The initial layout.
Welcome to the crazy world of factory idle!
Factory idle is an Idle Game about building and running a fully automated factory. You set up machines to buy resources, process them, and sell them, and hook them all together with conveyor belts. After that, it gets complicated.
A Spin-Off, Factory Idle Missions, is a Puzzle Game using similar conveyor belt mechanics to sort different quantities of differently coloured boxes into corresponding outputs. It starts simple but quickly gets complicated fast.
You can play Factory Idle here
and Factory Idle Missions over here.
Not to be confused with Reactor Idle, an Idle Game by the same developer about managing power reactors.
This game provides examples of:
- Adam Smith Hates Your Guts: Your first factory building costs $100. Two much-smaller buildings next to it cost $700 and $1200, and another nearby building of about the same size costs $140 million. There's really no rhyme or reason to land pricing, except to make sure that buying the next building is always a milestone.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- When hovering over a new machine, the description pane will have a little diagram of just what other machines you need to feed into it to make it run at 100% efficiency, even in weird cases like needing to feed 3 of one machine into 2 of another, or if one input machine can feed multiples of the machine you're looking at.
- When hovering over an existing machine, it will tell you the efficiency it's running at. This is extremely helpful when it comes to checking where a potential mistake has been made in your setup.
- Upgrades that require you to reorganize your factory can be refunded for 80% of the purchase price. Components are refunded for 100%. So if you make a mistake, you're never stuck with it.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: At first, you start out selling Iron and Steel. You upgrade to selling Plastics and Electronics which require almost entirely different resources. After that, you're back to metals again, this time producing Guns. After that, you're using a mix of metals and electronics to produce Engines. This all sounds quite random initially, until the final stages, where you produce Tanks that require Guns and Engines to produce, bringing all the production line resources together in one "finale". Ditto for Drones, which require Steel, Plastic, Electronics, Guns, Aluminium, and Engines to produce.
- Anti Poop-Socking: Oddly for an idle game, quitting the game entirely rewards you with "bonus ticks" to use in fast-forward mode when you return.
- Artificial Stupidity: Machines that produce more than one output will not selectively sort the outputs onto the conveyors with the intended outputs. One has to either build a sorter or find a way around their... weird nature of sorting.
- Attack Drone: You start building these one step after building tanks. These require you to build the drones, as well as the drone control room.
- Bribing Your Way to Victory: In the "extras" menu. You can buy time-travel tickets (that just give you 3 hours of profits outright) or more bonus ticks. There's also a pair of one-time upgrades, each of which unlock another one-time upgrade.
- Disaster Dominoes: If you accidentally feed too much input to something, the conveyors will eventually jam and back up all the way to the component itself, preventing it from outputting on that belt. If you're taking advantage of output sorting, this is... not good. Worst-case scenario, the jam can cascade all the way to your basic components and stop production entirely.
- Do Well, But Not Perfect: Certain level achievements for Missions require that you fail the level to get them.
- Inventory Management Puzzle: Can you squeeze just one more steel foundry setup into your building? And buying upgrades will make you reshuffle everything as all your machines now have different requirements and outputs.
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Minimalist Run: Certain achievements in Missions require that you use the lowest possible amount of conveyor belts to beat the level. - Nintendo Hard:
- Factory Idle outright says in the intro that it's hard for an Idle Game.
- Factory Idle Missions also outright states in its intro that the missions are really hard.
- Spin-Off: Factory Idle Missions, a Puzzle Game mode of Factory Idle that requires you to build conveyor belts to put different numbers of differently coloured boxes into different outputs. Like Factory Idle, it is far harder than it sounds.
- Tank Goodness: What your factories will eventually be producing in the late-game. These need to be assembled hull and turret separately, then assembled together with an engine. Later on, they can also have diesel and rocket launcher add-ons to increase their value.
