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The very last thing I would like in my life is one other manufacturing facility recreation, if solely as a result of permitting any manufacturing facility recreation into your life dangers it being consumed solely by its sprawling, hopelessly absorbing logistics puzzle. But then Cordyceps Collective went and mashed up Factorio with final yr’s colony simulation Empire of the Ants, and now I see I’m going to lose the second half of February to Microtopia.
Releasing in just some weeks, Microtopia invitations gamers to “turn out to be the hive thoughts of a robotic ant colony” designing logistics networks in your automaton bugs to provide and convey assets throughout a sublime industrial circuit-board. Starting with a robotic ant queen, it’s essential to nurse cute metallic larvae into child ants, draw pathways to inform them the place to maneuver, and place down sensors and logic gates to instruct them on methods to work together along with your manufacturing facility. Collecting assets and putting down buildings permits you to improve your ants into differing kinds, like flying ants, digger ants, and, er, “inventor” ants, which presumably enable you analysis new tech.
You aren’t restricted to 1 manufacturing facility in Microtopia both. Once you have established a colony, you may fly new queens to completely different biomes and begin afresh, experimenting with further plant species that may be processed into new assets. There’s additionally an ecological issue to Microtopia, along with your colony producing air pollution you could select to mitigate or ignore.
The trailer, which you’ll view above, gives a short overview of Microtopia’s elegant logic methods and motherboard-like manufacturing facility buildings, whereas there’s additionally a demo accessible for anybody who needs to take a more in-depth look. The full recreation releases on February 18, which is not far-off in any respect, though that pits it towards some heavy-hitters like Avowed and Monster Hunter: Wilds.
At least it is not competing straight with different manufacturing facility video games, since all the larger names in industrial automation opened for enterprise final yr. This included the superb Satisfactory, which arrived in September 2024 after 5 years in Steam early entry, whereas Factorio’s lengthy in-gestation Space Age growth blasted off a month later (blowing my tiny thoughts within the course of). Time will inform whether or not Microtopia proves as concerned or elaborate as these video games, though the previous few moments of the trailer suggest your factories can have some scale to them.
