Turns out that fantasy Factorio is a pretty good idea, and if you doubt me try the MoteMancer demo
Who wants to set up a flow of magical stuff to create more magical stuff? Who, I ask, wants some magical automation? Me, it turns out, and probably you, and probably lots of other people who like automation games.
MoteMancer, the debut game from indie studio CyanAvatar, has you as an alchemical apprentice in charge of automating a magical factory across six elemental planes and a magical tech tree worthy of the name.
And look, it's based on a hex-grid. I'm not going to pretend that doesn't factor into the appeal. It stands out from the pack of Factorio inspired-bys and I am easily charmed by hexagons.
MoteMancer's Steam Next Fest demo is still available. At first it piqued my interest, and then it devoured four hours of my evening. It nails the fantasy of being a research wizard who makes odd alchemical devices from plant-and-steel-and-stone elemental contraptions. You've even got spells—fountains of mana to power your buildings, flight to move over obstacles, telekinetic nudges, and even twisting the position of the sun around to suit you.
Rather than raw materials or ores, MoteMancer has you draw elemental motes from veins of magical energy. Six types of them. It's neat, because right off the bat you know exactly what pieces you'll be using to make everything in the game. Mixing elemental motes gives you new, different materials, from basics like salt and aether that you distill into basic magical devices to pure elemental forms that let you create ever-more-complex devices.
That also goes to its research system, which is pretty novel for the genre: The rather large research tree is divided by element, but it's also simultaneous: You don't have to choose just one goal, but rather just feed in the correct ingredients to your research buildings and watch as it makes progress toward whatever's available. It's neat in that you can work toward more than one goal at a time, yes, but also be surprised as the new resources you unlock and feed into your greater machine cascade into unexpected discoveries.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about MoteMancer—aside from the neat hexes, again, which are a genuinely refreshing layout challenge compared to yet another staid grabber-and-conveyor grid—where was I? Perhaps the most interesting thing about MoteMancer is that there are six worlds to explore and automate through.
The first is the plane of life, but the other planes are coterminous with the one you start on. They're all overlaid on top of each other, which I can only imagine is going to create some wild puzzles to build once you're really expanding into another world.
Each plane also has its own slice of available elements: As an example, going to the air plane means you don't have earth magic available anymore, which means you can't use the standard little earth hands to move things to and from your conveyor belts—so you have to use a new, different shaped air magic device to grab and move materials.
That little bit of variety is exciting just because it'll make you figure out new layouts. In effect, each plane's factory will have its own unique bits of puzzle to work on without just copy-and-pasting what you've already done.
CyanAvatar says that progress on the demo may carry over to the full game, and that the demo as it exists now is a slice from their live development version of the game, not a curated piece.