If you love conveyor belts and can't get enough of designing factories, so much so that you'd like to dive deeper and deeper into them without end, we have got the perfect game for your wishlist.
The recently announced Fractal Foundry (not to be confused with the slightly cursed bcat112a game Fractal Factory, which does similar things in 2D space) pulls the growing and popular factory/automation genre in another new direction: factories and modules that can recreate themselves, becoming recursive and ultimately creating infinitely repeating fractal structures.
The premise starts in a similar territory to genre staples like Shapez or the recently released Modulus: design aesthetically pleasing, ever-expanding networks of conveyor lines delivering tiny component parts to factories where they can be joined together, split, re-combined and manipulated via conditions and variables to form the next building block in the larger equation.
But unlike those games, Fractal Foundry turns the formula back in upon itself: what if your factory module could be configured to produce another version of itself, scaling up or down in the process? The result is, it seems, a nested world of production lines that can grow fractal megastructures impossibly large or impossibly deep. "What exactly are the limits?" Is an obvious question that comes to mind, and as of now it's not exactly clear.
Another interesting difference touted on the Steam page is that Foundry will not focus at all on hitting production targets, utilizing resources efficiently or being limited by them. Apparently the game is 100% creativity and experimentation, allowing you to build to your heart's content with no pressure. When optimization is such a cornerstone of the genre, this seems like an unusual choice... but maybe it makes sense when achieving infinity is such a baked-in part of the experience? Time will tell.
Fractal Foundry is "coming soon" to Steam, and you can put it on your wishlist now to get updates.
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