I was looking for a factorio-alike on iOS to give me my fix of belts, resource production and maths when I stumbled upon Sandship: Crafting factory. A free-to-play title where you run a huge ship going through a desert, building internal facilities to craft various items, complete missions, level up and keep at it with new content always showing up. The core mechanics are okay, but the free to play timers, boosters and other tricks ruined the experience for me, as they usually do in this kind of game.
The game starts fairly simply and interestingly. You have the same concept as with many of these games - resource generating structures produce materials that you transform into other materials to either craft further items, or turn them in for completion. What S:CF does differently that I kinda liked is that items have “heat” levels as they go through your factory floor. Metal ore needs to be at a certain temperature to be pressed into bars and it needs to be cool enough to be extruded into rods, for instance. This gives you a reason to have certain belt lengths or to control the temperature through other means.
Things quickly devolve, however, because you need to unlock new technologies and increase your level as you progress, this requires resources that you can produce, which makes sense and special items obtained in random packs that can be opened after a certain amount of time. Worse yet, researching new tech also takes time - and not special resources, like in other games - so you either pay up premium currency, or you wait. Which is really unfortunate, because as a paid game most would still make sense. You would go through quests by crafting items and complete quests, but just removing everything requiring a timer would keep the game brisk and forward-moving. Now instead I had to stop playing just to wait for timers to go down.
This is a shame, because I really dig the style of this game. Going through quests and progressively unlocking materials, crafting systems and tools while slowly improving your sandship and the size of your crafting area is pretty cool, but everything that gates your progress is too free-to-play for my tastes. I’ll still be looking for my factorio-alike that I can enjoy on iOS, but Sandship: Crafting Factory ain’t it.
