Factorish: the belt that keeps working while you sleep
There is a specific pleasure in placing a miner, running a belt from it to a furnace and from the furnace to an assembler, then simply watching iron turn itself into parts. Factorish is that, entirely in the browser, with nothing to install.
The first fifteen minutes
It starts dull and manual: find a deposit, drop a miner on it, run a belt to a furnace. The furnace smelts ore into plates, the assembler turns plates into parts. While there is one chain, the game feels simple.
Trouble arrives at chain number three. One furnace idles because all the ore is going to the other. An assembler sits with a full input and a blocked output. That is where splitters, buffer chests and your first real design decision show up: how do you route the flows so nothing waits?
Power changes the game
While everything is hand-fed you are just laying lines. The moment assemblers come online you need energy, and energy is its own subsystem: a boiler burns coal, heats water, and steam travels down pipes to an engine. Forget to feed the boiler and it is not the boiler that stops — it is the whole factory on the far side of the map. That loop, production feeding power and power feeding production, is what makes this an engineering problem rather than a timekiller.
Things worth doing immediately
- Do not economise on space. Dense builds look great and cannot be extended; late game you will be dismantling the pretty parts.
- A chest after the furnace is not a luxury, it is a buffer — it smooths mining hiccups and keeps assemblers fed.
- Coal deserves its own dedicated line. Furnaces want it, boilers want it, and it is always the thing you run short of.
- Toggle the fluid overlay with the button — do not try to trace pipes by eye.
Who it is for
Anyone who, as a kid, connected pieces not to finish a build but to see whether the thing would run. The map is endless and procedural, so there is no ceiling and you set your own goal. A good bar: a factory that ran for ten minutes untouched and stalled nowhere.