Crafting
Player Crafting
The player can craft any item available in their personal crafting menu. If some ingredients are missing, the player can recursively craft the required subcomponents, automatically pulling materials from their inventory.
Items queued for player crafting are added to the crafting queue and produced fairly quickly.
Keep in mind that not all player recipes are fully resource-efficient. This is especially true for circuit recipes. To save resources, it’s recommended to craft circuits separately using an Assembler instead of doing it manually.
To cancel a queued item, click on it in the crafting queue. When you hover over an item, a red outline indicates that clicking will cancel that order. Any unused resources will be refunded in the exact form they were consumed when the crafting order was placed.
Crafting Machines
Crafting Machines are the core automation blocks that perform in-game recipes without player intervention. To function, a machine must:
1. Have a valid recipe set (either automatically or manually selected).
2. Receive the required input items or fluids.
3. Be supplied with the necessary Resource (e.g., Electrcity or Heat).
4. Have available space in its output slot for the resulting product.
If all conditions are met, the machine will operate continuously, processing the recipe until one of the requirements is no longer satisfied. There are two main types of machines, differing in how they determine which recipe to perform:
Machines with Manual Recipe Selection
These machines require you to manually select a recipe. After pressing the Recipe button, a recipe selection menu opens. Once a recipe is chosen, the machine configures its input and output slots accordingly. Each slot is filtered to only accept valid items for that specific recipe, preventing incorrect materials from being placed.
Machines with Automatic Crafting
These machines automatically detect and select the appropriate recipe based on the items provided. Each unique combination of input items corresponds to a single recipe. The input slots of these machines are also filtered, allowing only valid ingredients for recipes the machine can perform.
Automation & Progression
The game is designed around progression through increasingly complex automation. As new technologies and recipes are unlocked, their time and resource costs grow, making manual crafting impractical.
The fundamental automation loop involves moving items between machines by robot arms and conveyors. Loaders will allow higher-volume, direct insertion and extraction of items, creating more compact and efficient production lines.