow streams
  • use swimming workers, and create a demand for the goods
    • requires workers that can swim or wade succesfully
    • fails if there are not enough workers (or demand is stopped)
• purge: remove all floating goods
  • add a net, which is routinely cleaned
    • can be challenging to build nets across wide rivers
    • nets will block water striders
    • can back up if net is not emptied fast enough
  • WARNING: no mechanism exists that works with water striders yet
• filtered split: split the stream, filtering goods to the left and right
  • create a net, then split the river beyond the net with a chute for each
    • no added tech needed
    • very labor intensive
    • scales to multiple rivers
    • scales to wider rivers
  • WARNING: this mechanism is extremely labor intensive

Merging, dividing and balancing floating goods

Merging streams is straightforward: simply join the streams. There are complications involved, since this will cause their height to drop to the lowest height. During implementation, we need to be careful to deliberate about when one stream of good never dominates over the other.

Dividing streams is similarly easy: simply fork the streams.

Balancing goods between two streams seems quite challenging. Players could use an overflow mechanism that gets extracted, and then a chute leading to the other stream. Repeat, and we have basic, although quite costly, balancing.

Fortunately this shouldn't be nearly as necessary as in Factorio. To increase throughput, simply make a wider, faster flowing river!

Top-up and overflow mechanisms

Overflow mechanisms allow players to divert excess goods to a lower priority use. If water has velocity, we should be able to get this working by creating side channels. By splitting it off of the main path, goods will only attempt to drift there when the main path is backed up.

Top-up mechanisms allow players to add goods, but only when needed. Similarly, we should be able to use incoming side channels, much like how side loading works in Factorio. If the main river is backed up, goods should only be added from the side channel when there is space for them.

Increasing throughput

Increasing the throughput of a river can be done in several ways:

1. Increase its width
   1. Very simple to do (and discover)
   2. Tends to lead to logistical complications in construction, efficient loading, and efficient unloading
2. Increase its speed by changing the height differential
   1. Requires extensive renovation along the entire length
   2. Relies on good mechanisms to raise water higher
3. Increase its speed by straightening it out
   1. Can be performed locally
   2. Can only be done up to a point
   3. May requiring refactoring your factory around it
4. Store goods more effectively
   1. Containers can be used rather than raw goods, which will store more total items per tile
5. Create multiple parallel rivers using splitting and merging
   1. Works well when you need narrow rivers for whatever reason
   2. Less space efficient (but you can grow things in the middle)

Logistics

Configuring Signal Properties