A Week's Worth of Robo-Programming in Craftomation 101 Open Beta - Hardcore Gamer

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It’s always kind of impressive how complexity can come from a handful of simple interactions.  A couple of sticks arranged just right can become a machine, or basic math plots intricate curves.  Throw in language to pack ideas down into a few letters and things can get out of hand pretty quickly, especially when programming takes effect across multiple robots performing their own routines in sync with each other.  No single piece of the operation is anything like complicated, breaking down to “go here” or “do this”, and when you build each part it doesn’t seem difficult until you step back for a moment to take stock and realize a small legion of bots is working autonomously to defrost an ice planet, all powered by the programming you dumped in their mechanical heads.

Automation comes in many different forms and Craftomation 101 ignores the factories for individually-programmed robots trundling across the landscape to terraform a frozen planet.  Any resource a robot can interact with you can too, performing all the necessary actions to get the colony ready, but there’s more to do at once than one person can handle and besides, that would be an awful lot of work.  Far better to have the bots do it for you, harvesting materials and combining them into new forms to spread out a small patch of warmth across the planet’s surface.  Two rocks combine into a spark, a spark and lump of coal combine into fire, and fire can be placed into a bonfire site to melt the surrounding area, uncovering new resources and sometimes even thawing out the metal bodies of other lost robots.

The programming interface starts off fairly easy, with commands like “find & pick” to scavenge an item, complete with an empty box you can use to define