The road of game development can be a weird one, with periods of regular news being followed by long bouts of silence plus varying levels of access to early builds. Open alphas, closed alphas, Early Access, and various forms of testing get the game into players' hands while providing important feedback, but the gathered information doesn’t do much good if there’s no time to integrate it properly. In the case of Foundry its alpha periodwent well enoughthe game waspicked upby a publisher, leading to a long period of silence after the Steam demo got pulled last November while the entire game received a full overhaul. Now it’s back with a huge number of changes, available for the duration of the Steam Next Fest before it disappears again.
The demo’s return was officially announced last week as Paradox Interactive revealed that it was the secret publisher, with Foundry joining games like Cities: Skylines and Crusader Kings in its library. The developer Meder Dynamics also underwent a name change to the somewhat-less-Google-able Channel 3 Entertainment, but the real news was the return of Foundry’s demo with all the new world generation upgrades and research tweaks, fully playable up through the second major milestone in the game.
Foundry is a factory-building game set in an infinite procedurally-generate Minecraft-style world. The terrain is made up of the familiar blocks, all of them breakable with varying levels of effort, and the object is to mine the ore blocks so they can be smelted into basic building units that can be further refined into components that are then assembled into buildings, tools, and assorted resources. The very first few items are hand-built out of components but once a few assemblers are hooked up to conveyor belts the automation kicks in properly and the factory takes off from there.
There’s a lot of new material in the updated Foundry, starting with an opening cinematic of the player’s arrival on the planet in a drop pod. The pod doubles as a base that lets you refine xenoferrite (literally alien iron) and technum (not-literally copper) into the initial components, plus modify your robot’s color scheme by entering the door in its back. The landing site will be right near a patch of each of the two starting ores and may also be near a patch of water, which is another major new resource used primarily for steam-powered energy. Meanwhile, up in the sky is the broken wreckage of a spaceship, hinting strongly that there’s no way off this planet that you don’t build yourself.
The bulk of the rest of the new content has to do with the flow of technology upgrades, which will be noticeable if you played the game last year and irrelevant if you didn’t. The basic flow of tech is that it’s bought with manufactured technology packs, and the demo lets you play with everything you can discover from the first two plus an endlessly-upgradeable mining efficiency modifier that technically isn’t supposed to be until the third pack but acts nicely as an excuse to keep on building for as long as the demo is available. The new trailer below is from the publisher announcement, but for a look at fun bits to come there’s also one showing off assembly line production from a few weeks back you can seeover here. There’s a lot more to come, but for now Foundry’s demo is back for a limited time to tide everyone over until the as-yet-unannounced Early Access release date.
