Justus Builds a Factory Empire

The best features of this game aren't in any design document. They start with a sentence at the dinner table. This one was: "Dad, there should be real factories…"

Justus (10, internally long since our "Lead Product Manager") had looked at the crafting menus and concluded: always clicking together single items at the workbench — that doesn't feel like industry. A factory, that's something with presses that stomp, rotors that spin, conveyor belts!

So that's exactly what we built. On some worlds there are now factories — industrial relics where things hammer and rattle. At the terminal you craft in bulk: factory recipes take cheaper materials and churn out much more at once.

But the real design trick came from Justus himself, and he insisted on it: Every factory can only produce a few specific things. So you have to find the right one first. That turned a convenience feature into a reason to explore — exactly the difference between a menu and a game experience. I probably would have built the convenient everything-factory. He was right.

And because factories need stories, the ruins came along: crumbling settlements, half-collapsed towers, overgrown rubble — fully minable, with treasure chests. If you really fall in love with a factory, you can track down a rare access code and claim it as your own base.

Justus has since declared ruin-diving his favorite pastime. So he has earned the feature he wished for fair and square — and we learned once again: a ten-year-old's product vision is right surprisingly often.