STEADY STATE

Your factory gets graded.

An operations director gives you orders: so many plates, so much wire and so many circuits a minute. When you think your site can deliver them, it measures what actually arrives into launch platforms. Measuring and certification are done over 30 seconds during which current and all previous orders must be delivered.

The grade card.

Every certificate is graded on three things. WASTE is how much of what you mined you threw away. SEAM SUPPORT is how well you backfill the ground you mine. SURPLUS is how close you came to exactly what was ordered. Each gets a letter from D to S. A grade never locks anything away, and a better card brings the next unlock sooner. Whether an S is worth a rebuild is up to you.

Old orders stay on the book.

A production line you built before is still being asked for while you prove the next one. Two Directives ask for nothing new: each doubles three lines you already run, and the endless book keeps doing the same. Every new production line has to fit in without starving the old ones.

The ground decides what you get.

Nine kinds of mixed seams, so ore has to be sorted before it can be smelted. A mine you backfill keeps giving its full output. Of the 91 recipes, 54 are alternative recipes for 28 of the products, and the right recipe depends on resources you have too much of. Power comes from coal, gas, the sun, geothermal vents and later a reactor, and the solar power stops at night.

Belts, rail, drones and rockets.

Belts carry the short runs and can dive underground. For the long ones you lay track and run trains between your stations, with signals so several trains can share a line. Drones carry the small loads. You walk the site as its engineer, and a fleet of construction bots builds what you place. Everything you deliver leaves on rockets from a launch platforms that you build.

A world that keeps going.

Every world grows from a seed: pick one, or roll a new one. The map never ends. After the twelfth Directive the book keeps asking for more, you can prospect empty ground for new seams wherever you stand, so the factory can spread as far as you want to take it.

Site 7.

A director has been surveying this ground alone for four hundred years. It can measure and judge, but it cannot build. Twelve Directives take you from the first mine to the end of the commissioning schedule, and after that the book keeps going.

Features

• Whole-site certification: every order at once, measured live, graded D to S

• A standing order book: old orders never go away

• Twelve Directives, then an endless book

• A new world from every seed, and a map that never ends

• Prospect for new seams and keep building outward for as long as you like

• 41 buildings, 48 items and 91 recipes, 54 of them alternates

• Nine kinds of seam: mixed ore to sort, mines to backfill

• Belts that dive underground, trains with signals, drones and rockets

• Coal, gas, solar with batteries, geothermal and a reactor, through day and night

• A built-in ratio calculator and live rate readouts

• Wrecks from the old site to salvage

• Blueprints shared on the Steam Workshop, and mod support

• Seven tutorials

• 23 achievements

• No combat and no game over. Pause, or run at ×2 or ×4. Offline, single-player