It becomes a game about tinkering, about inching toward a solution in incremental steps of tuning. When things go wrong, the flaw in your plan is immediately obvious. While the earliest puzzles can usually be solved simply by hovering above the stage and making a diligent mental plan, soon enough you'll need to use trial and error to test your solutions, ironing out issues and perfecting the timings of your belts. Enormous variety and ingenuity derives from a relatively small palette of tools (just eighteen different block types, in total). There are 'Welder Blocks', which allow you to fuse cargo together into wild shapes, or Rotator Blocks, which will allow you to spin the bricks in 45-degree increments. When one block passes next to a Sensor, the Pusher will trigger, shunting another block elsewhere on your network of conveyor belts onto a new pathway, allowing you to split the load. Soon you're provided access to Sensor Blocks, which can be paired with Pusher Blocks (using conduit pipes that link the two). But soon your employers introduce new stipulations such as particular arrangements of blocks, or cargo that's been diverted to arrive at multiple destinations.Īs the demands expand, so too does your stock of tools. Initially, you need only lay an unbroken string of conveyor bricks around obstacles to guide the cargo to its destination. This fundamental job description barely changes throughout your career, but the complexity of the challenge scales alarmingly. You can listen to their 'failure logs' to hear about their lives or how they died - usually through mental exertion, or boredom. Dead astronauts lay either in plain view or tucked away in most stages. In most cases, you need only send ten blocks to the exit to complete the day's work, at which point you're returned to your cell. The cargo must land on the conveyor and arrive at its destination intact, and in the correct alignment. When you're satisfied you've completed the task, you start the motor. Your task each day is simple: guide an incoming stream of cargo blocks to an exit point by laying a conveyor belt, segment by segment. It's easy to forget about worker's rights when your job is, essentially, to solve spatial cryptic crosswords. For one thing, the work itself is provides a glorious challenge and diversion. It's not all bad here in the galactic factory, though. Well, let's just say there is no health and safety officer here on the Infinifactory floor. While you're provided with a jetpack, useful for hovering over your workplace to gain a better vantage point on the day's work, if you step off the edge of a cliff and forget to engage the boosters. There are no toilet breaks and you can forget about joining a union (for one thing, the only colleagues you ever meet are dead ones). Space-suited bodies of fallen workers lay slumped against rocks, usually clutching an audio recording (dubbed, miserably, a 'failure log') on which their final words are recorded. Out in the field things aren't much better. After a day spent working the craters, you must return to a cell (provided by your employers, a race of tall-shouldered, gruff aliens) where your only comfort is a pillow-free bed, a pile of brown food pellets and, if you've been performing well, perhaps an old VHS tape to keep you company ( sans player, or TV). It turns out that the life of the average sweatshop factory worker is no more comfortable in space than here on Earth. When your input rate is too fast for your factory to handle, spillage at a conveyor belt corner will be included in the footprint.Infinifactory is a rare and ingenious treat: a puzzle game that allows players to combine creativity and logic to craft their own solutions. Also in puzzles where the initial direction of an input is away from the output in either the x or the y dimension, you can save a few footprint points with the technique of doubling back either above or below the fixed input conveyor. For example you can use one conveyor belt above another to transport two streams of blocks with half the footprint of transporting them side by side. Removing conveyor belts and pushing parts along the ground will reduce the block count, but that solution metric didn't exist until the most recent update it won't reduce the footprint. Any z-column in which you placed a factory component while editing your solution will be included in the footprint when you start it running, and the footprint will increase when blocks move into never occupied columns. Assuming a z-up co-ordinate system, the footprint is increased by 1 when a block enters the z-column of an x-y co-ordinate for the first time.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |