Caliche

[Image] CALICHE is a single-player industrial builder in early access. The Halden Extraction Group sends you to Morne, a dry desert planet, with a command center, twenty residents and a stock of steel. What the company wants back is refined veyrite, as much of it as you can ship. You start small, with a well, a greenhouse, a few solar panels, an iron extractor and a foundry. Many hours later, mines and refineries cover the basin and spill over the ridges around it, and the shuttle keeps coming back for more. Nobody asks what happens to the planet. [Image] [Image] Morne has iron, copper, silica, veyrite, caliche and uranium. Surface deposits run out, so the extractor that fed your first foundry will eventually go quiet. When it does, you move on to new ground, or dig the seam underneath once you have the research for it. Later still, deep borers reach a layer that never runs dry, at a high price in steel, concrete and power. An extractor only works the ore around it, so where you put it matters. Some of the richest ground is hidden under stained patches that only a survey station can read. [Image] [Image] Iron ore goes into foundries and comes out as steel. Copper turns into wiring, silica into silicon, and from there the chains grow into components, electronics, concrete, fuel rods, veyrite alloy and industrial machinery. Buildings cost materials, delivered to the site by truck and put together by your workers, so most new production lines start because the next building you want needs something you don't make yet. Veyrite refining gets better as you go. The first refinery is small and wasteful. Kilns, arc furnaces and finally a refining complex built in two sections get more out of the same ore, and want more power and water in return. Automated plants need far fewer workers and a lot more power, which starts to look like a good deal when housing can't keep up. [Image] [Image] Refined veyrite goes to your export pads, and the company shuttle comes down to pick it up. Sixteen export milestones, from 10 units to 30,000, release new generations of research, and the last one gets you better terms with the company. The last four milestones each release a stage of Halden's orbital lift: its anchor station, then three tethers. Each stage sends refined veyrite straight to orbit, opens four more squares of the plain and takes one freight contract, in which you send a good up and Halden sends another down. The fourth tether fulfils the company's contract, and the colony carries on. You start with the four squares of land around your command center. Each milestone earns you one more, and you choose which. It might be more iron next door, a thermal site for geothermal power, or a stained patch out on the pale flats that could be deep veyrite. There are 36 squares in all, and the company would like every one of them. [Image] [Image] Trucks carry the goods along the roads you build, ten units a load at first and up to twenty with research. A long haul or a crowded junction slows down a whole production line, and you can watch it happen on the road. Warehouses keep stock close to where it's needed. A day lasts twenty minutes, six of them at night, so your solar panels need batteries behind them until geothermal plants and fission reactors come along. Residents need water and food to work at full strength, and newcomers only arrive when there's room, water and food for them. Late in the game, residential towers and vertical farms fit more people and more food on less ground. When a building stops, its page tells you why, and the production view shows where each material comes from and where it goes. [Image] [Image] • Single-player industrial builder with a strategic camera • 18 goods, over 50 buildings and 40 technologies • 16 export milestones and 36 squares of land to claim • Halden's orbital lift, built in four stages over the last four milestones, with freight contracts to orbit • Three mineral layers, from deposits that run out to a deep layer that never does • Trucks carrying real loads on the roads you build • A 20-minute day and night cycle • Copy whole districts and place them elsewhere • Optional guidance and an illustrated in-game guide • Named colonies, autosaves and a colony library • 21 achievements Caliche is in early access: balance and content will keep changing, and your colonies carry over from one update to the next. The game is in English.