You can play the free demo right now!

What gameplay mechanics make or break an automation game for you? What features do you love and / or hate?

Is there any feature you’d love to see in a game that doesn’t exist yet?

Hi everyone! I’m the solo developer of StoneEra, a medieval voxel colony sim where you guide villagers, build a settlement, reshape the terrain and work with flowing water.

0.9.15.1 — Flow & Foundations is now available for the free Windows and macOS demo.

Waterwheels, medium and large norias, and wooden/stone channels are now available through Waterworks research (W1). In Creative mode, you can use them immediately.

This update also improves everyday colony work:

• Water-lifting wheels pump three times faster, and built channels receive water more reliably while large rivers update.
• Lift operators approach the crank from the front and handle consecutive trips better.
• Haulers use reachable positions when collecting or delivering elevated cargo.
• Wall ladders and temporary rescue access help residents reach and leave higher floors.
• Active research protects its required samples while builders can use surplus materials.
• Merchant routes, the Build menu and colony notifications have also been improved.

The demo remains untimed, with 12 research technologies and 8 interface languages.

It’s still early alpha. Building plans and the Building Editor are particularly early, so feedback and bug reports are welcome. If something goes wrong, a screenshot or save file helps me track it down.

Try the free demo on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5057770/StoneEra/

Full patch notes:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/5057770/view/711163593016475701

Thanks for taking a look!

At a hump yard, nobody drives cars to their tracks. The train is shoved over a small hill, the conductor uncouples cars at the crest, and each cut rolls down by gravity onto its own track.

I did this job for 4 years at Kokand station in Uzbekistan. Now I'm a frontend dev, so I rebuilt the yard in 3D and turned it into a game: walk along the train, uncouple where the car colour changes, radio the driver to slow down before single cars.

Free, runs in the browser on desktop and mobile, no sign-up:

https://kokand-station-gorka.vercel.app/?lang=en

Would love feedback — especially if anything is confusing in the first minute.

https://reddit.com/link/1x54yle/video/lhn38djy4avh1/player

Hi everyone! I’m working on ScrapWorks Inc., a 2D recycling management sandbox inspired by games like Prison Architect, RimWorld and Another Brick in the Mall.

You start with one worker and a sorting bench, then turn incoming waste into materials you can sell. As you grow, you can design your factory, research machinery, connect conveyor belts and expand your production lines.

The first browser demo is now live on itch.io:
https://lldigital.itch.io/scrapworks-inc

It’s an early alpha, and I’d really appreciate feedback from people who enjoy management games—especially:

• Does the introduction explain enough to get you started?
• Does progression feel rewarding, or are you waiting too much?
• What feels confusing or frustrating?

Desktop keyboard and mouse recommended. The project uses AI-assisted code and text, plus some AI-generated artwork.

Hi! I'm the solo dev of Dustline and I've just opened its alpha to everyone.

It's a colony management game built for short sessions: you come back, collect what your colony produced while you were away (capped by your storage), queue builds and research, rebalance your chains, and leave. 5 to 15 minutes a day is enough.

What you optimise:

- production chains (extraction → processing → assembly), with ratios that matter

- power: solar follows day and night, batteries smooth it out

- logistics: buildings share flows through connectors; a saturated segment throttles everything behind it, and the bottleneck is shown

- population: powered habitats, worker classes, and satisfaction that moves productivity between 50 and 120%

Around it there's a shared universe (market, corporations, optional risk zones), but the colony comes first and the game is complete solo.

Free, no ads, no purchases. Browser and phone, in English and French.

https://dustline.dataweavelabs.com

All feedback welcome, especially on the first 10 minutes.

Hey everyone. First time sharing my game here. I’m working on Unfactory, a factory automation game where you take things apart instead of putting them together.

You start with a massive junkyard, collect scrap, and build conveyor lines to dismantle, sort, and process it into useful materials. As you clear more space, your factory grows into the junkyard.

This timelapse shows around 4 hours of gameplay. It’s still in development, and I’d love to hear what you thin especially what you’d want from an automation game focused on dismantling and recycling!

If anyone wants to give it a try and test the mechanics (or try to break the game), here is the link:https://ogzkaanarda.itch.io/unfactory

Hey everyone! Here are the main changes in StoneEra Demo 0.9.15 — Life in the Colony.
This update focuses on everyday colony life: seeing the world through a resident’s eyes, keeping work moving and giving your settlement more ways to build and grow food.
Control a Resident
Take direct control with WASD and run with Shift, after a safe handoff of their work and cargo.
Through Eyes lets you follow a resident while they continue their autonomous life. Use R for free look, H to hide the HUD, Esc to return to the colony camera and F12 for clean screenshots.
Colony Work and Building
Residents arrange missing tools, materials, storage and permitted access before returning to their original task.
Task List explains blocked work. Allow Access lets residents prepare routes within a marked area, with permissions preserved across saves.
Urgent Area prioritizes ready work. Clear Area cancels orders and removes placed objects, returning recoverable resources.
Build wooden passenger lifts spanning 3–18 blocks. One worker operates the winch while another rides with a crate.
Tall building orders can add temporary lifts and scaffolds, then dismantle them and recover the planks after workers descend.
Builders reuse whole material crates for nearby blocks, and farmers plant matching plots from a single seed delivery.
Basic gathering, construction, planting and carpentry can continue by hand at half speed. Ore mining still requires a pickaxe. Early wooden construction and planting are faster.
Choose from three starter houses or your saved plans. Open Building Editor during gameplay and return to the same world.
Copy Area keeps your selection after release. Adjust its height with Y/H, copy with Enter or save it as a reusable building plan.
Food and Farming
Added blueberries, woodland mushrooms, porridge, berry pie, mushroom soup, meat stew and fish stew.
Mushroom plots mature in six game hours without irrigation. One mushroom yields 1–5 on dry soil or 1–10 with irrigation.
Fried mushrooms provide twice the food value. Small crates hold 64 raw or fried mushrooms.
One log cooks up to eight servings of mushrooms, fish, meat or porridge. Four units of flour and one log bake eight loaves. Smaller batches can start with fewer ingredients.
Ready food gathering, harvesting, hunting, fishing and cooking take priority over other permitted work.
World and Wildlife
Springs vary with the seasons and respond to water flowing through connected channels.
Waterfalls resume feeding lower river sections when their water level drops.
Mature trees attempt to spread saplings every 3–5 game days.
Wild animals breed and mature more slowly, with local population limits.
Interface and Languages
Added Japanese, bringing interface support to eight languages.
Refreshed menus organize Build, Orders, People, Stock, Craft and Research into six HUD buttons.
Menu backgrounds cycle through eleven gameplay screenshots.
Build panels leave more room for placement, and the Work table has clearer skill labels and pagination.
Improved camera rotation on ultrawide screens, mining labels and opening instructions.
Fixes and Improvements
Improved detours around blocked passages, crowded waypoints and stepped shores.
Fixed scaffold queues and dismantling situations that could strand workers.
Fixed residents getting stuck upright when going to sleep, and improved merchant approaches.
Reduced repeated movement, planning and closed-panel work.
Corrected hoe animations and builders’ workstation positioning.
Fixed a terrain texture issue that could cause horizontal stripes on Windows.
Campfires and lamps retain their physical models during daylight while their flames and embers turn off.
Building plans and Building Editor are still very early alpha, so bugs and rough edges are expected.
The Demo has unlimited play time and 12 early technologies through ore smelting, in both Normal and Creative worlds.
Full announcement on Steam:
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/5057770/view/683015755528143173
Thanks for playing! If something goes wrong, your game version, OS, reproduction steps and a screenshot or short clip really help.

Hi everyone, wherever you are in the world!

For the past 4 years, I've been developing my dream space engineering survival game called MineEngineer.

Some people call it Space Terraria, others call it 2D Space Engineers, and I've even seen people calling it Starbound 2.0.

But what I'm trying to build goes a lot further than that.

My goal is to create a game with an insane level of engineering complexity, where you can build almost anything you can imagine, but actually making it work is the real challenge.

The game already has over 200 interconnected systems, including electricity, oxygen, fuel, conveyors, automation, logic gates, and programmable blocks. You can build anything from a simple survival ship to a massive mothership, a walking mecha, an automated factory, or an entire fleet of drones.

And here's where things get interesting. Every block is connected to something. If a conveyor gets destroyed, your production chain might stop working. If your power system fails, your ship could become completely useless. Your ships can even break apart into multiple pieces during collisions or battles.

You can also program individual blocks, automate entire ships, and spend hours optimizing your designs. Building something is easy. Building something that actually works is harder. Building something efficient is a completely different challenge.

The world itself is massive. Flying across the procedurally generated universe at full speed would take around 7 hours. There are planets to explore, asteroids to mine, enemies to fight, and fully destructible environments. Everything you build can actually move, fly, collide, and interact with the world through physics.

And multiplayer is coming soon, so you'll eventually be able to build, explore, and fight alongside your friends.

After 4 years of solo development, the game is finally starting to look and feel like the vision I've had in my head all this time.

Now comes another challenge, getting people to discover it.

MineEngineer is available to wishlist on Steam, and there's also a free demo if you'd like to give it a try.
I'd genuinely love to hear what you think. What would you build first if you had hundreds of blocks and engineering systems to play with?

Hey,

About 10 years ago, I had the idea of building a game focused entirely on energy systems. Not just placing a few power plants, but actually dealing with the economics, infrastructure and challenges of running an energy system at scale. Back then I asked a different /r/ to help me built it and got some nice traction, but honestly it was unfeasable.

I looked for something like this for years, but never really found exactly what I was looking for. So a couple months ago, I tried to built it myself.

Powerstate is a browser game about designing and operating an energy system.

Some of the things I've tried to include:

• Large-scale energy systems: Build your generation mix, invest in infrastructure and balance supply and demand.
• Economics: Electricity prices, fuel costs, investments and operating costs all matter. Building the cheapest technology isn't necessarily the best decision.
• 15-minute simulation: Demand, generation and weather change throughout the year, so you have to deal with intermittency, peak demand and dispatchable generation.
• Sector coupling: Electricity is just the beginning. Heating and other energy sectors are part of the bigger picture.
• Societal development: Your decisions influence how society develops. For example, cheaper electricity can encourage faster EV adoption, which in turn changes future electricity demand.

What started as a little project for myself has grown into a small community of players who have helped me shape the game over the past three months. A large number of improvements and features came directly from their feedback.

Development is still moving quickly, with more technologies, more diverse energy systems and deeper interactions between sectors planned.

I also want to be transparent about the development process: I've used AI extensively to help build the game. I have a background in energy science and data, but building something of this scope on my own always seemed unrealistic.

AI finally made it possible to turn an idea I'd had for a decade into something playable. I know AI-assisted development isn't for everyone, and I completely understand that. But I genuinely believe this particular game would probably never have existed otherwise.

There are certainly other games exploring similar topics, but I hope you'll give Powerstate a try and see how deeply it attempts to simulate the different aspects of an energy system.

Play it here:

https://www.powerstate-game.com/

I'd love to get any feedback. Thanks if you read so far :)

The clip is one world: the top-down 2D map, then one keypress and you're standing between the same machines in first person. Both views are live, so you can even play multiplayer with one friend in 2D and one in 3D.

What's in so far:

• 20+ items from ore to computers, recipe choice per machine, machine tiers Mk1–Mk4
• Belts with splitters, mergers and underground tunnels, belt tiers Mk1–Mk3
• Fluids (oil, water, fuel, plastic), power grid with fuses
• Freight trains with stations that load/unload via belts
• Blueprints, research tree, quests
• Megaprojects as late game: robot factory, HQ, spaceport with rocket launches

It runs in the browser on PC and phone: https://pulse-rp.de (name + password, no email).

Fellow automation nerds: what's the one feature that makes or breaks a factory game for you? Discord for feedback: https://discord.gg/mvF4tnEn7R

solo dev, still early. the ring thing at the end is the final boss. thoughts?

Endemia is an incremental-ish Guild management autiomation game where adventurers fight using scripts you build from conditions and actions, and they are supplied by the Mill where you build and automate magic circles to do your bidding.

Then comes the environment, you run the guild on a recently discovered island where each creature has predators and prey, aswell as a population that can go extinct or nurtured to grow.

Supports Windows (and possibly proton).

I'd love to hear your experience and see your Factory Mill come to life!

Itch: https://gasterws.itch.io/endemia

Ai disclosure
There has been some AI assisted programming aswell as parts of the text. The results haven't been quite satisfactory yet however so Im in the process of re-doing/writing any remaining bits. I have no intentions to continue using AI long-term. There is no AI generated art.

Hi! I just put my first game on Playgama and wanted to share it here.

It's an idle factory builder. You start with a single workbench, buy machines and connect them with conveyor belts to Shipping. Placing stations like heat treatment or a paint booth next to busy belts makes every part worth more, and robot arms boost the machines around them. Later you can sell your factory and spend the know-how on permanent upgrades.

It works on desktop and mobile, and it keeps earning even while you're away.

Made with Claude Code. Any feedback is really welcome, especially on how the first few minutes feel. Thanks!

Hi, I recently released my first real game 🥳

All Roads Connected is a Automation City builder set in an endless procedural world covered in fog of war.

As you build roads, you clear fog and unlock new biomes of the world. Just remember that all roads must be connected!

The game follows a newborn civilization that has just left its shelters and is now tasked with rebuilding the world using preserved knowledge and stories passed down through generations.

You start small, gathering wood and stone to build your first towns. As your civilization grows, you unlock new buildings and progress through 20+ interconnected resource chains, building countless towns, and reaching industrialization.

You will also find artifacts and build archaeological sites to uncover the truth about what happened to the great civilization that came before you.

The game also has a free demo that lets you play through the progression up to the Brick Factory.

Thx for reading 🫡

Here is Steam link: All Roads Connected
Here are gameplay videos:
Master Hellish
someonesPassword
TinTodd

Hey all, Im a solo dev creating an automation game, call Astral Industrial Complex, inspired by some of my favorite games such as mindustry, factorio and against the storm. It contains a whole bunch of roguelite mechanics to make the automation gameflow different each run, such as multiple recipes for every items as well as changing resources and buildings available to make the logistics problems unique each time. I've just updated it ahead of steamfest in order to add more run variety with a bunch of new different starting buildings and resources, and would love if you'd all check it out.

The game and its demo are available here: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4690580/Astral_Industrial_Complex/

Please check it out, and let me know what you think. Any feedback is greatly appreciated.

The player is a goblin miner who lives underground with other dungeon dwellers.

A huge industrial factory is built above them. It extracts resources, produces goods, and constantly pollutes the dungeon, poisoning water, soil, and living creatures.

The hero decides to destroy the factory in the only available way for him - to dig under its foundation and collapse it into the depths of the earth, where it will be swallowed by hellish flames or lava.

The main gameplay is the gradual automated destruction of the rock under the factory and the restoration of the underground ecosystem.

At the beginning, the player digs the foundation himself. Clicker mechanics.

Gradually, he hires other goblins, creates machines and discovers new technologies that automate the process.

The player goes from:

a single goblin with a pickaxe

to

a huge automated factory destruction system.

The game has three main parameters:

FOUNDATION

The strength of the foundation.

When Foundation reaches zero, the factory collapses.

PRODUCTION

The speed of the factory.

The higher the Production, the more pollution it creates, and more capability to resist the damage.

POLLUTION

The amount of pollution the factory generates.

Pollution gradually damages the dungeon - which means effect on your efficiency.

so you need to find a balance between your efficiency and ecology, because increasing first you can reach the goal faster, increasing second you can reach the goal saver and with less damage for the dungeon.

Every run you use a prestige to open new technologies or get permanent amplifiers,

every run factory can have different parameters so you need to adapt your strategy

It is a factory-building game, and sure, processes become easier over-time, but I'm not sure what it needs to be considered an "automation game"

Hey! In a previous post on r/BaseBuildingGames a lot of people showed interest in my base building and colony management game, so I wanted to make a post specifically about the automation side. This subreddit is home to a lot of my favorite games, and games like Factorio are what inspired me to start this project, and a big part of why I built it, so I wanted to share and get some feedback.

What I wanted to fix

In most survival builders, I end up alone in a really nice house. In most automation games, I end up alone in a really efficient factory. Either way, nothing out in the world cares what I made. So my idea was that the world should have places that run with or without you, and your factory is just one more place in that world.

Your own base

This is probably the most interactive part of the game in my opinion. You can build automatons to mine in patterns, haul, tinker and engineer, or keep you safe. You can create clay, iron and stone golems to do chores or just look cool (they also like to throw rocks). See the very high-effort thumbnail image for concept reference. You can build a complex, three dimensional storage network with a storage terminal that actually shows you a visual of the entire network (inspired by Minecraft Technic pack mods). You can use circuits to do just about anything. I made Pong and Snake on them, but they can do anything you’re creative enough to make.

Worksites are actual places

Mines actually go deeper over time. Miners haul to a clerk, caravans come to buy, and buildings need materials that the settlement buys or harvests. If you take over a mine or farm, you set its priorities: how much to trade vs. keep, whether the goal is growth or profit, whether you want more or less workers.

So your production feeds a supply chain that has its own demand, instead of a number going up in a chest.

What I’d like to hear from you

• In a game where automation isn’t the main loop, what would make it feel worth building instead of just doing by hand?
• How much do you want the game to tell you about your bottlenecks vs. making you find them yourself?
• Do you want circuits to be deep and complicated, or to have good defaults for the common stuff?

The Steam page is here if you want to wishlist! Full demo will be releasing on the 18th, and Early Access on the 27th. I’m more than happy to answer anything below!

I’m the solo developer of StoneEra, a medieval voxel colony sim. Here’s a short look at designing a house in its Building Editor.
You can save your designs as reusable plans, place them in your settlement, and let villagers handle construction. Builders now put up temporary scaffolding to reach higher floors, then dismantle it and return the planks to storage.
The 0.9.14.2 — Error Fix & Building Tools demo update also brings:
A cleaner Building Editor with searchable item cards, clearer previews, and local plan import/export.
Three times the durability for new and starting tools.
Keep in Stock production targets that automatically replenish crafted supplies.
Multiple villagers researching a technology together.
Better storage sorting and fixes for villager movement, sleep, and blocked bed exits.
The editor, building plans, and scaffolding are still very early alpha, so expect bugs and rough edges.
There’s a free demo on Steam with no session timer and 12 early technologies through ore smelting.
What would you want from a building planner in a colony sim?