I really tried to like Techtonica but I couldn't. And it doesn't help that the game was abandoned, the game suddenly jumped from version 0.5 to 1.0 and everything that made the game fun was butchered to fit a badly designed progression system.
In Techtonica you play as a "Ground Breaker", an employee of a mining corporation which build a base on the alien planet Calyx. When you wake up from cryosleep however, the base has become derelict, most machines are unoperational and all your colleagues have disappeared. The few you find had their conciousness transferred into strange alien cubes through which they communicate with you.
Techtonica is an automation game that combines elements from Factorio, Satisfactory and even a little bit of Subnautica. But don't get too excited because the game tries some unique ideas that simply don't work. As usual in a factory game, you build mining drills to harvest ore, smelt said ore into bars and then produce a wide variety of items and machines from the metal. Grabbers and conveyor belts help you to automate the proccess so you can focus on exploration and base building. All of thi ssounds very simple and it is until you see the absolute horribly designed crafting tree. In Factorio, which most consider the gold standard in automation games, most of the early game items and machines are created from three simple materials: iron plates, iron gears and circuit boards. Iron plates are directly created by smelting iron ore and the plates cen be directly crafted into iron gear, so two of the important parts build into each other. Circuit boards are created by smelting copper into plates, then create wire and then use wire with iron plates to create the final product. If you look at this logically you notice that from iron plates alone you can create three finished products, the iron plates themselves, gears and the rest can be used to create the circuit boards. And from these items you then can create more mining drills, conveyor belts, grabbers and so on.
How does Techtonica handle early game crafting? Iron bars can be converted into iron components, iron frames, mechanical components and electrical components. Copper bars can be crafted into copper components, copper frames, copper wires, mechanical components and (as wires) into electrical components. Wow, that's a lot of parts, surely we don't need all of them right at the beginning? Nope, you need all of them because all the early game machines need them to some extent. Mining drills, conveyor belts, grabbers, assemblers as well as the plant based production which is also part of the early game all need these materials to be constructed. And you can either rely on handcrafting to do that or automate all of that. Yeah, you get overwhelmed quickly and even the game lampshades this by saying "yeah, you might feel overwhelmed but just try to find it out yourself, that's part of the fun". And while they might have a point here, experimenting and finding out how to build a factory is what makes the genre enjoyable, overwhelming the player with an overcomplicated crafting tree right from the start is not helpful. There is a reason why Factorios crafting tree starts of simple but becomes complicated later on, it eases the player into the creation process and helps them to understand how to build up a working factory before facing more difficult problems.
But crafting isn't the only issue, research was botched too. The game handles this in multiple layers. First you have an attempt to copy Satisfactories milestone system. You have a goal to deliver specifc parts to terminals and doing so unlocks parts of the tech tree. Then you have to scan destroyed machines to get access to other parts of the tech tree, just like Subnautica. And then you have to craft and place physical research cores to have enough computing power to finally gain access to techs you want. The whole tech tree is actually a glorified skill tree in which you craft physical talent points that you place in the world. Eventually you will fill up entire caves with these glowing orbs, I hope you have a good computer because your performance might suffer.
Imagine if you had to place all the science packs you created in Factorio somewhere in the game world instead of sending them to a research lab where they are consumed. You would loose your mind at some point. The game tries to make this easier later by giving you a platform that automates the process, you just need to automate the production of the cores and send them to the platform, it will place them all on top of it. Eventually you still run out of space and have to place more of them but it saves you time. If you feel fancy however, you can try to build a house out of these cores.
One of the worst examples how the full release was butchered however is what they did to the map. 0.5 had a big open map to explore, players could, once they had the drilling tool, go anywhere and find all the machine parts on their own to progress. The game would direct players to new locations by sending materials to the terminals, not what it currently does. That way players could naturally progress by doing the objectives or alternatively could explore on their own which was more fun.
But the devs hate fun and decided "You know what this game needs? Layers!" So they cut up the map and put the pieces on different floors. Now you need an elevator to reach those (loading screen included) and said elevator needs to be filled with drill bits so it can dig the shaft for it to traverse. This is the main progression system of th egame, reach floor, learn new techs, automate dril bits, deliver drill bits to elevator so you can get to next floor. But the game wasn't designed to be cut up like this, so resources and technology are now only found on specfic floors. The first floor only has mining stuff, second floor starts with assemblers and the horrible crank generators that are required to power up electric machines, third floor has power storage so you don't have to turn on your crank generators every 10 minutes and the fourth floor finally has water wheels so you can automate energy generation.
To fully automate your base you have to go through four different floors and do stuff in tiny steps, all while still having to go through the overcomplicated tech and crafting tree.
This game could not have made the early progression worse and it goes on like this since there are of course many more floors to gatekeep you from the fun.
Luckily you can delvier materials to the elevator and transport them to floors you need them on, but that's the bare minimum they could do to make this concept not entirely frustrating.
And I like the idea overall, dig your way deeper down, deliver your goods with the elevator to where you need them, but this would have worked better if the game was designed with this in mind from the start, which it wasn't. It was designed for an open world to explore and you feel that. You constantly hit wall after wall because you are missing one resource, one tech or anything to automate your factory and it realy frustrates me. But luckily you still can play 0.5, the arguebly superior build, on a beta branch. If you want to buy and play the game, at least do yourself a favor and play that version of the game.
But honestly, you are better off not buying th egame since the devs completely dropped the ball, there has been 0 patches since release, not even bug fixes. And everyone knows, no game comes out in perfect stae, there will be bugs that need to be afdressed and this game is no exception. I assume devs ran out of money, panicked and tried to rush it out, hoping that would attract more players but instead it flopped harder since the release was botched and so they gave up entirely. Which is a shame, the game has good visuals, a great world to explore and I like the overall premise of an underground factory game compared to all the other ones above ground.
