I got a little too into sorting my rocks in this game about a drone factory on the moon

Okay so recently released early access base-building factory building game The Crust is set on the moon, where your job is to take little autonomous drones and have them rebuild spacefaring society in the wake of a tremendous natural disaster that wrecks almost all the other infrastructure on the moon. A big part of that, naturally, is moon rocks. You grind those up and turn them into the kinds of stuff you'd need from rocks you mined on the moon: Steel, silicon, titanium, aluminum. You automate up a manufacturing base with fabricators and assemblers and all the other obvious and expected trappings of the factory building genre.

That's all pretty standard, we'll get back to it later. The good part is the moon rocks.

Rather than make the (obvious, boring) genre-standard choice of having you just suck perfect ore out of the ground and transmute it into usable materials via alchemy, or whatever, The Crust makes you process it. Everything you pull out has a purity, expressed as percentages of iron, aluminum, silicon, titanium, and slag. At first you can only process ore for one thing: Iron only, for example. That's fine when you're pulling from the richer underground veins near your base. Later on, however, you send out these giant earth munching monsters to suck up rocks by the ton and send masses of more generalized ore back… and for me, that's what the game became about.

Ore handling is a really cool, really tricky industrial problem that I've only seen done well in one other game—the excellent Captain of Industry—and it's handled here in a slightly different way that makes for differently compelling gameplay. In The Crust, making a system of processors capable of moving the separated ore is easy. The hard part is figuring out how to ensure that it doesn't consistently run dry of one type of ore when you switch from processing 40% titanium to processing 3% titanium ore.

How do you ensure it doesn't back up hopelessly when you do the opposite? How do you ensure that your masses of slag are efficiently moved away and made into concrete? These are the good questions, and they're why we play factory and automation games.

It's probably worth saying at this point that the reason I fixated on the ore processing is because much of the rest of The Crust's early access launch is mediocre. The factories themselves are pretty bog-standard sets of expandable matching parts that are easily solved: X silicon smelters and Y rare metals smelters per Z factories and such. The design does at least have this background element of disaster, meaning that you want to make as much as possible as fast as possible and then get it out of the factory and into your customers' hands immediately. That means you're focusing on throughput and delivery, which could actually be very interesting—most factory games won't ever penalize you for having products back up on the line, but The Crust's emphasis on delivered product will definitely make you feel the sting of not having turned that giant pile of iron into machine parts yesterday.

Unfortunately, that's pretty heavily undermined by the design at launch—some products take ages to manufacture, and NPC corporations are happy to demand timed orders of things you can't conceivably make that much of without taking hours, or could literally never deliver in time given the speed of your sad little moon rovers, or for things you can't even make yet. Or all three at once.

And then the gruesomely bad machine-voiced characters will be rude at you for failing the impossible, or tell you that a family of nice moon miners just died because you didn't get their stuck door fixed in time, or whatever.

Lady, just let me sort my ore in peace, okay?

The trap that The Crust falls into is really the legacy of how mobile games have affected modern strategy game design. It has a lot of timed, rate-based economies going on at once with a handful of ways available to bypass or speed up those interaction if you're doing well enough—there are no microtransactions here, but a lot of the things you do with your cash in The Crust feel like the kind of things you do with your in-game currencies in mobile games: Research new unlocks faster, give a permanent boost to a single building, buy a vehicle from a tier you haven't unlocked.

Pacing stuff like that can be fixed, though, and I think that this early on The Crust has a promising foundation that it can double down on, tweak for less grueling gameplay that respects players' time more, and get to a really good factory game by the end. It might not, though—I'm not entirely sure if this narrative campaign can pull it together. I've enjoyed unexpected mixes of narrative and strategy before—most notably the blending in Per Aspera—but that had Troy Baker, not a machine-drawn portrait rattling off machine-spoken lines.

Anyway, what I can definitively say is that it has some enjoyable rock sorting. I keep going back to the problem I left the game on: I need to ramp up production, and that means more space will have to be dedicated to machines utilizing all that sorted ore. The question is whether to expand above-ground production directly off of the sorted ore lines or shunt sections of the specific ores into the belowground area. See, because a belowground setup can benefit from colonists living in underground habitats to boost productivity. On the other hand, an aboveground setup has simpler conveyor belt lines that can lead directly into the shipping terminals.

I'm gonna stop writing, grab a snack, and see which of those treats my moon rocks better in practice.