Captain of Industry: Making Mt. Trashmore

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Captain of Industry: Making Mt. Trashmore

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

_{Thanks to Bhodi for the pic}

Available on Steam

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Your journey will start on an abandoned island with a small crew of loyal workers. In order to survive, you will need to mine raw materials from the earth, grow food, build factories, manufacture products, construct vehicles, research new technologies, explore your surroundings, and trade with other islands. If you do things right, you'll work your way up towards an industrial superpower and you can even start a space program! But this is no easy task and you will be put to the test to keep your settlement alive.

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Manufacture products
Start simple - smelt iron, mix concrete, create construction parts, and grow food. Soon you will be able to expand into crude oil processing, electronics, solar panels, data centers, and even rockets. There are over 150 unique products to explore and work with!

Build vehicles and transport products
Logistics systems ensure that trucks will automatically deliver products where they are most needed. You can configure the logistics to make it more efficient. Don�t forget to build enough trucks or upgrade existing ones to keep things moving!

Build conveyor belts and pipes
Use conveyor belts and pipes to route products efficiently and relieve stress on truck-based logistics. The transport system supports vertical stacking and auto-pathing for easy placement. Balancers and sorters also help organize your assembly lines by providing priority and sorting functionalities.

Mine raw resources on fully dynamic terrain
Find the natural riches of your land and use them to expand your empire. Mine coal, iron, copper, gold, or pump underground oil and water! Make open-pit mines to extract valuable ores from underground, or just dump excess rocks into the ocean to create a new land to build on! Remember that no mountain is tall enough for your fleet of excavators!

Additionally, the dynamic terrain system allows you to create access to various levels of elevation throughout your island. Dig or dump terrain to create slopes between hard to reach places so that you can have the most efficient path for your vehicles.

Farm your land
You need to feed your people by growing simple crops such as potatoes. Later, you will be able to grow more advanced crops such as wheat or soybeans and process them to make more kinds of food and products. You can also produce fertilizers and use greenhouses to keep up with the food demands.
Grow your settlement and provide for your people

To staff your factories, farms, and vehicles, you need people, and lots of them. Build housing and provide essentials to your citizens such as food, water, electricity, healthcare, and household goods. Population will grow on its own depending on their health and happiness, but you can also recruit and rescue populations on the world map to help aid your island.

Build complex oil and chemical refineries
Break crude oil down into different usable fractions using multiple refining stages. With the ability to stack pipes you can create compact and scalable plants that can make all the oil-based products you will need for your growing empire.

Research new technologies
Research is a must have! Unlock new buildings and materials and make your factory more efficient. New technologies will change the course of your future. Your factory will grow more efficient and advanced with over 140 technologies to unlock.

Import and export resources to and from your island
Establish shipping lanes with cargo ships to fill the gaps in your production by bringing in various products such as crude oil, wood, or quartz. While the resources on your island may be limited, the world is not! Later you will be also able to establish shipping contracts with other islands for periodic exchange of goods.

Explore the world, trade with allies, fight pirates
Repair and upgrade your ship with better engines, armor, and weapons. Explore your surroundings, find refugees, allied settlements to trade with, discover more resources, and be ready for naval battles with pesky pirates!

Get to space!
Research and develop your way to space flight. Launch a rocket as a true test of your settlement�s accomplishments.

Captain of Industry [COI] is an early access factory base building automation game similar to Factorio, Satisfactory, and any other game with the word Factory in the name. If you've ever played Factorio, the easiest way I can explain the most basic concept of the game to you is that it's a bit like if you started Factorio with access to Drones already unlocked. In this game you are building factories that make an item that feed into another factory that makes another item, etc. except unlike Factorio or similar games where you are a player in the world, in COI you are building your factory from a top down view with no physical presence. What you do have is a fleet of trucks and excavators that will automatically deliver construction materials and carry things around and need to be maintained and fueled.

Your factory requires workers, which is where the housing comes into play. Your population is largely just another resource, one that is needed to staff every building you make. To keep your population happy (and alive), you have to pump in various resources like food, water, and electricity or else they move out (or die) which could send you into a downward spiral if not attended to. The game does have many fail states but clever in-game ways like alarms to help you keep an eye on crucial resources across the island.

There's lots of complex mechanics to discover and still much more to come throughout early access but as it stands there's a lot to love here already for fans of the genre.

# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 19:37

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 14:47

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

After narrowly avoiding disaster by running out of diesel after my oil well dried up I finally have a stable supply from the two oil platforms and have been getting advanced oil refining set up finally.

I can't wait until they add functioning roads to this. I've been making due by dragging the pipes pause mode and funneling them into the roads but they still sorta just go everywhere. It's fun when it works though and you see all the trucks zipping around on the "roads"

# ¿ Apr 20, 2024 21:41

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

I haven't made it to nuclear power yet but every time I read a little about it I get more intimidated :ohdear:

# ¿ Apr 21, 2024 15:19

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

I buried some pipes to get them across my "road" while allowing excavators to pass and was quite pleased with the results:

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 16:33

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

The Locator posted:

I like how you integrated 'guard rails' to try to keep stuff actually using your roads.

Thanks! I got the idea from some folks in the management thread, you don't have to actually build them just keep the construction job 'paused' and the blueprint stays but still blocks movement as if they were built. It kind of works. Sometimes they go rouge and make new paths.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 16:39

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

I'm kind of in the same boat, mini factories everywhere with trucks supplying them and am just breaking into T3 construction now. I've started building T2 vehicles with glass I'm buying with the materials and while it's not exactly rapid, I am starting to amass a decent collection of T2 trucks and excavators which I think are helping. Dumping locations nowhere near my mines are what's killing me right now personally. I think this would be less of an issue with ore sorters since the stone/dirt/ore can all be dumped in there but I made this bed and now I gotta lay in it.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 22:08

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

DrHammond posted:

I actually went in and enabled ore sorters on the save for this exact reason (that's an option btw) and it was definitely a good move.

Oh drat I had no idea I could enable it mid game. Maybe that is what I should be doing now that 80 construction mats aren't going to sink me.

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 22:12

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

WithoutTheFezOn posted:

I start over all the time. But …

Putting alerts on all the important storage bins helps tremendously.

Yeah this was always a frustration for me until I started utilizing the alerts. You don't need to set many, just one on the crucial resources like diesel or water or your potatoes so you get some kind of ding when somethings wrong so you have time to correct it. It's real easy to get sidetracked in this and lose focus on what's going on elsewhere so use the tools they give you to keep a handle on it all.

Edit: vv Yeah same. You only have to restart due to missing electronics so many times before learning that lesson :shepface:

explosivo fucked around with this message at 23:33 on Apr 22, 2024

# ¿ Apr 22, 2024 23:23

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

Hm, I'm using a mixed pipes setup for my copper right now with water or acid feeding in depending on whether I have acid available and stocked. It seems like it's worked so far but I guess it has potential to slow down if something needs to come manually deliver water because some squeaked in but the pipes now are filled with acid.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 15:53

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

LonsomeSon posted:

Yeah the liquid inputs for copper are so minuscule that you’re not going to run into the same throughput problem.

You really want to have the Acid processing at all times though, otherwise you’re just throwing Copper away. Why don’t you have a consistent Acid supply?

Eh it's just a temporary setup after just unlocking acid really, the copper production is happening closer to the copper mines while the acid is being made on the shoreline very far away so I was just planning on trucking acid over for the time being before moving one or the other closer.

# ¿ Apr 23, 2024 16:04

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

I just broke into T2 research equipment and had to save and quit when I started looking at what to unlock first in the next research tier. Naphta is calling :ohdear:

# ¿ Apr 24, 2024 21:15

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

Yeah I have learned that I should always have massive swaths of dumping designations set for all the rock/dirt I'm digging up all over the island so there's somewhere for it all to go because you sure do dig up a lot of it. This has also helped me keep control of the ore sorters since there's always somewhere to dump the overflow. The nice thing about that particular coal mine is once you do break into the coal it's a looot of just straight up coal. Right now I'm tearing through that whole mine quite expediently but I realized there's way more below the floor level too so it's great.

I am currently in the process of building a huge ramp up to the next iron deposit beside that coal vein as fast as possible before the one you start next to dries out. Because I am quickly approaching that point.

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 14:49

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

I haven't built a stacker yet, can you move them once the pile gets so high or do you have to tear down/rebuild, or do you just deal with the mound of material some other way before it gets that bad?

# ¿ Apr 25, 2024 17:55

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

Just know that the whole "city building" aspect of this game is nothing like Anno or really a city builder at all. You have housing blocks that you need to pipe resources into to keep them happy so you have people to work your factories and that's it.

# ¿ May 12, 2024 18:30

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# ¿ May 19, 2024 14:47

explosivo: May 23, 2004; Fueled by Satan

Kaiser Schnitzel posted:

I have always wanted to play StripMine Simulator 3 and Tailings Manager 4 so this sounds perfect�..are there any trains by chance

Sadly, no trains (yet.. ???)

# ¿ May 12, 2024 18:35

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Video Games > Captain of Industry: Making Mt. Trashmore