Automation games take the best parts of idle games and strategy games and mash them together into something that dilates time and somehow makes five hours feel like one. It can be incredibly hard to pull yourself away from an automation game, as you’re always just a few minutes away from some great new upgrade or development on your factory.
Of course, factory games just aren’t complete without conveyor belts. In fact, one of the most appealing aspects of these games (at least to us) is being able to watch all your little resources slowly make their way to their destination. If you’re like us, though, your carefully planned factory very quickly devolves into a mess of conveyor belt spaghetti. These games perfectly exemplify this phenomenon.
While Oxygen Not Included is more colony management than a factory building, automation is still the name of the game. You are tasked with ensuring the survival of space colonists by creating and maintaining sources of basic necessities like food, water, and oxygen.
Oxygen Not Included’s factories may not be as intense as the sprawling megacities found in games like Factorio, but they more than make up for this in terms of complexity elsewhere. There are about a million layers of complexity to manage to keep your colonists alive, and creating temporary solutions to long-term problems will be your bread and butter for your first few hundred hours as you learn the ropes of everything the game has to offer.
Timberborn is what happens when you let beavers be city planners. Set in a world where humans are long-gone, it’s up to the beavers to rebuild society, one plank of wood at a time. Compared to some of the other automation games on this list, especially the aforementioned Oxygen Not Included, Timberborn is a much more relaxing and cozy experience.
Thanks to its simpler complexity, Timerborn isn’t prone to hectic factories where you can no longer tell where things start and where they end. It’s relatively difficult to end up with spaghetti monstrosities like a few other games on this list, but you can definitely make one if you try.
Dyson Sphere Program is a unique take on the factory/base-building genre popularized by Factorio. In this game, you build your factories over entire planets, harnessing the power of stars to gather resources and set up shipping lanes.
Dyson Sphere Program has tons of layers of complexity to chew through, leading to the inevitable dance of setting up just one machine to make one type of resource, folding it into your main belt system, forgetting that you put it there but not wanting to take it down, then building around it in the future. But when everything just works, regardless of how it looks, the satisfaction will keep you hooked for hours on end.
Mindustry is a blend between factory management and tower defense. The main game is structured like a typical tower defense campaign, with new maps and missions unlocking as you complete previous ones. This means that, a lot of the time, you’re only building your factory for a short amount of time before moving on to the next location.
Since you’re only ever expecting to be in a mission temporarily, you may care even less about carefully planning your factory, which leads to an even worse case of spaghetti conveyor belts.
Of course, you’re rewarded for planning out your machines, because your factories will continue to run even when you’re away on a different mission, but the tendency to value speed over efficiency is in full force in Mindustry.
Shapez 2 is a game about making shapes of increasing complexity. By taking a simple shape like a square and cutting it in half, you get two rectangles. Cutting those in half will give you two smaller squares, which you can then combine with other shapes like circles, triangles, and so on.
Shapez 2 gives you a massive amount of space to build your factory, and all without the constraints of a physical character that you have to control like in Factorio or Satisfactory. This means you can focus entirely on building out your factory, which may or may not lead to some big bowls of spaghetti.
Factorio is the gold standard of factory-building games, pioneering the genre into what it is today. While there are fairly comprehensive ways of dealing with spaghetti, like using blueprints to pre-plan your factory, the early game is absolutely riddled with belts crossing belts, getting interrupted by machines, running into pipes, and so on.
While planning your factory carefully can alleviate many of these issues, Factorio is also the game that has some of the most celebrated spaghetti contraptions, with some players devoting their time to intentionally creating the most convoluted belt systems you can imagine. Spaghetti management in Factorio is an art form, and factories that run efficiently despite the hodgepodge of machinery strewn about are something to strive for.
Satisfactory takes the factory building genre, which is typically presented in top-down, to a first-person perspective, allowing you to visualize and construct sprawling factories into the horizon. With all this extra space, you’re encouraged to build your factories vertically, creating towering skylines of productivity.
What this actually means is that, for the first few hours of gameplay, you’ll have conveyor belts going in literally every direction to deliver ore and refined materials to other machines. The game starts out relatively simply, and you unlock new machines rapidly, so you’re never locked into your initial factory.
You’re encouraged to get your buildings up and running quickly to start producing more materials and unlock new buildings. However, this is definitely the leading cause of spaghetti syndrome, and we’re afraid it’s incurable.
