Fill alien caverns with factories in automation game Techtonica

pcgamer.com:

Bringing a new vibe to the factory-building automation genre, Techtonica's neon alien caverns and synthwave soundtrack are a lot of fun to explore and excavate in. Releasing just this week on Steam and Game Pass, Fire Hose Games' debut release is a first-person factory game that follows in the footsteps of Factorio or Satisfactory, but adds literal depth to the formula by setting everything inside a network of subterranean caves on a strange, rogue exoplanet.

The terrain is a big draw here. Not only are the caves really beautiful, but the space constraints and networks of tunnels are a nice twist on what you expect. Exploring the world around your factory is complicated by the twisting nature of variously connected caverns. You've got a crunchy drilling tool to prospect for ore veins and enlarge tunnels, and that's a lot of the fun. Should I repurpose another chamber for this new part of my assembly, or should I enlarge an existing one? A 3D map, the echosketch, helps you wayfind the caverns as you explore.

Since it's in Early Access, the factory-building itself isn't too detailed. That said it has promise, with a complexity that uses Factorio's inserter system alongside Satisfactory's first-person perspective. Figuring out where your conveyor belts should diverge and where they should merge again is as delightful as you might want, and multi-stage productions often have unwanted byproducts to reuse in other industrial processes—you gotta grow a lot of glowing flowers for fuel, but what are you gonna do with all that salt?

There are also hints of a story that draws from the kind of environmental exploration we all loved so much in Subnautica. The game takes place on a rogue planet, Calyx, the subject of a human