Factories gotta build, it’s just what they do. It doesn’t matter if they construct components, elements, shapes, random widgets, snacks for the elder gods, robots, or star-sized constructs, they all start small and then scale upwards nearly forever as their output increases. Generally, though, they make one component out of another, assembling two or more pieces into a brand-new whole. Product goes into what’s functionally a black box, new product comes out after the assembler’s mysterious internal processes are complete. The recipes may be ridiculous at points (three steel pipes and eight spindles of wire make a single stator, Satisfactory?) but so long as the internal logic is good all is forgiven. Modulus, on the other hand, uses its factories to create voxel structures, and each cut and merge is internally consistent and all voxels accounted for.
Following Instructions First, Following Creativity Second
Modulus is an automation game from the chilled, laid-back side of the genre, and it’s been going through playtesting for several months now. While the end goal has yet to be revealed the process of building up is unique in the genre, in that the smaller voxel-manipulating structures exist to supply a set of components to the larger buildings, but while the components have a set structure the path to creating it is left to the user. The items from the large buildings are more like the standard factory game output, such as bot cores that get turned into bots in the next structure down the line before being exported, but the heart of the game is free-form building of voxel constructs to keep the big buildings humming along.
Four Elemental Blocks to Build the Universe in Fakutori Demo
The Fakutori demo is a meaty chunk of game with a good eight hours of play, depending on how deep into its automation mechanics you want to dive.
The first couple structures are fairly straightforward. Outcroppings of polyrock are scattered around the edge of the large platforms that make up the map. Drop a few miners down, run conveyors from four miners into one smelter, and that’s the first four by four by four voxel cube. That’s not a needed shape, though, so the next step is to cut it into chunks and reassemble them into something a bit more useful. This is done primarily through three different structures, all of which function at thirty operations per minute. Cutters chop things at a width varying between one to four voxels, assemblers put two shapes together any which way you’d like, and the stamper knocks a rectangular hole out of a shape in a user-defined size. There are other buildings to paint shapes in various colors as well, and many of the required blocks need to be assembled from multiple colored pieces.
The first major building wants two shapes to get to work, two by two by eight and two by four by eight. Ok, that’s easy enough, divide a cube in half, split the conveyor leaving the slicer in two, send both sides into an assembler, and then get the first hint of the freedom in Modulus' construction. When you click on the assembler it doesn’t use a pre-built recipe but rather takes you inside to arrange the inputs any way you’d like. The tutorial at the start is fairly strict so for now the best plan is to put the two halves of the cube end to end, merging both two by four by four pieces into a single two by four by eight, dump a splitter outside the assembler, run one of the conveyors through a cutter to divide it in half lengthwise, and that’s the first building supplied. Playing around to try and build Final Fantasy sprites can come later. There’s no real need to build voxel ducks, dinosaurs, cars, assorted geometric shapes, or anything else other than the required parts, but the tools are there to create with and it’s hard to resist seeing what they can do.
The Modulus demo is available todaythrough Steam, still a work in progress but filled with potential. Whether you want to follow the path of the main mode or poke around in the sandbox, the game combines the creativity of a voxel editor with the satisfaction of dozens of automated processes working in sync, all ticking away to create both the needed pre-defined items plus whatever ideas you think might be fun to put together.
