An engineering game, as I’d define it, is a game where a primary gameplay element is designing machines for some purpose, weighing conflicting needs such as cost, versatility, and performance. I’ve only played a handful of these games, and I really wish I could find more. Here are some of the ones I’ve enjoyed:
Kerbal Space Program: I’d call this a definitive example of an engineering game, and one I have hundreds of hours in. I absolutely love designing rockets, figuring out what I’ll need for each mission, experimenting with different staging mechanisms to maximize fuel efficiency, pushing my available tools to the absolute limit to land on far-off celestial bodies, etc.
Automation: The Car Company Tycoon Game: Yes, I know, fuck cars, but I’m having fun with this one. There are a lot of different niches you can cater to, and I enjoy specializing in affordable, reliable, fuel-efficient sedans and compact cars against the trend of turning everything into a gas-guzzling behemoth.
Master of Orion: Yes, a DOS game from 1994, and primarily a 4x, but its ship designer has some of the best balance between simplicity and depth I’ve ever seen. Ships have a limited hull capacity, but no fixed number of weapon hardpoints, and they can only fit a handful of special modules, but there are dozens to choose from, with widely varying capabilities. The number of actual choices to make is small, but they involve balancing so many things - durability, damage reduction, damage output, armor penetration, weapon range, maneuverability - and the turn-based combat gives enough control to let you really appreciate the impact your designs have.
Avorion: A space flight sim with highly customizable ships built out of blocks, with fine-grained control over things like engine power, maneuver thrusters, and armor thickness, and cargo bay sizes. I wanted to like this one, but it’s way too grindy for me (building up your reputation with factions takes forever, and they won’t let you buy better ship equipment until you do).
Robocraft: A game where you design a robot and then pit it against other players’ creations in online team battles. My best creations were a spider bot that could scuttle up and over hills and ambush enemies with a massive plasma burst, and an air defense bot with bigass twin AAGs and a shitload of top armor. I had a lot of fun with this one back in the day, but nowadays it’s so deserted that most of the players are bots.
Factorio is the prototypical machine building game. It also has an extensive modding scene.
Dyson Sphere Project is extremely similar to Factorio.
Satisfactory is Factorio but 3d and first person.
Minecraft tech modpacks are usually basically machine building games. Right now I’m playing Create: Astral
I’d recommend not paying money for Factorio. The devs are shitheads. It’s a fun game, just don’t pay money for it.
Entirely reasonable. I’ve had it on steam since way back when I didn’t pirate everything and before the dev made it clear what a shithead he is. CW:
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I’d recommend not paying money for Factorio
Too late by a few years
Which is a shame because I like playing pacifist (keeping my pollution low and prioritizing clean tech like solar panels to not upset the aliens).
Mindistry is a lot like factorio and is free on fDroid (but is also on steam)
Haven’t played the first world but the second one is like factorio x command & conquer.
Workers and Resources: Soviet Republic. City builder/production line game where there’s a good clear RL goal: meet your people’s needs and keep your economy afloat.
gets deep into the weeds with infrastructure. gravity based sewer systems, low, medium, high voltage lines, district heating, realistic waterworks, walkable cities, rail, and of course, good old BRUTALIST architecture.
very much an engineer’s city-builder
I tried to get into this one twice and bounced off both times, which is a shame, because I really wanted to like it. I found it really complicated and fiddly (why do I need to choose which specific model of truck hauls things between two production buildings when the differences between trucks are basically non-existent?) and the tutorials unhelpful (“follow these steps to set up a power line. How do you know which kind of power lines you need? What do these gauges mean? We’re not telling you, onto the next tutorial!”).
I had to watch a few (long) tutorials and play along with them to get the hang of it, but want to get back to it. The “Realistic Mode” was the coolest to me, I’m so sick of city builders where the only factor is how many $ are in the bank.
Try besiege. It’s about building medieval siege engines to knock over castles.
This game is hella fun.
I think most of the Zachtronics games qualify? Cost generally isn’t a factor, but you get a rating based on number of parts used, time it takes for your machine to fulfill the task given, and… some third factor I forget lol.
Exapunks and the others might, but I’m not too familiar with them.
IIRC Infinifactory is considered the best on-ramp for someone new to the genre, but all of them are incredibly complex.
I love Zachtronics’ stuff! Opus Magnum is one of my favorite games. Beat TIS-100 and Opus Magnum, stopped about halfway through Exapunks though, I should really get back into that…
Check out Oxygen Not Included
I just might! I’ve heard good things about that one.
oh man i have some HOURS in that game. I got hooked when I saw the dumb little faces the characters make when they’re pooping, and while I don’t quite understand how to make steam generators and sanitize food using chlorine, I can appreciate the game (my fave bits are the farming and cooking mechanics). There’s some jank since it simulates gas flow (eg. hydrogen floats to the top, carbon dioxide to the bottom), but each tile can only have one kind of gas in it, so you have to be careful when building if you don’t want to end up with someone’s fart in your steam generator.
Infinifactory is a game about designing a factory that turns a set of inputs into a specific output, a different kind of engineering than jn your examples but a cool one to explore nevertheless. It’s got a blocky aesthetic, a puzzle game vibe, and a simple story about joining the resistance to an alien empire.
One of the cool things about Infinifactory is that the “leaderboards” are bell curves that measure different kinds of efficiency - so you could design your factory for high speed, low part count, make it not waste any materials, or some combination of goals and see how your solution measures up to what other players came up with.
Does Dwarf Fortress count?
I feel like it counts because half the game is designing incredibly elaborate ways to automatically delete siege attempts and invasions.
300 goblins? Release the lava reservoir we pumped from the depths of hell earlier.
Minecart machineguns
Supply chains. Requirement to trade for resources if you do not have resources available locally. Keeping various resources on hand because they might be needed for a sudden mood.
Yeah it’s definitely an engineering game. Even water pressure is a factor in contraptions.
I tried to get into Dwarf Fortress but bounced because it was complicated. Might give it another shot. I had a lot of fun playing modded Rimworld and setting up rings of pillboxes and minefields and razor wire to make my colony impenetrable, and Dwarf Fortress sounds like it could scratch that same itch.
The only thing you really need to understand are stockpiles and labour orders.
Your dwarves collect things and put them in stockpiles.
You build workshops.
You set labour orders with things like “make 5 drinks if drinks are below 50”.
This gets automatically assigned to a workshop by a dwarf assigned as an administrator with an office. (middle manager)
Then your orders for creating those drinks are sorted. Now all you have to do is concern yourself with making sure the raw materials for those drinks are going to your stockpiles, and hopefully that you’ve put the stockpile for those materials not too far from the distillery where it’ll be made. This is done by farming or by plant gathering. Which is again something that can be set up with labour orders.
Once you understand stockpiles and labour orders the whole thing clicks. You do not individually assign tasks for dwarves to do. Your dwarves do that. You just set up the chains and locations of stockpiles and workshops.
DF gives you a lot of components you can assemble to do all kinds of things. Lava cannons are popular, land mines made by caging an arbitrary number of dogs inside a single tile then putting it in the way of monsters that destroy buildings, contraptions that can drop the entire space around your fort in to lava with the pull of a switch. Plus the dorfs themselves are components that can be tasked and set loose.
Create mod for minecraft has a lot of this. No magic blocks doing things.
To process a tree down into logs:
- First make a contraption that cuts down the trees and replant saplings
- Then connect up a hub to empty the storage of the tree-cutting contraption onto a belt
- Run the wood on the belt through a saw to split the logs
- Do further processing on logs with other contraptions to turn into other usable resources.
The ultimate goal of Create (without modpacks or anything) is to set up an automation route to bake a cake, but your imagination is really the limit when it comes to what you can do.
Outdated trailer that has only gotten more impressive since then: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rR8W-f9YhYA
If you’re looking for more structured gameplay maybe try the Create: Above and Beyond modpack that provides progression in the form of quests to guide you through Create’s main mechanics.
This looks really cool!
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Space engineers is fun if you can ignore how incredibly crap it is. With some mods applied it can have some decent engineering challenges. I have a severe love hate relationship with that game
the original kerbal guy made some new thing called KitHack model club that i assume is kerbal for RC cars and planes
Uh Subnautica could fall in that category when it comes to building bases and choosing what upgrades to have on mechs and constructs.
Lots of “cost” management when it comes to choosing what raw materials you want to use for whatever project to you have going.
Also a good idea to play if (and Subnautica below zero) before Subnautica 2 comes out in 2025
I like Subnautica a lot, but it strongly resists what I think of as machine building gameplay. Everything is manual and small scale. Even stockpiling materials is resisted by the inventory mechanics.
Yeah ur right, but it’s the easiest to get into. Plus there is the adventure part of the game.
Yeah, Subnautica is great, though I consider it more of an exploration game than an engineering game. Still, a solid rec.
children of a dead earth
you could probably play this game for heat transfer and intermediate aerodynamics lab credit
I’ve actually played this one and loved it! My go-to design is a tiny ship with tissue paper armor and an obscene number of tactical nukes.
Oh man I tried but orbital dynamics are not in my skill set. Extremely cool idea, though. Hard sci-fi space combat is something you almost never see.
So Factorio would be like the ur-example. It’s all about producing very complicated factories. The dev is a squidnozzle so pirate without remorse
Dyson Sphere Program is a cool game about, well, building a Dyson sphere. You have to build huge factories across multiple planets or even star systems to harness the power of the sphere (or swarm). A recent update added an enemy to fight if you’re in to that, but you very much just can build and build and build and build and build
Gratuitous Space Battles is an ancient auto-battler where you build a fleet of ships using various hulls and components then set them up, give them orders, and watch them fight it out with the enemy fleet. There’s lots of options and setting up synergies between ships and taking advantage of enemy weaknesses is important
I think Ostranauts might have this but honestly I have bounced off this game like a brick wall, it’s complex.
Outpost Infinity Siege isn’t this, it’s a weird combination of FPS, extraction shooter, tower defense, base management, and a couple of other htings. But the core loop is - explore, loot stuff, defend your tower to extract stuff, return to base, build new stuff for your tower, then repeat. You have lots of building pieces, machines, turrets, utilities, and so forth you can add to your tower, and it can get quite complex as you try to balance armor, utilities, power, ammunition, while setting up all your turrets for optimum fields of fire and coverage. I’ve spent hours and hours building and tweaking my base. Late game you can set up an ammunition factory, too. There have been many quality of life updates since launch that have made progression much faster and more reliable so it’s easier to get in to now that at launch. Really unique game, there isn’t anything else like it.
A big part of X4: Foundations is building stations, assigning ships to convey resources and products between them, building large factory complexes, setting up trade with the various factions, and managing your tech. It’s really it’s own thing, a very big, complicated, messy space capitalism sandbox. Not nearly as complex as Factorio but I did end up with a bunch of spreadsheets to track my fleets, my station inputs and outputs, and so forth.
Besieged is a fun old doohickey building game. Your task is to blow up a castle or tower or some sheep and the game gives you tons of mechanisms and doodads to stick together. Once you’ve built your machine you turn the simulation on and watch the chaos.
Nebulous: Fleet Command is more or less “The Expanse: The Video Game”. It’s a very granular space combat sim where you design ships, assemble your fleet and go to war in a PvP environment. radar coverage, E-war, jamming, point defense, very granular resource management, and shooting shipping containers full of explosives in huge salvos are all key to gameplay. It’s very very cool.
Rimworld can be this. You’re mostly ordering around your little dudes, but they work a lot like semi-autonomous machines. It’s much much more approachable than the very similar Dorf Fortress.
Astroneer has elements of this but it’s mostly exploring.
With the right mods Fallout IV can involve building a lot of complex gadgets and whatsits to produce resources at your settlements.
Is there a game like this but for constructing buildings, villages, and means of production? I barely play any games, so maybe I’m just describing Minecraft or Civ. But I played Valheim with my friends when that game first came out, and I got so invested in building a village for the group that I didn’t even play the main story line.
Basically I think I’d really be into a game which is like a historical materialism simulator. Starting from building a small village community, building defenses from the elements, improving means of production and discovering new technologies, class conflict as new technologies wipe away the social basis for old traditions, conflict with other civilizations, etc. I feel like I’m just describing Civ (haven’t played) but is there one which is more first-person?
Edit: let’s say it’s a game where you take the role of Hegel’s Spirit but also hop into the body of an individual character at different times, kind of like a cross between Civ and Minecraft. It would be cool if a server would last several months or years, with players logging in and improving the society somewhat. If you don’t log in for a month, you might come back and find that the user base advanced the server from feudalism to capitalism, or maybe two parts of the map went to massive war against each other.
Rimworld, especially with tech/automation mods.
There’s also a game which is interesting as a case study. It’s called Eco, and the premise is basically “minecraft but you have to solve global warming with market-based solutions.” The neat thing is that if you just don’t engage with the market mechanics at all and instead be climate Stalin it’s extremely easy to beat the game and fix global warming.
Just checked both of those out. Eco looks like it might be what I was looking for! Watched a video where a guy joined a server of “red team” and “blue team”, and the reds/socialists way out produced the blues. I think the multiplayer aspect is what intrigues me, as long as it doesn’t allow wreckers to ruin everything.
RimWorld also looks interesting, the randomness mechanic I think is really good for a single player game.
The way simply doing socialist production trivializes Eco reminds me of Vicky 3 players saying that communism is overpowered.
RimWorld is fantastic. People meme about it being a war crimes simulator but I always build postscarcity utopias.
Rimworld players I’ve watched annoy the shit out of me for this. They’ll mod the game to max out difficulty cause they’re hardcore, but then their strat tends to be the cheesiest most boring schlock imaginable.
Absolutely agree. A weird one for me is embrasures. I always mod them in because A. They are a real world extremely effective and dead simple construction for defending fortresses, and B. Club beating rifle because of the way accuracy and distance scaling work in RimWorld is stupid.
But many RimWorld players see them as inherently OP, while preferring goofy ass killboxes that exploit the enemy pathing.
Kenshi has some of this, but… uh… Kenshi is real weird. But you can build a village, set up farming, get beat up by tax men, bake food, get eaten alive by beak things, trade your food for raw materials, fight off murder gorillas, upgrade your industry to produce more sophisticated components, make war on ninjas, begin producing electronics, have your skin melt off in acid rain, and end up cranking out bleeding edge cybernetic prosthetics and giant buster-swords made of alloys that never dull while you try to grow strong enough to defeat the removedster.
I’m just trying to feel out where the bounds of this genre are, have you played Opus Magnum or Armored Core?
Played it and beat it! It’s a fantastic game.
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