Building Blocks

Modulus: Factory Automation pitches itself as a chill and relaxing take on factory-building games like Factorio or Satisfactory, and I think that's a solid summary.

There are no enemies to fight, no weapons or defenses to build; and most buildings don't need upkeep resources like electricity or fuel. (Some late-game structures do have such requirements, but they're really the exception.) Modulus presents a very light plot - assemble robots and deliver them to a human colony - with a slight but still-straightforward twist of "monument" building instructions sent by a mysterious signal.

The factory components you work with in Modulus are all abstract shapes -- not like Factorio's iron gears made from iron plates, or like Satisfactory's rotors made from iron rods and screws, or even like Infinifactory's missiles made from a warhead and rockets and chassis sections. Here your manufacturing goals are three-dimensional arrangements of voxel-like cubes, in simple primary colors.

So there's not much in the way of immersive motivation or narrative stakes. Modulus is a game about plugging pieces together to fit a target output image; and as you move forward in the tech tree, those outputs become inputs to something else, often making you re-examine and refactor old machinery for higher throughput.

It's a relatively pure flow-control and optimization game. Which is great, if you're into that kind of thing. And I am! Although I miss the incidental sense of world-building that comes from assembling gears or rotors or rockets ... optimizing block factories is still fun.

Modulus does a mostly-good job of gradually increasing in complexity, though there were a few unexpected spikes that disrupted my flow state. Like the sudden increase in intermediate steps needed to make yellow paint (and hence yellow cubes). And like the stunted utility of freighters to transport components across the map; they become available relatively early, but a freighter-count limit forces you to keep fiddling with unwieldy conveyor belts for some time.

And especially the endgame-stage "GNN Gate" structure's resource requirements. By this time in the game, I'd already delivered the maximum amount of Bots and Androids and et cetera, so I demolished those factories and built other stuff over them ... and then the Gate revealed its input requirements. Blurgh.

But hey, I rolled up my sleeves and built new robot assembly lines anyway. I couldn't let Modulus defeat me so close to the end.

I do want to note a handful of quality-of-life issues, especially when managing freighter logistics: renaming freight hubs doesn't update the hub list in real-time, and that list isn't sorted in any coherent way. Modulus is still pretty new, though, so it's entirely possible that future patches will fix these things up.

Imperfections aside, Modulus did a great job of scratching my itch for a new automation game. And after putting in ... shit, nearly 100 hours!? Yeah, I'd say that it was worthwhile.

Better than: I dunno, No Man's Sky? Not many other factory-builders in my resume, yet.
Not as good as: Satisfactory
Roughly comparable, kinda, to: Factorio, which was more immersive but also - in retrospect - more annoying to work in.