Assembly Planter

🌎 Overview 🌏

Assembly Planter is an enjoyable and cheap entry into the automation genre that is perfect for any fans of the genre. Conveyors are all here, but they way resources are generated puts an interesting spin on the genre to create something that feels unique.

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Game Breakdown

🎮 Gameplay 🎮

Resources & Plants
At the beginning of the game, the player starts off with a hoe, a blade, and a few plant seeds. Seeds can only be planted in soil that had been hoed out, removing the grass. Once the grass is gone and the seeds are planted, it will take five seconds and the plants that were sown will pop to adulthood. They can then be harvested by the blade. This is a little tedious, but it is the basis of the early game and is the main reasoning behind wanting to automate the process. This same process progresses into the mid-game, where more resources are required. Every resource has to be grown, though it isn’t too hard to replant. Soil only needs to be hoed once and then plants can simply be regrown there endlessly. The player is able to click and hold to replant endlessly on the soil and it works the same way for the blade when it comes to harvesting. There are upgrades to the blade later on that helps as when it is used it has a cooldown before it can be used again.

Crafting
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2187786212
Crafting is quite simple and it is done at one of the few crafting tables that the player gets access to later on with more resources. Crafting is time based and large orders of objects will take quite a while. That is why automation is so important, because it becomes inefficient to craft objects by hand after a while. There are a few things that can’t be crafted at the crafting table.

Compost & Sieving
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2187787396
Dirt can be gained not by crafting, but an endless supply is available by using the hoe on the ground infinitely. This isn’t very efficient, so the player soon gets access to compost pots which take the biomass gained from early plants and turns it into soil at an efficient rate which reduces the amount of manual labor the player has to do early on. Plant seeds also can’t be crafted, which is why the sieves are so important. By sieving dirt in one of the sieves of various qualities, different seeds will pop out. This is how higher tier seeds are created as well which are very important as they are required to create the automated machines that will allow player to focus instead on increased efficiency instead of doing everything by hand.

Automation
Automation is similar to other automation based games. There are harvesters and planters which will plant the seeds a player has and then send the materials on their way on conveyor belts. One machine can lead to another machine, but the main way to move resources around requires the hub. A central hub will spit the finished resources that have been collected on the conveyor belts into the player’s inventory. It is unique and an interesting concept that I haven’t seen explored in other automation games. What I dislike is how the items then come out of the player’s inventory. This requires a machine called a puller, which will take a specified amount of resources each second and insert it into the attached machine. My difficulty was that I was unable to get all of my machines to share the resources. Due to the fact that machines have an inner inventory that can hold a stack of resources that is quite large and some pullers seem to have priority over others as some of my machines would starve while others were nearly full. I was also saddened that there wasn’t any way early game to get the resources from a conveyor belt into a machine.

Shrinking Machine
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2187786592
Once a player has reached a high enough tier, they are able to unlock the shrinking machine play area. This allows a player to take a certain amount of play area and turn it into a single machine. This is first accomplished by unlocking the barn with a key recipe found in the tutorial book. The player must then have a shrinking block that will be required to make a one block machine. The player may then create as many of these specialized one block machines as they want as long as they have the required resources. I do wish there was a way to look inside of a completed machine as I forgot what I had put into some of my earliest designs and wanted to analyze them for an improved version. I also found that the shrinking machine produces errors sometimes but doesn’t give a reason as to why it isn’t happy with a design.

Transmutation
The late game way to generate resources. Transmuting resources skips a majority of the planting steps and goes straight to turning some resources into others. This is the best way to get massive amounts of copper and iron as well as a sizable source of gold.

📚 Story 📚

Automation games don’t usually have a story and this game is no exception

🎧 Sound 🎧

The sound effects in this game are nice. They don’t layer over one another and there is a satisfying cutting sound that occurs whenever the player uses their sword to collect resources from a plant. The music, however, is extremely repetitive and I was unable to listen to it for very long.

📺 Graphics 📺

The graphics are three-dimensional models. The lighting on these models looks quite good with the graphics on high. The models themselves look a bit rough, especially the iron plant.

⌨ Controls ⌨

The game controls well with a keyboard and mouse. I liked that the inventory bar infinitely elongated, but I do wish it was easier to move around an item’s place in the order. Controls are smooth and I never had any issues with them. There also is a satisfying control scheme to plant and pick up resources.

⚙ Performance & Bugs ⚙

[table]
[tr]
[td]Specs[/td]

[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Cpu:[/td]
[td]AMD FX-8350[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]GPU:[/td]
[td]GTX 1080[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]RAM:[/td]
[td]16 GB [/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]HDD:[/td]
[td]7200RPM 2 TB[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]SSD:[/td]
[td]Corsair 240 GB[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

Easy to Alt-Tab: Yes
The game is a bit buggy at the moment. There were times when I was unable to do anything and had to save and restart my game. This only really happened in the early game. The shrinking machine also has trouble identifying outputs which causes difficulty while using it. Finally, I really wish the options menu was located in the game menu instead of inside the tutorial book as I found myself taking the book off my hotbar and then I had to read it to change a key later on.

💰 Replayability & Price to Content Ratio 💰

The game has a pretty good return on value due to its cheap price. More time could be spent automating, but the shrinking machine doesn’t seem to always work. The replayability is rather low though as the game doesn’t change in any way if it is played again.

PrCR: 1x – Good Value

🌟 Overall 🌟

👍 Pros 👍
A fun entry into the automation genre
Shrinking mechanic is fun

👎 Cons 👎
Repetitive Music

[table]
[tr]
[td]Gameplay[/td]
[td]9/10[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Story[/td]
[td]NA/10[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Controls[/td]
[td]7/10[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Sound[/td]
[td]5/10[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Graphics[/td]
[td]7/10[/td]
[/tr]
[tr]
[td]Game Length[/td]
[td]8/10[/td]
[/tr]
[/table]

👑 Final Rating: 7.2 👑

This is a tough review to write: I am not sure what to make of this game. I am giving it a thumbs-up because of its unique gimmick, but I feel that the execution of this gimmick is badly implemented. That is to say, this game has 20 levels, and the first dozen or so can be done as a farming game, where you literally farm ingredients using a hoe and a knife. These levels also can be done in a few hours. Then suddenly, the 'shrinking barn' is opened, and a relaxing farm game suddenly becomes a factory game of machines and conveyor belts. And then in level 18 the game turns into a timed puzzle game where you have to manufacture 1000 wood in under 5 seconds and stuff like that.

I promised myself that if I solved the puzzles at the end-- which I did-- then I'd give the game a thumb's up as all achievements are doable and I certainly got many hours out of it. However, the game has many flaws beyond the schizoid level design, so buyer beware: the manual is terrible. The U.I. is terrible. Adding ingredients to a machine is a pain in the rear end. Trying to figure out how to build your first machine on your own was beyond me, so I had to look at a guide; turns out I had the right concept and idea, but the game is finicky about which machine can be connected to which. Also, a set-up that works great in the field may work terribly in the barn, and vice-versa. (And the game sometimes crashes, but this is an Unreal issue, so it may work fine for you.) Finally, the reason my number of hours in the game is so high is that it took me four tries to crack it. I played once a year ago, gave up, and only picked it up again a month back on a whim, determined to figure it out.

And I did, but you might not have my patience or willingness to grind, honed from many years of playing tower-defense games, roguelike games and idle/clicker games. If you're not in the mood for an endless grind of conveyor belts, then this game isn't for you.

It is a very charming automation game about making the most of the little space you have. The concept of recursive custom machines is a very fun one and reminds me of compact claustrophobia, a minecraft modpack I absolutely loved.

That said, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ I haven't played a game this much anti-QoL. Like, wow!

It should be now mandatory for any game implementing an inventory system that
left click is pick up stack,
right click is pick half stack,
left click while holding stack is place stack,
right click with stack is place 1,
shift left click is transfert stack,
shift right click should transfert half.

This game uses left click to transfert 1 item, shift left click to transfert stack (good), ctrl left click to transfert half, right click is only used to open GUIs, because the game refuses to allow you to clear your hand of items. If you empty your selected item, the game will immediately select the one next to it. If that's the hammer, well yay, you're now breaking your items and need to replace em.

There's no interface to see how much of an item you're producing, so hope you got Excel nearby to manually note your production

Copy and pasting your settings from one puller to another doesn't exists, gotta set em manually for each and every one. Same for seed sifter, and the UI to set the seed is extremely infuriating, popping up over other machines that you want to configure, or hiding before you've selected the right seed. There is no indication of what seed is selected if you're not highlighting the machine.

The game calculates how much a compact machine will produce, it won't simulate it working, and in its calculations, it takes in account the fact that regular splitters do a 50 50 split (so if you chain 4 machines with splitters, 1st gets 50%, 2nd 25% and the 2 last get 12.5%), so and will reduce its efficiency if you don't actively work to balance the splits. This is a nice mechanic, WHICH IS EXPLAINED NOWHERE.

So, while I find the premise of this game extremely good, and at its price point, it's an absolute steal, the game raises my blood pressure so damn much that I can't recommend it to other players.

If you do play it, expect REALLY annoying jank and tedium. But, if you can survive said jank and tedium, it's a fun game.