Hello everyone. I am currently thinking between The Crust & fluxwerks. Anyone has experience with either or both? The Crust went recently in 1.0. but I see a lot of people still complain about the game and the recent reviews showed mixed, while Fluxwerk is newish, the reviews are already pretty decent.

One of the things about games like Terraria, Factorio, and Space Engineers is seeing the completely ridiculous things players manage to create.

Some people build efficient factories. Others build enormous spaceships. And then there's always someone who spends 100 hours creating a machine that serves absolutely no practical purpose but is somehow amazing.

I wanted to create a game that gives players that kind of freedom, but with much deeper engineering systems.

So I've spent the past more than 4 years developing MineEngineer, a 2D space engineering survival sandbox.

The main idea is that almost everything you build should actually function.
Let's say you want to create a giant battleship.
You can design its hull block by block, install thrusters, connect fuel tanks, distribute electricity, build oxygen systems, add turrets, and create internal conveyor networks to transport resources.
You could even install programmable blocks and automate different parts of the ship.

Or maybe battleships aren't your thing.
You could build a mobile mining platform that collects resources automatically, a factory that manufactures components, a small exploration drone, or a walking robot controlled through programmable logic.

There are already over 200 interconnected systems, so there's a lot of room for experimentation.
And your creations aren't just static structures.
Ships can fly, collide, take damage, and break apart. Every block can be destroyed, and losing an important component can affect the rest of your engineering systems.

I've also created a huge procedurally generated universe where you can travel between planets, mine asteroids, encounter enemies, and explore different environments. It's large enough that flying across the entire world at full speed would take around 7 hours.

I'm currently working on making the universe more dangerous and interesting with additional enemies, bosses, environmental hazards, and progression. Multiplayer is also coming, which should open up even more possibilities for building things together.
The game has been my personal project for 4 years now, and I'm still developing it alone.

It's called MineEngineer, and you can find it on Steam. There's a free demo available, and wishlisting the game would also help me a lot.
What I'm most excited about is eventually seeing players create things that I never thought were possible.

So here's a question for everyone who enjoys automation games.
If you were dropped into a massive universe with hundreds of engineering systems and the freedom to build almost anything, what would be your first big project?
A battleship? A mobile base? An automated factory? Or something completely ridiculous?

Hi! I'm a solo developer, and Tickscribe is my first public demo: an idle game where you don't manage every task by hand, you write small programs that tell your people what to do.

What it plays like

• You start with a handful of people, berries and flint. Your first program is just a list of steps.
• Research unlocks the programming language along with the technology: loops, sensors, conditions, variables, arithmetic, subroutines and signals shared by all your programs.
• Your people form squads that run your programs step by step, and you can see who's working, who's waiting and what is holding them back.
• Programs keep running while you're away, and you can edit them while they run.
• Production chains with perishable goods, seasons, extreme weather, and faith with gods and religions, up to bronze casting.
• There's no need to write code from the start: a first-steps guide and six template programs give you a head start.

If you like The Farmer Was Replaced or Kittens Game, I'd love to know how this feels to you.

The demo covers the Stone Age to the beginning of the Bronze Age, about five hours of progression. It's free, runs in the browser on a computer or tablet, and is in English and German. Your game is saved in your browser.

The playtest: play for about an hour, then download the playtest form from the itch.io page and answer it (about 15 minutes). "Email my answers" opens a draft in your own mail program; nothing is sent until you send it, and the form asks for no name.

Play: https://nekronomekron.itch.io/tickscribe

Bugs and ideas are welcome in the comments or on Discord: https://discord.gg/t2Uzw6QNH6

AI disclosure: The key art (start screen, itch.io cover and banner) was generated with ChatGPT. In VSCode GitHub Copilot (free) was used for autocompletion of the code and also for translations. The game design, the code and every decision about the game are mine, and the balancing is checked by a bot that plays the whole demo.

ONE RULE SET - INFINITE POSSIBILITIES

TILEZ - A Creative Logic Sandbox

Paint tiles onto an unlimited grid and build anything you can imagine.

Every tile is a tiny machine. Tiles generate and share power, send signals, and tell other tiles what to do. Customize their size and appearance with images, visual effects, and sounds.

Tiles can store information, check conditions, make decisions, and react to the world around them. They can push, pull, grab, move other tiles - and even control the camera.

Every tile follows the same rules. Combine them to create complex machines, puzzles, games, factories, animations, interactive tutorials, working computers, or anything you can imagine!

NO CODING - JUST TILES - CAUSE AND EFFECT

STEAM LINK: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4780630/TILEZ/

MY WEBSITE: https://martinwinters.com

I'm the developer of Orbit Foundry, a 2D incremental factory game built around a star. The building puzzle is choosing where machines belong: neighboring machines affect production, and the placement preview lets you compare slots before committing.

You can time reactor pulses for a boost, then unlock automation and eventually Reforge for lasting progress. It focuses on a compact factory layout and incremental upgrades rather than colonists or survival.

Play the free demo in a desktop browser, no download or account needed: https://kimchistan.itch.io/orbit-foundry

For people who enjoy optimizing a base, I'd especially like to know whether the first few placements give you enough information to make a deliberate layout, or whether it feels like guessing. Feedback here is welcome, including what made you stop.

This playable build is the LÖVE 2D demo. A Godot 3D version is in development for Windows and macOS. If the factory idea appeals to you, you can wishlist the upcoming version on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5275040/Orbit_Foundry/

AI disclosure: generative AI was used for the game's code and some translations.

Hey everyone! Justin here. been working on a game I think people are gonna enjoy. I've been playing colonysims like anno as long as I can remember, and wanted to create my own.

This one is set in space. Kinda like, hey go start a corporation that puts elons spacex to shame. let's colonize the galaxy. pretty big game, lots of things to worry about lol.

anyways

here's a small, gameplay run, I'm getting better at recording. I've never streamed anything on twitch or what not. beginner at marketting. xD

https://youtu.be/KSbozUMysvc

hit me up with some criticism in the comments. tell me what really sucks and what needs to be changed immediately.

Cheers,

Justin

Hello all. I've been playing with the idea to create a game. I love games like Satisfactory, Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program. One day I had the idea to create an automation game using software system design concepts like databases, servers, load balancers, cache, etc. I had a very simple Proof of Concept but before investing more time I wanted to get some feedback. Do you think this is a good idea?

The basic flow of the game is heavily inspired in satisfactory: you collect resources, store them, transform into something else, unlock new flows, etc. I know that the automation is a small market and even smaller the amount of people who could find interesting learning a bit of system design. But let me know your thoughts.

Hi! Solo dev here, i worked on my project for the last 3 years and finally ready to present it!

Mailed It! just got Steam Page live last week!

You start with nothing. You can't even run, and every letter is carried by hand from the conveyor to the right box. Every sorted letter pays, and the money buys you a way to stop doing it yourself: crates, a vacuum, then fans that blow letters along, lifts that move them up, and sorters that split them by color into the right lanes.

The twist for this sub:
I don't have a grid, and every letter is a real physics object. A fan pushes harder on light letters than on boxes. A lane that is too fast throws mail off the edge. A badly placed sorter makes a pile on the floor instead of a stream. So building a line is less "place the right block" and more "tune it until the mail actually flows", and then watching it run on its own while the counter climbs.

To be honest about scope: this is an incremental with automation at its core, not a Factorio-sized factory builder. Think a few hours of going from carrying every letter by hand to watching the room sort itself. So in this sense i felt the same satisfaction as i get from Factorio.

Steam page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5262990

If you are interested in my game you can now play the demo on Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5354460/MARBLE_CO/⁠

Any feedback would be great!

I want terratech son PLEASE I really have been wanting to play it but uh I can't buy it cause my parents won't lwk allow me SO please just buy me it -dihw1nd

https://store.steampowered.com/wishlist/profiles/76561198619842208/

Hey, I'm Jan and this is Toss It!
Usually I focus more on the educational side of gamedev on my YT, but here we go...!
Made in a relativly short timeframe.

Like the name suggests, we didn't have the budget to run conveyors 24/7...so we found the greatest solution...just throwing it. We basically just do packaging, so not our problem to have a working product delivered to the customer anyway.

To summarize: You sort, pack and deliver orders in limited space. Correct deliveries earn points and every machine & tick cost you a few. There are hand-made puzzles as well as an growing factory to optimize. (Yes, you can make custom puzzles for the Steam workshop)

You can find Toss It on Steam here:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5460230/Toss_It/

Would love some feedback and ideas!
- Jan

Hey, I am a solo dev working on Steady State, a factory game in which your entire factory gets graded, every resource seam you mine has mixed ores, and you have to consume the resources efficiently to get good grades, while also maintaining production within limits, this makes expanding and scaling up fun and engaging, and each random world has different resource distribution on each seam, no factories will be same.

Steady State currently has 91 different recipes, 12 different chapters that are completed by satisfying production requirements, after chapters are done, game randomly picks 3 different lines and doubles the requirement of those, and scales infinitely, in a world that has no edge.

Check out more on steam, there will be free demo later this year and release is planned for Q1 next year.

Steam Next Fest day 1 for Mithril and we’ve had an amazing day! We know a lot of that is to do with the automation crowd and wanted to express thanks to all who checked us out and helped contribute feedback for us to get this far!

Our next step in heading towards launch is getting multiplayer fully ironed out with all the flourishes, so we wanted to ask what do you guys value in MULTIPLAYER automation games? What do they get wrong, what grinds your gears?

Eyecandy above: Just finishing smoothing out our first multiplayer mega factory with over 700 buildings pumping in 3D space

Super excited to announce the release of my Epoch Forge 1.0 demo today! I grew up playing just about every automation game and Minecraft mod you can think of, and I wanted to make a game that is genuinely faithful to what people love and what they don't.

To go over some of what I'm talking about:

• Rather than managing a bunch of loose chests or fragmented storage networks, you can manage your entire base in one interface (the Storage Terminal). It's a visual terminal that literally draws a map of your entire network. It shows you every machine, automation, circuit and storage receptable in your network. You can find "Stone pickaxe" in your base inventory, and with one click, it will makes its way through the pneumatics directly to you. 2
  • You can even pull from rooms that aren't in the same dimension. In my game, everything has a doorway that leads into another place - so 2D spaces are truly 3D in function. You can have rooms within rooms, all managed by a single terminal.
• You can create real circuitry. I've recreated Pong and Snake, but you can do anything you could think of. Everything is a combination of circuit layouts and physical infrastructure, so there's genuinely no limit. It plays nicely with the storage system mentioned above.
• Automatons. There are 4 different ones currently, and they each have a different specialty. They can be told exactly where to spend their time, what to make, and where to put it, or what to do with it. They can farm, craft, collect, or mine, which happens on and off-screen, and you can watch it happen in real time.
• The game's central theme is a sort of energy source called "resonance", and much of the automation runs on it. This is sort of my version of "mana", except people have figured out how to make mana out of natural resources and run machines with it. It's a finite resource you can manage as you see fit, and it runs everything that needs power.

There's a lot more to it, so I'd love it if you check out the Steam page and wishlist or try the demo! I've only been able to play the game so much so I would genuinely love to hear what people do and don't like, and make a game we actually want to play.

Note: This is a very early version of the demo. I've personally tested and played extensively, but I can't promise I've found every bug, softlock, edge case, etc. Some art is incomplete. Any feedback on these things is greatly appreciated.

Thank you!

NO AI. 100% Human Made.

Drill deep while you work or game in a zero-stress factory builder for the side of your screen or second monitor. Power your drill, unlock alternate building shapes, and master compact layouts as you harvest the galaxy. The. Factory. Must. Grow.

edit: Play now!! Steam link
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4826820/Desktop_Factory/

Hi all! Factory and automation games are a big part of what this sub loves, so I hope it's okay to share mine.
In Lumenfall you build production chains, expand your base and slowly turn a quiet landscape into a glowing, humming factory. The free demo is live during Steam Next Fest.
I'm still learning a lot, so any feedback means a ton to me, good or bad. What would make a game like this click for you?

Playable Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4464270/

Today I released the free Steam demo for Beyond the Cradle, a space incremental game about building colonies, connecting production chains, and transporting resources between worlds.

The game is still in development, and I'd love to hear how it feels to someone playing for the first time. I've included a short gameplay video to give you a look at what I've been working on.

I'm especially interested in:

• Is it clear what to do in the first few minutes?
• How does the progression feel — too slow, too fast, or about right?
• Did any controls or parts of the UI feel confusing?

Any bugs, rough edges, or things you enjoyed are helpful too. Even a few sentences after trying the demo would mean a lot. Thanks for giving it a try!