Sandustry, a survival and factory automation game from developer Lantto Games, has launched in early access on Steam. Rock Paper Shotgun covered the release.
The studio describes the game as one "where every pixel is a resource waiting to be mined, mixed, processed, or destroyed". In practice that means production lines are assembled out of the same simulated pixels that make up the world, with materials reacting to one another according to physical rules: sand absorbs water and becomes easier to sift for gold, ice melts when heated, and other combinations trigger their own chemical reactions.
Procedural, destructible worlds
Each world is procedurally generated and fully destructible, so players can dismantle the terrain wholesale rather than only building on top of it. Alongside the automation there are artifacts to recover from an ancient civilisation, and the game ships with modding support in mind.
Lantto Games expects the early access period to run for roughly a year depending on how development progresses, and has said the price may rise afterwards. According to the Steam page the game is fully playable in its current state and everything described there is present in the build. A demo is also available for players who want to try it before buying.
The material simulation is what separates it from more conventional automation games. Rather than placing machines on a fixed grid and routing abstract items between them, players are working with a world whose every particle has behaviour: heat, moisture and the interactions between different substances all feed into whether a production line does what it was built to do, and terrain can be excavated or wiped out entirely in the process.
Alongside the factory building, Rock Paper Shotgun notes the game frames its progression around uncovering the secrets of an ancient civilisation, with artifacts scattered through the generated worlds. Modding support is intended to extend what players can construct once the base systems are in place.
It arrives in a month that has been unusually busy for sand: Sandcastle, an unrelated game about building castles, released a demo earlier in August.
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