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 95
I really love this game, it's an excellent factory sim with a port theme to it. I recommend a try for fans of the genre or crunchy city builders like Workers and Resources.
The game is currently being review-bombed because they decided to released paid DLC while in early access. I agree with the criticism on how this update has been marketed; they should declare the game a full release before paywalling content. When you buy an early access game, there is an implication that you haven't quite "gotten what you paid for" until the 1.0 release, so dropping paid DLCs feels wrong.
That said, I thought it was important to say that the game itself is awesome and deserve the thumb's up.
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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Steam User 41
it's all so familiar. start in a rush and forgot to plan for the future. tech debt piling only up. workarounds becoming permanent solutions. people are counting on you and you don't know what to do, where to go. 10/10 will face my incompetence again.
Steam User 37
Yeah this is my "preferred" factory/automation game.
I really just want to build a normal looking 20 to 21st century factory with a god camera, and this game lets me do that.
Not a gearpunk, alien, high sci-fi first person one (although those games are great too).
Steam User 36
An in-depth factory game with a realistic presentation and a cool terraforming system. HOWEVER:
This factory game is not remotely for beginners.
There are a lot of quirks and particular nuances. Even with 1k hours in Factorio, 500 in Satisfactory, hundreds in Dyson, and having built many mega-bases in my time, programmed them all, etc...there are still a lot of specifics to COI. Furthermore if I had none of that prior experience with factory games, this would be an incredibly hard game to learn the genre on compared to the other two due to how punishing it is when you make just about any mistake.
Still in EA so I will hold final judgement and see how much they're willing to streamline or add some of the QOL features. This feels like it could carve out its own niche in a crowded genre in time. Different than the others mentioned and worthy of its own unique attention.
Steam User 34
As someone who really enjoyed Satisfactory, the Crust, Techtonica I can tell you:
if you like factory games with a dash of Tropico and Transport Tycoon, get Captain of Industry!
This game is absolutely fantastic, I am 250+hrs in, and some highlights:
- Graphics and volumetric terrain system are absolutely amazing
- Every single factory automation game could learn from CoI how the filtering and priorities should be implemented. The way balancers and output/input settings work is pure poetry. As a fellow game designer - different genre though - kudos to people who came up with these!
- I love how the game changes over time, providing always a fresh bottleneck and a goal
- Incredible scope of the game - shaping the island, building factories, exploring oceans and fighting occasional enemies - and a space station! Crazy good variety
All in all, if you wandered whether to buy this game - yes, yes, yes!
Steam User 39
I am not entirely certain why but I have a bit of an obsession with games like this. Both in this game and in Oxygen Not Included I have a tendancy to start the game, learn a little, restart the game, learn a little, restart the game over and over and over and over again. I am not certain why but I find this a very relaxing and chill way to play games. It's likely due to my AuDHD wanting the chaos of learning, but the optimized perfection of a clean and highly efficient start. I expect that I will be restarting and continuing repeatedly until I have completely optimized the early game with the precise number of vehicles, buildings, food, and workers. It's a really great game, very well thought out.