Genres tend to get standardized after a while. A soulslike will have a strong focus on parrying in a dark and desolate world, character action games focus on the cinematics, farming games have life-sim socialization, etc. Even a genre like automation, which is just a decade old in its current incarnation (Factorio in 2016, although 2011's SpaceChem is the spark that started things off) has expectations that almost every game adheres to. There will be conveyor belts, assemblers in all shapes and sizes, refiners, and a few systems unique to each game to give them their own identity. Whether it's Foundry, Shapez 2, Satisfactory, Little Rocket Lab, and many more, you'll have a rough idea going in of how things work once you've played a couple. But "automation" doesn't technically mean "factory".
There's Gold In Them Thar... Sand?
Sandustry released into Early Access today and takes a pass on most of the automation genre tropes, instead wandering off in its own unique direction. Fusing automation with the falling sand/Powder Toy genre, it's less about building than it is refining one substance into another using heat, cold, water, or just shaking it to get the byproduct you're after. This will be, for the most part, gold, which is needed to buy the tech-tree goodies that turn the latest substance piling up in storage from waste to resource.
Starting off with little more than a jetpack and shovel-hands, you're dropped to the surface of a pristine planet just waiting for someone to come along and turn its dirt into cold, hard, cash. Beating on the earth with the shovel turns it into sand, which is useless by itself but can be dunked in water to make wet sand. Wet sand is a much better substance, seeing as shaking it drops gold, but it also leaves behind a grey substance called, appropriately enough, residue, and all residue does initially is pile up. You've got blocks that can be turned into walls and flooring, and gravity isn't a concern for anything you build, so whether you toss the residue into a pile or quickly build a container to hold it all, there's no reason to be untidy about the byproduct.
While nothing you build costs money, and you can just draw as big a structure as you like, new tech in the research tree is another thing entirely. Purchasing shakers lets you dump the wet sand directly on them to separate gold from residue, conveyors (they had to be in here somewhere) move items horizontally while lifts move them upward, sorters let a specified substance drop through while acting as a conveyor for anything else, and new tools allow you to manually process different substances in new ways. As a falling-sand game, every pixel is simulated and can react in different ways depending on what you hit it with, and while a shovel is great for breaking up dirt, a flamethrower has any number of uses. Melt ice, turn water into steam that recondenses in the sky and rains back down again, burn plants, or convert residue into a more productive substance, a little bit of fire can go a long way, and that's just one of the tools available.
As Sandustry progresses the systems keep getting deeper, and there are ruins and relics scattered about the world to encourage exploring into the planet's depths. A rare purple element lets you power up the tools, sigils tucked away in puzzle rooms grant new abilities, and there are plenty of hidden caverns buried deep beneath the surface filled with the resources needed to keep the gold flowing. It's the kind of game that can easily eat up the hours, as you put together systems then rip them apart to reconfigure them better, integrating new tech and smarter layouts into the sprawling production chain that seemed so efficient when it was first built. Sandustry is an automation game that plays very differently from genre expectations, but the urge it inspires to create a beautifully working system remains the same.
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