The best factory games

Factory games are a subgenre of engineering games in which players build a wide network of assembly lines. These games offer various tools to gradually improve extraction and transformation of resources, leading to the tentacular growth of production infrastructures across extensive worlds. Factory games usually define a number of goals to reach, but their core reward mostly resides in the slow and continuous process of furthering a grand automation project.

While these games often have modest beginnings focused on elementary resources and survival, immediate risks rapidly dissipate, and the gameplay shifts closer to an open-ended sandbox experience. Scaling up the automation process relies on successive technological upgrades, but wielding these powerful tools requires solving new logistics problems. Players may have to coordinate the extraction of distinct resources to combine them at an efficient pace, or rearrange an array of conveyor belts to reclaim additional production tiles.

High-profile factory games such as Satisfactory and Factorio include antagonistic fauna by default, while other games such as shapez 2 and Factory Town are completely combat-free. There are also very distinct tones to be found in the genre: some games use purely abstract visuals, like Beltmatic, while others fully embrace the turn-a-remote-place-into-a-serviceable-colony ethos. We published a longform feature about factory games if you want to read more about it!

The games listed below are the most favorited factory games in the Thinky Games database.