Rough game design

The game is about excavation of old tech, washing/sorting, disassembly, handling sushi belts, recovery of components, and finally reconstruction. Those tasks will roughly fit into 3 tiers -- not hard barriers, but distinct game phases.

Phase 1

Excavating ancient garbage / trash. This is straight forward like mining ores, except for the requirement to learn how to work with the energy beams.

Washing and processing of generic resources: ice, machines, weapons, canisters and bio-waste. Nothing really new here as early recipes are similar to most factory games. Slight variations on: route inputs via belt into a machine, power it, extract products with predictable amounts. Don't worry too much about scaling or efficiency yet.

Learn about dumping waste products: junk, dirt, sludge. These will factor back into the later game recipes, but there will always be excess items around and learning how to run the dump pits is necessary to avoid factory deadlock.

Learn about energy beam branching, splitting primary colours and combining secondary colours. There is a way to cross primary beams but it might not be obvious yet.

Early HUB goals are small and incremental tutorials: deliver N units of X.

First real HUB goal is to craft the first product: AI Candles.

Phase 2

More complex predictable recipes unlocked building on phase 1.

First batch of less predictable recipes with product yield probabilities, for sorting and classification of junk. For eg a 10% chance of finding item A and a 20% chance for item B. Unsuccessfully-classified junk is returned and can be fed back into inputs. Number of possible outputs  requires different belt layouts. Items will show up that are not useful yet and must be handled somehow.

The first HUB goal is about scaling up phase 1 plus waste processing:

• Craft AGI Candles
• Recover lost Cryptowallets and Knife Missiles from junk

The second HUB goal is more scaling up and some heavy compute:

• Craft ASI Candles
• Crack Cryptowallets to recover ancient Cryptocoins
• Recover Nano Missiles

Phases 1 and 2 recipes exist in the game and, while likely to be very unbalanced, it's possible to complete phase 2 and reach a placeholder HUB goal that simply demands a huge number of everything.

Phase 3

This phase isn't built yet and is really still a bunch of ideas in the recipe book window. The general plan is:

• Scan for large buried and semi-intact ancient tech on the map. A ship. A Reactor. A giant robot
• Retool the factory to reconstruct them. This is slow, like building a wonder in Civ or launching the rocket in Factorio
• Rewards / upgrades / leader-board for each completed project... or something :)