There’s more work to do in a single day than any one person could ever hope to accomplish, but this is why we have automation. Dump dishes in dishwasher and press button, then do something else while that task takes care of itself. Stagger that with laundry so the water-pressure doesn’t give up completely and all of a sudden you’ve got time to goof off while also accomplishing two separate chores! Or do a completely different third task if you want to get all workaholic about things. Automation means all the tasks can be completed by a single lightly-frazzled individual, whether that be getting through the day or setting up home on a brand new world.
Nova Lands is a top-view pixely automation game set on an uninhabited but otherwise lively planet. An energetic explorer has touched down on their new home, which is a decent-sized hexagonal island with a few good resources scattered about the landscape. Another traveler, Camila, landed nearby and promptly took off to the next island over, which is something of a surprise seeing as there only appears to be just the one at the moment. There’s no way to chase after her yet, but the harvesting rod makes short work of turning stones and barren shrubs into rocks and twigs, the landing pod disassembles into brick and steel, and that’s a good start to constructing the first buildings on your new home.
It’s a rough start, though, with only a small handful of basic buildings to work with. The bricks and steel from the landing pods turn into an oxygenator, but that’s the only semi-freebie you’ll get, with the rest needing to be built by harvesting everything the island has to offer. Each rock drops three to four stones and it takes ten to build a furnace, and you’ll need a few of them before things start kicking off properly. There’s no limit to the amount you can build outside of space on the island, though, and any harvested bush or rock pops up again almost instantly somewhere else. Which is good because no matter how much you harvest, you’ll always be wanting just a little bit more.
So twigs go into the furnace to become charcoal, while burning charcoal with rocks in the furnace creates bricks. Charcoal and ore, however, become steel, and a few bricks and steel let you construct the research station. Each research node lets you build something new but you need to pay for them using manufactured resources, with progression gated at a steady, satisfying pace. As research trees go it’s not the biggest you’ll ever run across, but each node is either instantly useful or a step on the path to one that will be needed once you get around to exploring its systems, so think “streamlined” rather than “sparse.” Each new research is also a step on the path to bigger and more intricate automation, taking you from minding every furnace to letting the systems take care of themselves.
The heart of the automation is helper-bots, which come in three types. Collectors can be set to harvest a specific resource and dump it in a deposit area, fighter bots take on hostile wildlife, and logistic bots bring resources to places they’re needed. Set up a collector to harvest ore and place it in a deposit area and the logistic bot will automatically bring it to a furnace set to produce steel, for example. The bots are sent from a bot antenna, one per island, and each antenna can only control a couple at a time so you’ll need to think about what needs to be automated and what doesn’t. The antennas can be upgraded as the game progresses, though, and once you get a feel for how they work, the five-bot-per-island maximum limit doesn’t feel too restrictive.
After you’ve got a good base things soon start getting nicely out of hand in the way automation games almost always do, as one system and another interact to create what seems like a nightmare sprawl, but makes perfect sense in your head seeing as you’re the one who built each item. Bigger furnaces create more items at once and come with a holding area rather than just spewing the output on the ground, refineries and assemblers make different types of product but require electricity from power stations, farms auto-grow plants and ranches tend to various types of critters, and all of it fits together to create tech that starts at rocks and twigs and ends with hypercomputers and other fancy goodies.
Along the way to all the shiny new tech are new islands with different resources or quests on them. One of the earlier islands finds Camila again, as well as a number of other residents, each of which have something to trade in a continuing chain of upgrades. Eventually you’re able to even build and decorate a little home there, if you can spare the money for it. A space station has a number of shops and mini-games, all of which cost money earned from fulfilling contracts on shipping out items that could just as well be used to upgrade the ever-growing techno-madhouse you’ve transformed the new planet into. Nova Lands does a great job of tossing curveballs now and then to break up the automation, which includes a couple of boss fights that also have ways to avoid the confrontation entirely if you can just figure out the puzzle.
Closing Comments:
Nova Lands isn’t the deepest automation game around, but it’s also not trying to be Satisfactory orDyson Sphere Projectso doesn’t need to be. What it is is a great little adventure with a fun, satisfying sense of progression that rarely feels overwhelming, making it a perfect gateway for people who haven’t played this kind of game before. On top of that there’s a lot of personality in its details, whether that be excellent cartoon art of its characters (one of which is Ru Paul in all but name, running a boutique letting you change your character to any of dozens of possible looks whenever you’d like) to a radar station for finding new islands that’s a Nintendo 64 with an antenna stuck on top. The straightforward nature of its systems makes it easy to create complex setups, with dozens of machines all working together to produce the components that go in the assemblers that construct the parts that are needed for more advanced devices. It does get complicated at the end, of course, but by then Nova Lands will have gently guided you through the logic needed to get there, and even for hardened automation fans it’s still fun to kick back with a game that doesn’t require an advanced degree in systems management to see all it has to offer. It’s a brand new world that could use a couple hundred buildings to take advantage of all it’s got to offer, and with a little automation backed up by halfway decent logistics, a single settler can make it their home.
Nova Lands
In Behemutt’s Nova Lands, you’ll head off to a fresh, unexplored planet, where you’re tasked with gathering resources and building an automated base. This will allow you to explore further, discovering new islands and battling strrange creatures.
