Beyond the Cradle

Beyond the Cradle is a factory game on small round planets. You mine, smelt and assemble, and every single item travels on a belt you laid yourself. Then you build rockets and take the whole operation to the next world.

You start on Sylvara, a little green world with a river, a desert and a pine forest. It's so round that a long belt slips away over the horizon.

The river, the rocks and the trees all have opinions about your straight lines.

Ore leaves the drill, rides to the smelter, rides to the workshop, and only counts once it rolls into your base. When a line backs up, you see the pile grow.

Untangle it with splitters, mergers, tunnels, bridges and lifts. Machines take from the back and deliver from the front, so turning one changes the whole layout.

Build a spaceport on each world, pair them up and fill the hold. Your rockets wait on the pad, fly the real route between moving planets and land with exactly what you packed.

Fuel goes in its own tank. If the pad is busy, they queue in orbit.

On Cryomar the ice is so smooth that every belt runs 1.5× faster. On Slatewind the wind never stops, so solar panels work all night. Azure Shards speeds up machines that sit next to their twins. Riftsun gives you four times the sunlight and charges extra for every watt. On Cryocyan the gravity is so low that rockets leave with a fuller hold.

Each world has one building you can only build there, and the late recipes need parts from several planets.

The last project is a Dyson sphere around your star, launched piece by piece from the factories you built. When it closes, the campaign is done. The belts keep running anyway.

The free demo covers Sylvara and its ice moon, Cryomar: your first production lines, your first fuel route between two worlds and your first base upgrades. Play it during Steam Next Fest.