How many different industries does it take to make people happy when starting from scratch? Turns out the answer is “lots”, because the skills needed to gather at a professional level aren’t the same as those needed to process materials or assemble them. Sure, one person can do a lot of different things, and learn to do them well, but that still doesn’t change the number of hours available in a day. It may be nice to switch up tasks on a personal level, but from the town view there are endless jobs needing to be performed constantly, requiring endless people to do them. When everything works as planned, that makes for a happy, thriving home where everyone has all they need, even if part of that “everyone” is a cheerful volcano trying to knock a comet away from hitting the Earth.
Warm Days, Cool Nights, and the Endless Activity Of a Productive and Growing Town
Factory Town was a combination automation game and town builder, where growing the town means more workers who could grow its industry into a giant Rube Goldberg machine of ever-expanding production. For Factory Town 2: Paradise, the base idea is the same but this time you start off alone on a glorified sandbar in the ocean, with the only company being a helpful volcano. Once the volcano realizes it’s just the two of you, with only a small patch of sand to build on, it strains out an eruption to raise a proper island with trees for both wood and fruit, plus stone, wheat, and cotton, which is just enough to start a lovely long climb to building a tropical automation empire.
The basic gameplay loop is- Houses hold people, and only require logs to build. Logs and other basic resources are as simple to harvest as walking up to the appropriate tree and hitting the Harvest button as quickly as possible, then plopping down houses in an orderly (or disorderly, if you’re feeling chaotic) fashion. Living space allows people to move to the island, and that means you’ve got workers to assign to the various jobs that will be popping up. New workers don’t show up unless the island is happy, though, which requires a market stocked with the best goodies available. And that’s where things start getting a bit complicated.
Harvesting wheat is all very nice but flour is better, and that means you need a couple of different things. In this example, a harvester hut needs to be placed near a wheat field and workers assigned to it, and it makes sense to have the windmill built right nearby. Connect the two with a chute to transfer wheat from harvester hut to the mill automatically, and make sure there’s a worker or two assigned to each building, and that’s flour production taken care of. As the town grows and its needs deepen, though, flour won’t be enough, so spending the points in the research tree to open up the bakery to create a good variety of food (using, of course, an equally impressive amount of ingredients) becomes a necessity. It all opens up at an even pace, though, with town growth and the complexity of its requirements keeping pace with each other.
As the town grows, it’s always important to keep an eye on the volcano’s needs, not because it will get annoyed and flood the place in lava but rather due to the potential size of the workforce being dependent on the volcano’s level. Feed it with goodies and it levels up, with more complicated items providing better experience, and each new volcano level allows more villagers to move in. You still need to keep the current villagers’ happiness level up, because nobody is moving to a town of sadness, but seeing as more people means more things can be made using ever-escalating tech to create fancier goods, it’s a cycle that will see the initial small island turn into a cheerfully active interconnected archipelago of tropical industry.
Factory Town 2 released into Early Access today on Steam, with the current plan being to polish the large amount of existing content based on player feedback while adding more recipes, buildings, and custom map settings. It’s already a huge amount of fun, as evidenced by the gameplay overview below, and if the first Factory Town is anything to go by there’s going to be many, many hours of building up the most intricate systems you can dream of ahead. Or kludging it together, so long as it works. Efficiency is nice but it’s a tropical island paradise, so there’s no reason to get too worked up about perfection so long as your villagers are happy and everything is functional.
