Somewhere out in the sunny tropical ocean lies a small little sandbar-island with an upbeat volcano planted squarely in the middle. It's a good life being a volcano, but sometimes a little dull when nothing much is happening for a few decades. One day a traveler washes up ashore and, with nothing better to do, dumps a few bananas in the volcano's caldera to wake it up. Sandbars don't have much room for much of anything so, with a grunt and a tremor, the cheerfully goofy but unquestionably powerful volcano pulls up some land and sees it instantly populated with trees, streams, wheat, and other natural resources. It turns out there's a job for the volcano's inhabitant to do, and while the wonders of unspoiled nature are certainly appealing, saving the world by diverting a comet requires building up an industrial infrastructure rather than kicking back in a sun-drenched paradise.
Automated All My Life, Living In an Island Paradise
Factory Town initially came out way back in 2019, starting a two-year Early Access journey that just kept on going well after the 1.0 release. It was a combination town-builder and automation game where keeping the workers happy was just as important as managing the logistics, with various types of manufacturing workshops needing to be crewed by the townsfolk rather than having items built by automation-standard assemblers. It's still a favorite all these years later, despite a UI that, to put it as kindly as possible, requires patience and a willingness to learn its quirks. Still, that's five years gone at this point, and that's more than enough time to justify a sequel. Factory Town 2: Paradise was officially announced back in March and now, just a couple of months later, has been given a release date of July 14.
Like the first game, Factory Town 2 is coming out in Early Access, plus a demo landing for the Steam Next Fest around June 15. I've been playing the playtest for the last couple of weeks and having a great time with the game, and while at the moment it feels like my experience with the first game is a huge help getting to grips with the new one, understanding the basics is fairly straightforward and there's no time pressure (despite the threat of a world-annihilating comet on the way) to prevent players from experimenting with the systems and figuring out how everything fits together.
Basically, at the start you're alone on the island, but reaching milestones by feeding items into the volcano allows it to shoot out invitations for people to immigrate into a new, welcoming home. Which you need to build, of course, but that's as simple as beating up a couple of trees to gather the needed materials. Each house holds two villagers at the start, although that's expandable once you earn one of the fancier upgrades in the tech tree, and meeting the villagers' needs means the bar indicating when the next new mobile work unit resident will arrive ticks up that much faster.
So- gatherer huts allow the harvesting of resources within a decently-sized radius, whether that be wood, fruit, wheat, ore, etc. Manufacturing stations such as the lumber mill turn raw items into useful things, whether that be carved stone from the mason or fresh bread from the bakery. Each new building needs at least one worker if not more, and they can be upgraded to produce more than one type of recipe for when a product has multiple stages of refinement. Each new product not only can be sold in the marketplace but also donated to the volcano, and leveling up the volcano not only allows the maximum population to increase but also earns points to buy new goodies in the tech tree. It can be a bit overwhelming to know what to go for at first, but so long as villagers are feeding the volcano the points come in at a decent pace, and soon you've got a good-sized town covering not just the island you start on but also other islands with new resources, all of which can be joined together with shipping routes to turn the archipelago into a buzzing hive of happy industry.
One of the fun things in the original Factory Town was the sheer volume of products you could make, from luxury food to magic items, and Factory Town 2: Paradise doesn't look to be short on any of that. One new tech leads to another as the town keeps on growing, and while it can be a little overwhelming at first the internal logic of the game eventually becomes second nature as you set up more intricate production lines. Roads, shipping, trains, water pipes, elevated conveyors running along scaffolding that leaves room for the villagers to run around underneath, and much more all come into play, and there's no rush pressuring you to set up the town with perfect efficiency. Factory Town 2: Paradise is a chill and upbeat game about turning a lonely island into a cute rustic automation empire, and if it knocks a comet out of a collision course to Earth, that's a pretty nice bonus.