It’s always kind of impressive how complexity can come from a handful of simple interactions. A couple of sticks arranged just right can become a machine, or basic math plots intricate curves. Throw in language to pack ideas down into a few letters and things can get out of hand pretty quickly, especially when programming takes effect across multiple robots performing their own routines in sync with each other. No single piece of the operation is anything like complicated, breaking down to “go here” or “do this”, and when you build each part it doesn’t seem difficult until you step back for a moment to take stock and realize a small legion of bots is working autonomously to defrost an ice planet, all powered by the programming you dumped in their mechanical heads.
Automation comes in many different forms and Craftomation 101 ignores the factories for individually-programmed robots trundling across the landscape to terraform a frozen planet. Any resource a robot can interact with you may too, performing all the necessary actions to get the colony ready, but there’s more to do at once than one person can handle and besides, that would be an awful lot of work. Far better to have the bots do it for you, harvesting materials and combining them into new forms to spread out a small patch of warmth across the planet’s surface. Two rocks combine into a spark, a spark and lump of coal combine into fire, and fire can be placed into a bonfire site to melt the surrounding area, uncovering new resources and sometimes even thawing out the metal bodies of other lost robots.
The programming interface starts off fairly easy, with commands like “find & pick” to scavenge an item, complete with an empty box you can use to define exactly what it is the robot needs, to “combine” when it’s got two of the specified items, or “drop to” to put it where it needs to go. It creates a simple, easily-understood flow-chart that in theory will turn your robot into a productive member of the terraforming crew, unless one of the instructions isn’t quite so effective as it seemed when putting it in place. In that case it can be disconnected from the flow and trashed or replaced with something more useful, and slowly the planet gets a little bit busier and more complicated than it had been before.
Craftomation 101 is in open beta on Steam this week, and it’s a cute, approachable programming-automation game from the studio that created the equally-likeable Learning Factory. The beta is as much of the game as is ready to show to the public and free to all, available from now through September 18 for anyone who wants to take it for a spin. It’s early, of course, and the point is to get feedback (like the need for a command to get robots to empty their hands aside from just trashing the entire program and starting over) but it’s still incredibly satisfying to put one piece of the system into place after the other and watch a frozen ice ball turn into a hive of robotic activity. Head onover to Steamto give it a play or two, and teach those bots how to be useful.
