It’s a beautiful, lovely, unspoiled world, and fortunately it goes on forever. This means that, no matter how deep you dig, tall you build, or far into the distance your factory sprawls, the logic that only exists in videogames lets you know that the environment can take it. The factory needs all the space it can get and if that means clearcutting a forest or paving over the desert, there’s a functionally infinite amount more where that came from. Which is for the best, really, because the factories of Foundry can get incredibly huge very quickly.
Foundry is a factory game that’s been in developmentfor a while, starting off as a cross between Minecraft and Satisfactory and growing from there. The ground is made of destructible cubes while buildings and other environmental props are more detailed models. Like in any good factory game you start with nothing but the ability to wrest a bit of metal from the earth and from there slowly automate your way towards an epic tangle of interconnected systems designed to build the necessary items to scale up even larger. Ore becomes metal, metal becomes assemblers, assemblers build a huge variety of machines, and more machines allow new resources to start the cycle over again. The surface deposits soon become too small to supply the factory’s needs and get used up so underground mining is necessary, and as long as you’re down there you might as well build a network of power plants to energize the system, because the enormous modular buildings will be tearing through power soon enough.
While Foundry has been in development with regular updateson itch.io, the developers feel it’s still too early for a Steam Early Access release. That time may be over sooner than expected, as evidenced by the recent demo thatshowed up on Steamlast week in preparation for the big Steam Next Fest starting October 3. That demo was joined today by an all new trailer showing off a number of upgrades since the last one from two years ago, including multiplayer and jetpacks. Not included is the major upcoming addition of water, as shown off in theAugust developer update, primarily because it’s still a work in progress thanks to the many features it can make possible. Even in its current state of a highly stable alpha there are already dozens of hours of content available, so it’s going to be exciting to see what new options actual liquids can add. For now, though, there’s afree demo,paid alpha, and brand new trailer to entice you to check out one or the other.
