BlockFactory

The old world is gone.

You wake up in a cryo capsule deep inside a bunker. The power is out, and the war that wiped out the Ancients ended long ago. Up on the surface there is nothing but barren steppe, endless ore fields and ruins.

There is only one way out: build a factory. A big one. The Factory must grow!

BlockFactory is a factory-automation overhaul for Hytale, inspired by Factorio and Satisfactory. It replaces the base game with its own world, its own tech tree and one long goal on the horizon.

Early Access. Many models, textures, sounds and recipes are still placeholders, and the balancing will change.

Please read "Important before installing" at the bottom first.

What you do

It starts small. A Wooden Drill on an iron field, a Brick Furnace next to it, a belt between the two. Soon the furnace can't keep up, so you build a second one, then a power grid, then a train to fetch ore from a field further out. At some point you notice you haven't mined a block by hand in an hour.

Somewhere out on the steppe stands the Great Portal, a ruin from the old world. Opening it again is what the whole factory works towards, and belts and furnaces won't get you there on their own.

What's in the mod

• A world of its own. A flat steppe with rivers, lakes and low mountains, generated by the mod. Ore fields never run dry and get bigger and richer the further you go. Ruins are guarded by War Golems. You never carry an axe or a pickaxe: hold left click and the whole tree or rock comes down.
• Research by curiosity. Goblins and Golems study what your factory makes. They get bored of seeing the same thing over and over, so a varied factory researches faster than one that only makes plates. What they find out unlocks new machines for your whole team.
• Workers from another world. The Portal of the Ancient calls in Goblins, Golems and Outlanders. They staff your research centers, refineries and reactors. Goblins also carry items between your chests and build your blueprints.
• Logistics. Belts, grabbers, splitters, pipes, visible power lines, and trains with stations, schedules and signals. You can climb into the locomotive and drive. Don't stand on the tracks.
• Blueprints. Copy part of your factory, see it as a hologram, turn it and paste it somewhere else. To upgrade a belt or machine, place the better one on top of it.
• The Programmable Interface. Control your machines with a few lines of code in a small language of its own, and watch the editor show the values live.
• Enemies. Dust Burrows spread across the steppe, and the louder your factory gets, the more of their creatures come looking. Build towers and walls, or turn on peaceful mode if you just want to build.
• Multiplayer. Teams share research, pick their own color and get a team chat. Server owners decide on PvP, raids and protection for new or offline teams.
• Music and sound. An original soundtrack that changes as your factory grows, and machines that hum, hiss and clank while they work. The steppe wind gets quieter the bigger your factory gets.
• Cutscenes for the big moments, like waking up in the bunker or the first attack.

Lost? The Field Manual in your inventory (or /recipes) shows what makes an item, what it's used for and which research unlocks it.

Wiki, bug reports and translations

Everything around the mod lives in the BlockFactory-Wiki repository on GitHub:

• The Wiki explains machines, research and the Programmable Interface.
• Issues are the place for bugs, wrong texts, questions and ideas.
• BlockFactory speaks English and German so far. If you want to bring it to your language, read CONTRIBUTING.md. You don't need to know how to code, and half a translation is better than none.

Important before installing

• BlockFactory replaces the base game. It becomes the world generator for every new world, removes vanilla crafting recipes and creature spawns, and only its own blocks can be placed or broken. Give it its own server or install folder.
• Start a new world. Existing worlds are not converted.
• Singleplayer: tick BlockFactory under "Mods" in the settings of a new world before you create it.
• Saves may break between Early Access versions. If a newer version generates the world differently, an older world refuses to start, and the server log says why. Keep playing that world on the older version or start a new one.
• Server owners can tune ore frequency, size and richness (also per resource), nest density, peaceful mode and the multiplayer rules in the world's config.json. Do this before the first start: changing the resource settings later can break your world. Research test times are in the mod's own config.json under mods/com.mutigeraffe_blockfactory/ (in singleplayer, inside the world's save folder).