There is something simplistic and charming about farming simulators. Collect, gain workers, grow, harvest, and sell. It’s a consistent loop of comfort and routine that almost becomes robotic. Well, in Denki’s upcoming title Autonauts, the robotic feeling of farming is the basis of the actual game:
What had begun as a kickstarter back in October 2017, Autonauts was created by developers Denki, run by Gary Penn. It was to be simplistic and charming farming simulation game where the player is the one person who finds a planet and is on the quest of colonizing it. Find a planet, and begin to collect materials, and use those materials to build machines. And eventually, to build robots. And with the robots, you can begin to build civilization.
However, the robots can only do what you teach them to do. For instance, if players want the robot to chop a tree down, they have to have the robot follow them to a cluster of trees, use whatever they have on hand to chop down a tree, bring back the logs to a machine that will shape them down to wood planks. From there, the robot can begin their life-long situation of chopping down trees and collecting wood. And soon enough, you’ll have an army of workerbots to help you build and create.
Eventually, the amount of time spent in the game, there will be less for the human to work on. As the goal in the game, in a sense, is to do the least amount of work. Because anything the human can do, the robot can copy. And don’t worry, there isn’t anything that can hurt your workerbots, as there is no fail state. If something happens to go wrong, the robots will pause and stop their work until the problem is fixed and they can continue on their duties.
Autonauts is set to come out sometime in Fall of 2019. For more information about the game, check out their Steam page, or the itch.io page.