Kubifaktorium is a game currently being developed by Mirko Studio, which is currently one man, Dr Mirko Seithe. It’s a 3D, voxel-based colony management and automation game in which the player is tasked with ensuring the survival of his colony by recruiting new colonists, producing resources and using complex machinery to automate these processes.

So you are tasked to build, manage and grow a colony, once you are established you will need to discover new lands and later you will craft legendary weapons to defeat your enemies.

There are currently two functional biomes but the game will feature many more and exploiting the resources of each by creating machinery and production chains to grab everything you need is the main order of business.

The gameplay is fabulous, it feels really stable and you get the sense that this is a competent programmer.

You have to set up production lines that will gather resources, convert them into other useful items and then store everything in the most efficient way possible. Actually, I suppose you could be very inefficient but I don’t know why you would.

You can assign roles to each colonist and get a break down of their skills by selecting them. This will give you the best idea of where to use each one.

You can use bonfires to set areas that your colonists are and are not able to travel into, this means you can separate tasks in a very real way and its very easy to get caught up in the minutia of each production line.

The colonist’s skills will change over time based on the roles assigned to them. They could be miners or farmers or part of a production crew or even weapon manufacturers but suffice to say the more they do the same job the higher in that skill they will become.

Using the colonists in the most efficient way is key as they have a limited amount of work power. Crafting the right machines and automating as much of each process as possible is very rewarding and despite its early access status I am yet to encounter any game destroying bugs.

As with all games of this type having resources where you need them is often the biggest challenge and in Kubifaktorium there are a lot of ways of moving goods. Trains, Zeppelins to the more traditional carts or even conveyer belts all keep things moving nicely but I seem to be unable to avoid bottlenecks.

Sorting and storing items using automated depots which have an insertion point and storage for specific items is overwhelming initially but the tutorial is well thought out and gives you the basic skills you need to do most tasks.

Remembering where each command is can be difficult but after a short period of time adjusting to the nuances of the game and I was very competently creating a complex (if fatally flawed) set up.

I really like the game so far and I am having a great time just figuring out the best way to get things done.

It’s nice to see a game this early in development being supportive to the modding community. There are currently 41 mods in the Steam Workshop but this number will grow and will add many more years of life to Kubifaktorium.