Autonauts

Abuse countless robotic workers in service of a few do-nothing citizens as you convert pristine natural landscape into an industrial mess. Then once you get home you can come do that in this game as well, except now you have to program the robots instead.

Autonauts is a charming little game about building, programming, and automating your way to efficiency in a colorful, blocky world. It’s quirky, addictive, and brimming with potential. But I have a serious bone to pick with the developers about a glaring issue: apparently, there’s a glitch where every time I sit down to play for "just an hour," two hours mysteriously vanish. My relationships and productivity have taken a hit, though I can’t say I’m complaining.
At first glance, Autonauts feels like a walk in the park. You chop some wood, gather some berries, and train adorable little robots to do all the grunt work for you. Easy-peasy, right? Wrong. As you progress, the game shifts gears from "relaxing village automation" to "I-need-an-engineering-degree-to-optimize-this-nightmare." Don’t get me wrong, the complexity is part of the fun, but every now and then, the tutorial decides to take a coffee break and leave you floundering.
This is where the dreaded Fandom Wiki comes in. Look, I appreciate that there’s an external guide for when the game refuses to explain things properly, but… it’s Fandom. Do you know what it feels like to scroll through neon ads for other wikis while trying to figure out why my robot refuses work? I feel betrayed. A more robust in-game tutorial would be a welcome addition.
Now, it’s worth noting that I’m autistic, which means I often interpret things quite literally and might not always connect the dots as quickly as others. I’ll admit, my tendency to overthink doesn’t help when the game throws ten new crafting recipes at me and says, “Figure it out!” But hey, I’d like to think that adds to the charm of my gaming experience. Sure, I might spend half an hour trying to decipher a mechanic that a ten-year-old could master in five minutes, but isn’t that what games are all about? (No, don’t answer that.)
The true magic of Autonauts lies in its robot army. Programming these little guys is like teaching toddlers how to do chores; adorable, frustrating, and often unintentionally hilarious. Honestly, the chaos is half the fun. Who needs perfection when you have 50 robots enthusiastically failing to complete a task?
Autonauts is a delightful game that balances charm, challenge, and the occasional existential crisis. Yes, the tutorials could be clearer. Yes, the Fandom Wiki is a necessary evil. And yes, the time-warping bug is destroying my life one late-night gaming session at a time. But for all its quirks, Autonauts is a fantastic experience for anyone who enjoys building, programming, and occasionally questioning their life choices.
Would I recommend it? Absolutely. Would I warn you about the inevitable time vortex? Also absolutely. Just don’t expect to get much else done in your life for a while.

The programming element is such a unique take on the automation genre that I really enjoy.
Unlike other games of the genre, this one is packed in a cute colorful art style. It continues to trick me into picking it up for a cozy relaxed couch gaming moment, and then itches my need for optimizing everything.
10/10, will be tricked into spreadsheet gameplay again.

Love it. Very relaxed resource management game with programming elements that can be as simple/complex as you want depending on your taste for efficiency, wrapped up in a nice city-builder progression system. Take your time and enjoy the problem solving process :)

Autonauts is a charming and inventive simulation game that combines the relaxing appeal of base-building with the cerebral satisfaction of programming automation. Developed by Denki and published by Curve Games, the game places you on a colorful, uninhabited planet with the goal of colonizing and industrializing it—not through brute force or efficiency-driven metrics, but through a whimsical, coding-lite approach centered around teaching adorable robots how to do everything for you. The result is a peaceful, open-ended experience that gradually evolves from simple crafting into complex systems engineering.
The game begins with nothing but a land full of natural resources and a basic workbench. You start by manually gathering sticks and stones to craft primitive tools, but it quickly becomes clear that your true power lies in automation. Early on, you build your first robot and teach it tasks by recording your own actions, essentially creating a visual script. This mechanic is the heart of Autonauts, and it’s surprisingly intuitive: you perform an action, your robot mimics it, and then you refine the script with loops, conditionals, and storage instructions. Over time, you develop entire production lines of bots—one chopping trees, another planting saplings, others transporting materials—all working in harmony under your direction.
One of the game’s most engaging aspects is the sense of gradual mastery it fosters. Each new tier of automation builds on the last, forcing you to think in terms of dependencies and process optimization. You’ll eventually create bots to farm, cook, mine, manufacture complex components, and even care for human colonists, who arrive once your society reaches a certain level of sophistication. These humans don’t work or automate, but instead require food, shelter, and entertainment—adding a new layer of responsibility and planning that blends nicely with the otherwise robotic structure of your colony.
The visual style is deliberately low-poly and bright, with bold colors and simple animations that enhance the relaxing atmosphere. The sound design complements this tone with cheerful background music and playful sound effects that make even mundane tasks feel satisfying. It’s a game that invites tinkering without stress. There's no combat, no survival mechanics, and no failure state in the traditional sense—just your growing factory, your increasingly smart little bots, and the complex, self-sufficient civilization you’re slowly building.
Progression in Autonauts is tied to research, which unlocks new crafting stations, tools, and bot upgrades. The pace can feel slow at times, particularly in the mid-game when you're trying to scale up your operations but still dealing with basic bots and short-range tools. However, the ability to upgrade bots with more memory, better locomotion, and specialized tools eventually opens the door to enormous systems. The challenge becomes one of logistics and planning rather than execution, as your own role shifts from laborer to systems architect. It’s deeply satisfying to step back and watch an entire production pipeline hum along without your input.
That said, Autonauts is not without its hurdles. The interface, while clean, can become cluttered as your colony grows and more bots are introduced. Managing dozens or even hundreds of bots—each with their own scripts—can become overwhelming, especially without robust sorting or grouping tools. Some players may also find the learning curve steep, especially if they’re unfamiliar with logic-based systems or coding concepts, though the tutorial and early missions do a decent job of easing newcomers into the mechanics.
Despite these minor flaws, Autonauts succeeds as a creative and meditative take on automation and colony-building. It scratches the itch for logical problem-solving without the high-pressure stakes seen in many factory games. It’s ideal for players who enjoy designing elegant solutions and watching their creations unfold over time. The game's blend of simplicity and depth gives it a unique identity in the genre, and for those who appreciate a slower, more thoughtful approach to automation, Autonauts is a delightfully rewarding experience that can easily consume dozens of hours.
Rating: 8/10

It's a very cute game with the basis in visual programming. The objective is to craft items, to craft more advanced items, to craft more advanced items. The pacing is good. You start out with simple things and as you advance through the stages, it adds slightly more complexity. If you like automation and tweaking things to be more efficient, this is the type of game for you.

There are a lot of neat tricks you can do with the robots, but you're limited in the number of commands you can assign them, so you will have to be efficient in your tasks.
Overall, I'm really enjoying it, and each new stage of the game adds a lot of new fun toys to figure out how to add into your current flow.

On the programming side of things:
You're bound to visual only programming using a recording system. It would be nice if you could type in the commands manually or if the command list had all the options, but you're forced to do the task yourself to show the robot, then you can copy/paste and shift things around using the visual layout. This is mostly likely to prevent someone from just sitting in one spot and programming the bots, and also to prevent overwhelming people.

The programming can be a bit complex at times and requires you to think about how these things function and why:
You can't set any variables nor tag specific items, so you will have to program around that. For agriculture, there doesn't seem to be a way to parse the status of the plants. For example: There are flags for watered, fertilized, and toiled, but you can't tell the robots to check for these flags. You have to simply program around the limitation.
Robots often get stuck on a task if there are multiple robots working on it. Example: Look for the wheelbarrow at X location after finishing Y task. Then another robot grabs the wheelbarrow and walks off with it. The first robot just stands around looking for the wheelbarrow and often won't error out.
There is also an "unreserve" option that I don't recall ever being talked about. When the robots go after an item, they place a reservation on it, which prevents other robots from targetting it. You can unreserve to remove the lock.
There is a checkbox on the loop function that will exit the loop on an error (usually a timeout during an action). I don't recall the game ever telling me about this option, so I was unaware of it until I read some pages about the game itself.

I feel like this is a sleeper hit that more people need to know about. I love automation games like Satisfactory and whenever I'm looking for a new one, I look in "games like Satisfactory" lists, but this one has never come up before.
What an absolute GEM of a game! I'm so glad I finally discovered it. At first look, it seemed simple and cutesy, but wouldn't offer much in the way of "how can I solve this problem more efficiently?". Oh wow was I wrong! I wouldn't say it's complicated (or difficult), but it has depth I wasn't expecting. And the deeper I get, the deeper it goes. It's really fun!
It also somehow manages to make something like programming fun and accessible. This is a great game for kids thinking about getting into it, and veteran programmers alike. My hats off to the developers of this one, you really have something special here!