Early Access Review

I started a co-op factory with a close friend. After a day of work, I stepped back, looked at what we built, and came to some realizations.



1) I have no ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ idea whats going on in this factory

2) Half the components that directly interact with each other aren't even near one another, one of the machines producing copper cable for another machine to assemble into circuit boards is halfway across the ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ refinery

3) 90% of the conveyor belts are underground, and the rest are going so many directions this thing looks like a ball of yarn

4) There is coal ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ EVERYWHERE

5) I maintain enough sanity to count to 5

6) Staring at this thing makes my eyes itch

7) Looking away makes my brain itch



The scariest part is that it keeps getting bigger, and every time it gets bigger it somehow becomes MORE labrynthine. One of those ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ conveyor belts goes all the way around the entire factory to deliver steel plates to a single assembler thats making bloody gears, and its right next to the refinery itself!



Sometimes the factory breaks. We don't usually notice because of how much of a mess this thing is, and the breaks we do spot are often half an hour old and are a recurring problem. Rather than fix it, we simply unjam the machine and ignore it until it breaks again. The biggest problem to fixing it comes from our production lines. Normal production lines look like a grid. Ours looks like you threw a bunch of squares into a bowl of spaghetti noodles and gave the bowl to a five year old for a period of one to five minutes. This proccess results in either an empty bowl and a full five year old, a floor covered in noodles, or spaghetti all over the walls and ceiling with the squares nowhere to be found. Knowing the trend in increasing chaos and complexity the factory exhibits, probably all three.



The factory is an empodiment of madness incomprehensible even to the men who built it, laid every unholy circuit of conveyor belt, a thousand arms madly spinning every second, countless plates of copper and iron in a complex dance the likes of which is unseen in the realm of mere mortals. There are sections that I have no idea how they work, and I BUILT THEM.



The factory grows more complex with each passing second and more convoluted every milisecond. Perhaps the reason is in part due to each segment being constructed with no plans for future additions, then the future additions were constructed by forcibly adapting the existing segments, usually by shoving more tubes into it rather than actually redesigning it, and these futrue additions are also not planned for expansion. The end result is a cluster-♥♥♥♥ so large in magnitude, the last time a cluster-♥♥♥♥ rivaled it in size, God smote the town and turned its inhabitants into salt. Unfortunately no god can save us from this... thing.



Having expanded it further its almost as if the factory has a mind of its own, an ever hungry consciousness burning with dark malevolence and the need to grow. It infects all who stand in its presence, compelling them to add to it. A hundred furnaces belch smoke and the black blood of the earth is torn from its cradle to fuel the fires of industry. The ecosystem is demolished and the skin of the planet is rent and shattered for its glittering treasures, tossed into the inferno of a thousand stone and metal prisons to be transformed, used to expand the malignant blight upon the world that we brought. Ten thousand steel cogs turn and steam fills the air as the never ending fires boil the oceans away to power the sprawling spiderweb of mechanised mayhem, ordered chaos at its purest, a hundred thousand plates of steel and copper cycle and swirl in patterns barely knowable by the very people that created them.



Each day, the red and green fluids are pumped into glowing crystalline globes, each sparking and burning, discovering new knowledge and new machines. The factory grows. Each advance in technology only complicates matters. The factory grows. The new advances create a need for new resources. The factory grows. The new resources require new means of transportation. The factory grows. The new transportation feeds new machines that burn the new resources to produce blue fluids to discover new technology. The factory grows. The blue fluids feed the globes to reveal new truths, beginning the vicious cycle anew, a neverending circle of destruction and growth that will only end when every corner of the planet is scoured clean. The factory grows. The planet will never be scoured clean. The factory grows. The planet is infinite in size. The factory grows. The game will never be over.



The factory grows.







Epilogue:



//: Date: 6/21/[ERROR_NULL_VALUE]



Resources have dried up again. The factory consumes all within its reach, insatiable in its hunger. Though it had experienced full production stoppages in the past, the factory could never be eliminated from the planet by the natives, for the sun itself powered the beams of destruction that maintained its borders. Within the creaking, ancient cogs and permanent haze of foul and polluted smoke, a single humanoid shape slowly rises to its feet. Aged, failing flesh and bone long ago replaced with steel and chrome, once polished and clean, now weathered by uncountable years of exposure to acid rain and blackened by thick, choking smog, form its excuse for a body. It could have left while it was still human, before it was consumed in body by the foundry it created to escape. It never had a chance to leave, mind and soul devoured in the pursuit of freedom. With slow, clanking steps and the steady drip of oil from its joints, like a bleeding mechanical nightmare brought to hideous life, it stands and rasps as it moves for the exit. Behind it, a thousand drones rise like a plague of locusts, ready to continue the endless harvest. As the abomination that was once a man steps towards the gates of the factory, a mighty space faring vessel lies decrepit in its dry dock deep within the core of the facility. It was supposed to be a way off the planet, the whole reason for the factory's construction. But soon, the building of the factory became the means and the end, no thought other than the constant urge to grow in its mind.



The only machine resembling the human form in the entire world stepped out into the barren wasteland of the ruined world. A keening, howling wind tears across the surface, forests destroyed by the ruined atmosphere no longer keeping it in check.



It is the cry of a dead world, echoing forever on a planet overtaken by the machine.