Captain of Industry
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About the GameYour journey will start on an abandoned island with a small crew of loyal workers. In order to survive, you will need to mine raw materials from the earth, grow food, build factories, manufacture products, construct vehicles, research new technologies, explore your surroundings, and trade with other islands. If you do things right, you’ll work your way up towards an industrial superpower and you can even start a space program! But this is no easy task and you will be put to the test to keep your settlement alive.
Manufacture products
Start simple – smelt iron, mix concrete, create construction parts, and grow food. Soon you will be able to expand into crude oil processing, electronics, solar panels, data centers, and even rockets. There are over 150 unique products to explore and work with!
Build vehicles and transport products
Logistics systems ensure that trucks will automatically deliver products where they are most needed. You can configure the logistics to make it more efficient. Don’t forget to build enough trucks or upgrade existing ones to keep things moving!
Build conveyor belts and pipes
Use conveyor belts and pipes to route products efficiently and relieve stress on truck-based logistics. The transport system supports vertical stacking and auto-pathing for easy placement. Balancers and sorters also help organize your assembly lines by providing priority and sorting functionalities.
Mine raw resources on fully dynamic terrain
Find the natural riches of your land and use them to expand your empire. Mine coal, iron, copper, gold, or pump underground oil and water! Make open-pit mines to extract valuable ores from underground, or just dump excess rocks into the ocean to create a new land to build on! Remember that no mountain is tall enough for your fleet of excavators!
Additionally, the dynamic terrain system allows you to create access to various levels of elevation throughout your island. Dig or dump terrain to create slopes between hard to reach places so that you can have the most efficient path for your vehicles.
Farm your land
You need to feed your people by growing simple crops such as potatoes. Later, you will be able to grow more advanced crops such as wheat or soybeans and process them to make more kinds of food and products. You can also produce fertilizers and use greenhouses to keep up with the food demands.
Grow your settlement and provide for your people
To staff your factories, farms, and vehicles, you need people, and lots of them. Build housing and provide essentials to your citizens such as food, water, electricity, healthcare, and household goods. Population will grow on its own depending on their health and happiness, but you can also recruit and rescue populations on the world map to help aid your island.
Build complex oil and chemical refineries
Break crude oil down into different usable fractions using multiple refining stages. With the ability to stack pipes you can create compact and scalable plants that can make all the oil-based products you will need for your growing empire.
Research new technologies
Research is a must have! Unlock new buildings and materials and make your factory more efficient. New technologies will change the course of your future. Your factory will grow more efficient and advanced with over 140 technologies to unlock.
Import and export resources to and from your island
Establish shipping lanes with cargo ships to fill the gaps in your production by bringing in various products such as crude oil, wood, or quartz. While the resources on your island may be limited, the world is not! Later you will be also able to establish shipping contracts with other islands for periodic exchange of goods.
Explore the world, trade with allies, fight pirates
Repair and upgrade your ship with better engines, armor, and weapons. Explore your surroundings, find refugees, allied settlements to trade with, discover more resources, and be ready for naval battles with pesky pirates!
Get to space!
Research and develop your way to space flight. Launch a rocket as a true test of your settlement’s accomplishments.
Game Discussion
Steam User 272
Man, I don’t even know where to start...
Remember that carpet from childhood?
The one with little roads and houses printed on it?
And you’d drive hot wheels around like you were the mayor of legotown?
Yeah! This game is that, except now the carpet is an island, your toys are diesel-powered, and you can DIG HOLES IN THE CARPET
The digging
The filling
The terraforming
It’s stupidly satisfying
Therapy? Nah, just give me an excavator and a cliff to flatten
Difficulty? Somewhere between mild anxiety and existential logistics crisis
One wrong pipeline and boom!
Welcome to the Death Spiral™
Farms stop working, trucks go on strike and your fuel economy turns into Mad Max
But if you survive?
That endorphin rush hits like a haul truck
Only gripe:
the ship system feels like I gave a guy a to-do list, pushed him out to sea, then he came back three days later with loot and no explanation. Immersion 7/5
Wishlist:
More variety in construction and hauling machines (holds up picture of Bagger 288 like it’s Simba)
Tunnels?
Moar real piracy on the sea
Anyway
Eternal gratitude to the devs for giving grown-up me a valid excuse to play with dirt, trucks and power plants again
I’m not procrastinating life I’m optimizing throughput
11/10 would terraform myself into a corner again
Steam User 141
I now understand why big companies destroy the planet(pro tip dump trash in the ocean to increase your land)
-Very good game
Steam User 148
As far as factory automation goes, this game is second to only Factorio, which is the highest praise I could possibly muster. Notably, a similar care during development seems to be taken, the game is extremely stable, playable and enjoyable during early access, much like Factorio was, with substantial updates coming.
I highly recommend this game as a result to any Factorio enjoyers, it's a safe buy for you guys.
Edit: yes there is going to be a DLC with trains. Hurr durr, much rage. This game still rocks. My review stays positive, but I'd highly recommend working on the communication and framing the need for a DLC, this one was not smooth guys.
Steam User 101
The 4th Horseman of the factory genre. (Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program) If you like Factory games, pick it up. You will not regret it.
Steam User 75
I've played a lot of production simulator games (Factorio, Satisfactory, car production simulators, etc.) this is one of the best. I worked in an industrial production environment as an engineer my whole career (nuclear power, oil refining, and polymer production), and this game comes as close as I've seen to being realistic as far as production chains go (raws in, finished products out)... not perfect, but the inaccuracies are probably to maintain playability. A definite buy!
Steam User 61
> Launch game for the first time
> "Just gonna see how it starts"
> 12 hours later
> Entire island reshaped, logistics spaghetti, population barely alive
> Forgot food, forgot sleep, waking up in 3 hours
10/10 Great game, sleeping finally
Steam User 51
Captain of Industry is an in-depth industrial, logistics and survival game that balances complex economic management, advanced production chains and demanding resource planning. Where many city-builders focus on stylish urban planning or leisurely economic loops, this game places you in the role of an engineer-captain on a remote island, starting with a handful of survivors and a rusty naval factory. From there, you must build a self-sustaining industrial society from the ground up.
The game stand out by being a production and logistics game first , and a construction game second. The game offers one of the most detailed resource cycles in the genre. Earth is moved in huge quantities with trucks and dumpers, mines gradually sink, the terrain deforms dynamically, and you have to plan your excavation areas to avoid triggering disasters. In addition to classic raw materials such as iron, coal and oil, you will later gain access to refined chemicals, electronics, environmental components and even advanced fuels such as hydrogen.
Everything is integrated into logical, realistic production chains, where errors in one place can destabilize your entire economy. A dry tank of diesel or lack of cooling water can go from a minor problem to a complete production stop in a matter of minutes.
Transportation is a core component. Trucks move almost everything in the beginning, and their routes, fuel, and numbers are critical factors. Later, you can build huge belt networks , pipelines, and conveyor-based superfactories, but planning requires thought—especially when the terrain changes or you've dug up half the island.
The progression is heavily technology-driven. You start with simple mechanics and fuel production and end up, after many hours of play, with full automation, nuclear power, advanced chemical processes and global transport via container ships.
Captain of Industry has a steep learning curve. The UI and tutorials help you along the way, but the complexity of production and logistics requires long-term planning, frequent restructuring, patience and desire to optimize. On the other hand, the reward becomes all the greater when you manage to transform a raw, unproductive island into a hyper-optimized industrial complex that feeds thousands of residents.
The graphics are functional, clear and uncluttered. It's not a visually flashy game like Cities: Skylines, but everything is easy to read, vehicles have good animations, and industrial complexes look impressive when running at full power. The sound effects support the industrial atmosphere well without becoming noisy.
Captain of Industry excels as a deep, complex, and technically demanding industrial simulation that rewards players who love to delve into detail and build gigantic, interconnected production systems. It's one of the most ambitious and satisfying games in its niche - both because it challenges your planning skills and because it offers a rare feeling of building an entire industrialized civilization from scratch. A must for engineering game enthusiasts and logistics geeks.
9/10
DISASTER | BAD | MEDIOCRE | OKAY | GOOD | GREAT | AMAZING | MASTERPIECE
Reviewed on: Win11 Home 64-bit, Intel i5-11600K, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5060 Ti 16GB PRIME, 32GB DDR4-3600 RAM, 2 x Kingston NV1 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD, Internet Broadband 1000/1000 Mbit
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