Ahh, the sweet hum of industry. Sandbox building games like Satisfactory and Factorio take the crafting elements from the likes of Terraria and the Minecraft Technic mod scene to the ultimate level, tasking you with crafting huge, complex production networks churning resources into materials and goods at a hugely satisfying tilt. But now a new challenger is about to join the roster. Coming from new indie developer Channel 3 Entertainment and published by Cities Skylines 2 and Stellaris studio Paradox Interactive, Foundry is preparing to roll out via Steam Early Access in May.
There’s a lot of interest in Foundry – the factory-building automation game reached 100,000 players across its itch.io alpha build and a demo at Steam Next Fest in October 2023. There’s clearly potential for it to join the ranks of the best building games around, then, and it won’t be too much longer before we get hands-on with the full early access launch.
A first-person game offering solo and co-op play in a gorgeous voxel world, Foundry has all the exploration, scanning, mining, and gathering you’d expect from the likes of Satisfactory (or games like Astroneer and No Man’s Sky). Then you’ll take those materials and build out an increasingly large factory of production lines, conveyor belts, pipes, power sources, and more. This unlocks more advanced resources, additional research projects, and ultimately even faster and more efficient machinery to produce more materials quicker than ever.
Unlike the predetermined environments of some such games, every time you boot up a new world in Foundry you’re handed a different, procedurally generated world. You can destroy every single block of the environment in true Minecraft fashion, shaping the very world to fit the factory of your dreams.
While the launch build of Foundry has “most of the core gameplay mechanics implemented,” its dev hopes to add plenty more features throughout early access. These include more underground mechanics, the ability to mine deep into the terrain and discover secrets buried in the depths of the planet – or even build your own factory down there, and “more complex options to customize and control how your factory operates.”
These will include the likes of logic gates to create custom machine behavior – opening up the potential for customization that leans more towards the advanced end of Factorio. There will also be more crafting recipes, research, and other machines introduced as early access continues; the team also says it hopes to “gradually introduce mod support” on the way to the game’s full 1.0 release.
Foundry is set to launch on Steam in early access Thursday May 2. Channel 3 Entertainment says it expects the game to remain in early access “for more than a year,” as it works on adding a lot more content and polish. It estimates that the release version includes “15 to 25 hours of playtime,” and that the game’s price will increase “when we feel the changed amount of content justifies a price increase.” For now, you can wishlist the game on Steam to keep track of it ahead of launch.
For now, we’ve also got more of the best sandbox games to exercise your creativity, along with more of the best management games if you can’t get enough of staying on top of every last aspect of things.
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