Rootlands (demo)

You are Roots.

A small robot waking on a small island, long after the last of everything. The soil is good, the sea is patient, and the machines still remember how to work; someone just has to be the hands.

Dig ore with your own arms until the arms can be replaced: furnaces first, then boilers and steam, then the first electric current humming through copper wire. Rootlands is a factory game in the Factorio tradition with GregTech's love of the long chain, but the map is not a continent. It is thirteen islands in a shallow sea, joined by plank bridges you build yourself, and no single one of them has everything you need.

The islands are the puzzle.

Some islands hold ore and it does not grow back. Some are groves, thick with trees. One is a pasture where the animals live. Expanding means committing to a route: a bridge, a belt line across it, and a decision about what that island is going to be for. Underground belts can span a bridge but cannot sit on one. Pipes can sit on a bridge; underground pipes cannot. The sea shapes the factory.