There’s not a lot of work one single ant can do, which is why they tend to show up in the hundreds. Just because each one is alive doesn’t mean the survival instinct is for the individual, which for ants is just a single part of the greater whole of the colony. This means they work together like the organs of a body, or in the case of Microtopia, the gears of a machine. Every ant has its job and will do it until it dies, by which point the queen will have laid more than enough eggs to cover the loss. It’s not great for the ant, but it’s not like anyone’s ever asked the bladder’s opinion of its job.
The Ants Came Marching One By One, Hurrah!
Microtopia is an automation game viewed from the top-down perspective, where the job is to lay down paths for mechanical ants to feed an ever-expanding array of machines with one purpose in mind: expand the colony. In real life ants follow pheromone trails left behind by the scouts, but as the embodiment of the hive mind, you can just lay down the tracks any which way catches your fancy. Basic trails are for one-time use, bringing an ant from its current task to a new one, while the other types of path are designed for the long term and specify what type of job the ant on it should do. An ant on a Foraging path will stop to harvest the energy pods growing in flowers, while one traveling past the same growth but on a Hauling path is busy carting goods from a depot to a workshop. Add in splitters as the simplest of the available ways to divide a path and it doesn’t take long to realize all this automation is a sneaky way of creating a logic circuit.
Building the Greatest Engineering Feat in Dyson Sphere Program
Which isn’t to say Microtopia isn’t fully working its automation roots. Queens need energy pods to produce eggs, eggs need to be carried to the incubator, the incubator doesn’t hatch eggs as quickly as the queen can lay them, so a little experimentation laying down paths leads to efficient worker production, and seeing as you’ve got multiple incubators, they might as well each have their own paths directing to the various tasks out in the wilderness. First up, though, the basic ant fresh out of the egg doesn’t have much of a lifespan so tacking a splitter onto the path and sending it into a merging machine will net you a much hardier ant capable of getting far more done before it eventually falls over for good.
Raiding scrap metal depots or carting the scrap from the stockpile to smelter to new stockpile, where the refined ore can be turned into components that will then make new machines to expand the colony further, or harvesting plant fiber to turn into fabric, or being a link in production chains for any number of other components is the best life an ant can hope for as the factory grows more complex with each newly-researched technology.
Microtopia has been available in various forms for a while now, with bothdemoandprologueavailable on Steam and a round of public playtesting back in November. All this is in preparation for the full release, which today received an announcement of coming out on February 18. The mecha-ants have an empire to build and all the resources necessary to grow and expand, and while there may be a fair amount of logic needed to make them grow in the most efficient manner possible, it’s an analogue world down there and they’re not going to complain so long as whatever tangled system they need to follow actually works.
