Builderment is a neat little free factorio-a-like on iOS where you mine resources, build things, transform things, carry things around to transform them some more and use them to research new technologies, allowing you usually to build different things, but sometimes also serve as upgrades for your existing factories. The overall gameplay loop is fun enough and I had a good time, even if the existence of a premium currency used only for strange cosmetic buildings and the need to have gold if you want to build or upgrade things makes the economy of the game quite strange, and that being on IOS, the controls are not perfect either - although they do work nicely.
Starting with nothing, you build a research lab, some resource extractors and use conveyor belts to move wooden logs to it. I find funny how certain UIs in the game are just native iOS popups, but what is less amusing is how difficult it is to get info in certain situations, do I have to press and hold an icon to know what a thing does? A small info button would’ve helped.
Then the tutorial is more or less over and you are thrown into the loop of the game. You build extractors on resource tiles, they produce X resources per second, you combine a bunch of extractors by sending them all to the same conveyor belt, so you have X times that number of resources per second, limited by the speed of the conveyor belts. Then if you want to build things with those resources, you have to allocate them to your building facilities based on the production rate of the facility and how much resource you want from it. Produce too much, your conveyor belts will be fully clogged, not enough and you’ll have to wait before your materials trickle in.
In order to help you manage all that, you can build conveyor belts, underground belt and splitter belts. Everything works more-or-less as you would expect it, with a few issues here and there. Underground belts are pretty finnicky and will only work if you place them correctly on the first try - otherwise you have to destroy them and replace them - splitter belts always split into three directions and they will connect to any belt around, so you have to be careful and give them a wide clearance if you don’t want things mixing around. The game also lets you copy/paste parts of your factory and build multiple belts at once, which gets very useful after a while because the game started lagging pretty heavily on my somehow recent iPad when my factory got too big.
I haven’t mastered the fine points of Builderment (I couldn’t tell you what the best way to produce carbon rods was, even if I tried in three different spots) but it was a good time, adding more and more things you can build forced me to expand to get more resources, and it overall was quite fun. Try this one out if you enjoy factory simulation games and want to play one on iOS!
