STEADY STATE

Your factory gets graded. An operations director gives you orders: so much plate, so much wire, so many circuits a minute. When you think your site can deliver them, it measures what actually arrives. Every order has to arrive at its rate, at the same time, for thirty seconds. The grade card. Every certificate is graded on three things. WASTE is how much of what you mined you threw away. SEAM SUPPORT is how well you backfill the ground you mine. SURPLUS is how close you came to exactly what was ordered. Each gets a letter from D to S. A grade never locks anything away, and a better card brings the next unlock sooner. Rebuilding for an S is up to you. Old orders stay on the book. A line you built three orders ago is still being asked for while you prove the next one. Two Directives ask for nothing new at all: each doubles three lines you already run, and the endless book keeps doing the same. Every new line has to fit in without starving the old ones. The ground decides what you get. Nine kinds of seam, and they come up mixed, so ore has to be sorted before it can be smelted. A mine you backfill keeps giving its full output. Of the 91 recipes, 54 are alternates for 28 of the products, and the right one depends on what your ground gave you. Power comes from coal, gas, the sun, the vents in the rock and later a reactor, and the sun sets every evening. Belts, rail, drones and rockets. Belts carry the short runs and can dive underground. For the long ones you lay track and run trains between your stations, with signals so several trains can share a line. Drones fetch the small loads. You walk the site as its engineer, and a fleet of constructors builds what you place. Everything you deliver leaves on rockets from a launch platform you build. A world that keeps going. Every world grows from a seed: pick one, or roll a new one. The map has no edge. After the twelfth Directive the book keeps asking for more, and you can prospect empty ground for new seams wherever you stand, so the factory can spread as far as you want to take it. Site 7. A director has been reading this ground alone for four hundred years. It can measure and judge, but it cannot build. You can. Twelve Directives take you from the first mine to the end of the commissioning schedule, and after that the book keeps going. Features - Whole-site certification: every order at once, measured live, graded D to S - A standing order book: old orders never go away - Twelve Directives, then an endless book - A new world from every seed, and a map with no edge - Prospect for new seams and keep building outward for as long as you like - 41 buildings, 48 items and 91 recipes, 54 of them alternates - Nine kinds of seam: mixed ore to sort, mines to backfill - Belts that dive underground, trains with signals, drones and rockets - Coal, gas, solar with batteries, geothermal and a reactor, through day and night - A built-in ratio calculator and live rate readouts - Wrecks from the old site to salvage - Blueprints shared on the Steam Workshop, and mod support - Seven tutorials - 23 achievements - No combat and no game over. Pause, or run at ×2 or ×4. Offline, single-player