BUILDING & CONSTRUCTION

Player-built machines take over tasks previously done by hand: miners harvest, belts move, assemblers craft, and eventually the factory runs itself while the player designs the next layer.

Players capture a built structure as a reusable template and stamp it down elsewhere — often as ghost outlines that workers or logistics then construct.

Automated transport that moves items along a fixed path from producers to consumers — the fundamental logistics primitive of factory games.

Tools that let players duplicate a selection of their own construction — a room, a factory block, a circuit — and stamp it down elsewhere, often with a ghost preview and material cost.

The ability to remove or destroy built structures and terrain — the player's own constructions, enemy fortifications, or the environment itself.

Construction rules requiring buildings to sit on prepared foundations — leveled platforms, pillars, deck grids — that mediate between irregular terrain and regular structures.

Building without grid snapping — structures positioned and rotated at any coordinate and angle, limited only by collision and support rules.

A translucent hologram of a structure shown at the cursor before placement — green when valid, red when blocked — letting players see exactly what they're about to build and where.

Discrete vertical levels in construction and simulation — Z-levels, floors, stacked layers — where each stratum is a full playable plane.

Buildable AND/OR/NOT components that combine signals into computed behaviors — circuit networks controlling machines, redstone contraptions, wired sensors and actuators.

Construction snapped to a regular grid — square tiles, hex cells, voxel lattices — where every buildable object occupies discrete cells and alignment is automatic.

Buildings must be connected to and supplied by a distributed resource grid — electricity, water, oxygen — that the player builds out and balances.

In-game systems players program with real logic — visual scripting for machines, in-fiction assembly languages, behavior editors for units and robots — going beyond toggles into authored computation.

Turning placed objects to face different orientations — rotating furniture, machines, walls, and decorations through fixed increments or free angles before placement.

Predefined attachment locations on building pieces — wall edges that grab floor edges, pipe ends that click to machine inlets, sockets where the next part wants to go — guiding free placement toward valid connection.

Buildings requiring physical support — beams that sag past their span limits, walls bearing load, unsupported structures collapsing, integrity systems that make architecture obey gravity.

Players reshape the physical terrain itself — digging, filling, flattening, raising land — rather than only placing objects atop a fixed landscape.

Taking moves back — the undo button rewinding a puzzle step, level resets to a clean slate, rewind stacks that store every state, the build tool's ctrl-Z.