It’s hard to do much without stuff. The whole of humanity is tool-using monkeys scaled up to a ridiculous degree, because there’s only so much we can do with our bare hands and we always want more. Most of the time the systems that get us what we want are functionally invisible, needing little more than a trip to the nearest store to pick up the goodies, but lost worker waking up alone on a strange planet where all the machinery is decaying to rust doesn’t have that option. Escaping from the caverns and discovering the planet Calyx’s secrets won’t require facing down a ravening alien horde for once, but it’s not going to be so easy as a stroll to the surface either. Everything is broken and that includes the machinery necessary to ascend from the depths, and the only way to fix it all is with a massive network of automated productivity.
Techtonica is a factory game along the lines of Satisfactory and Foundry, played from the first-person perspective in a destructible voxel world where the terrain is designed to mostly hide the underlying cubic nature. Waking up alone in what turns out to be a small building, you can instantly see that everything is old and run down into near uselessness. The only functional tool, in fact, is a pickaxe on the wall, which is great for breaking up the dirt blocking the exit and getting to two major revelations. First, the caverns are huge and filled with lovely glowy bioluminescent plant life, and second is that the disembodied female voice of Sparks means you’re not so alone as initially feared. Conveniently enough your suit is only good for receive rather than send, making for the classically-voiceless protagonist, but actions speak louder than words and you’ve got an entire factory to build in order to express yourself.
The primary reason for the factory is due to the needs of the first building you see coming out of the sleeping chamber, and that’s a production facility that can grant access to new technologies. While the first repairs are cheap, just requiring raw iron and copper ore easily extracted with a few whacks of the pickaxe, Sparks provides the schematics for a mining drill. The initial building and production facility had a couple of chests of materials, so tossing a few drills together near the ore veins only takes a minute, while swiping a few plants for burnable fuel can be done while walking. Create miners, toss in fuel, wait a few seconds for ore, deliver to the production facility for repairs, and get the first new discoveries on a tech tree that will see the caverns eventually packed full of interconnected machinery producing tech both familiar to factory-game fans and brand-new to Techtonica.
While much of the logic and tools may be second nature to fans of this type of game, progress up the tech tree is what sets it apart. Sure, there’s the usual setup of miners digging ore that’s sent to smelters which deliver it to assemblers, all linked by conveyor belts with a storage unit between each stage to act as buffer while you experiment with the production speed of components to ensure maximum efficiency. Earning new tech, however, involves a few different steps depending on the type. One of the first things you earn is a scanner that can be used on just about everything, from cave plants to broken machinery. While the plants just give information on type, scanned machinery is either sent directly to inventory for the more simple items or broken down into parts for the bigger ones. When you find a machine for the first time, however, scanning it goes towards unlocking its spot in the tech tree, although that frequently requires a few units before it’s made available. Once the spot opens up the final hurdle is being to be able to afford it.
The tech cost in Techtonica is measured in research cores, which are relatively simple to make with iron and copper. A research core is a purple sphere that takes up one cube of space, and so long as they’re deployed somewhere they count towards the total number available. If you’ve got enough there are all sorts of new tech toys to buy, including suit upgrades like a hover ability that gives a few feet of height so you can more easily lay down machinery from the first-person viewpoint. There are also planters and threshers to manage organic resources, upgrades to existing machine speed or new and faster models, power options and much more. The thing about earning it all, though, is that it’s gotten from a combination of exploration, factory production and story progression.
While Techtonica is a factory game, there’s a story running underneath it all given life by the excellent narration of Sparks, who’s just as mystified by what happened as you are thanks to some narratively-convenient memory gaps. Meeting production goals opens up new points of interest on the map, and traveling there usually results in finding a bit of plot as well as different types of machinery. Follow the plot, explore the caverns, scan the machines, use research cores to learn how to build them, and it doesn’t take long to start filling the place up with a busy automated network turning the unprocessed resources into the tools needed to escape.
The journey out is going to be a long one, especially seeing as Techtonica is only just starting its Early Access run. The current plan is about three years of production, more or less, adding not just more and bigger machines, but also the story bits explaining what happened on Calyx and how to get out. Currently there are as many hours of play as you’d feel like devoting, thanks primarily to the free-form nature of factory games and the need to build ever-bigger and more intricate systems, but if that seems like a lot of work the game launches with four-player multiplayer so split the load. Granted, multiplayer kind of cuts the legs out from under the whole “lost and alone” thing, but sometimes video game logic needs to supersede atmosphere. There’s a lot more Techtonica to come, but the start of its Early Access journey shows off a richly-detailed and beautiful world that only looks more impressive as it turns into an underground automation paradise.
