Travel the universe creating settlements on uninhabited planets with the sole goal of setting worlds in motion through the power of automation. Fresh from your spaceship you must harvest stick and stone and begin your settlement building efforts. Create rudimentary crafting items from blueprints and slowly build a number of workerbots to aid in your efforts. Teach and shape their artificial intelligence with a visual programming language, then instruct them to begin the formation of your settlement. Marvel as a planet you’ve shaped becomes home to a civilisation of workerbots, happy to do your bidding! Expand further with the creation of Folk; beings that require your assistance to survive. Push your workerbots further by introducing fishing, cooking, housing, and tailoring and help the Folk into a state of transcendence...

Travel the universe creating settlements on uninhabited planets with the sole goal of setting worlds in motion through the power of automation

Autonauts is a retro looking world building game that is challenging but a hell of a lot of fun. You start off landing on an uninhabited planet. As you wander around the map you'll slowly be able to see the planet's natural resources. You'll start off building a workstation so that you can build rudimentary tools. To build these you'll need to gather items from around you (like sticks and stones). Once you have built a tool you can use it to refashion other items in your environment. So, for example, once you've crafted an axe from a stone and a stick, you can chop down a tree. This then becomes a log, which you can chop again to become some planks. And if you chop a plank it becomes a pole.

Once you get the basics down you'll want to build a robot production line. This will allow you to build bots (if you have the right raw material) and then you can train the bots to do some of the manual labour so that you can crack on with the more important elements of building your new world.

As you wander around the map you'll slowly be able to see the planet's natural resources, and gradually learn how to use them

It takes a long time to progress as you'll need to undertake certain tasks to unlock new blueprints, but pretty much every job you need to do can be undertaken by a bot. To do this you need to chose which bot you want to do a specific task and then show them what to do and then leave them to it. You'll need to check on them from time to time to ensure their tools are still in full working order, but other than that you can just leave them to get on with the task at hand.

The learning curve is huge, if you're fairly new to this sort of game, but the tutorial is effective at showing you the ropes and you'll be surprised at how quickly you pick things up... and before you know it you'll be experimenting on your own.

The learning curve is huge, but you'll be surprised at how quickly you pick things up

After the basic tutorial you might think there's not a whole lot to it and how dull chopping logs is... but this is the building blocks for a much bigger game. You'll be able to create your own world with few limits to your imagination. This is a game that you'll want to sink every waking hour into.

While the menus and basics of the game require you to really concentrate (and can be a bit confusing to begin with) you'll soon be automating jobs like a pro.

This is a fun, addictive game that you'll want to return to time and time again.

8

Nick Smithson