Production chains
Raw resources are transformed through multi-stage recipes — ore to plates to circuits to assemblers — with each stage's output feeding the next as factories and logistics link into a directed graph. Production chains are the core puzzle of automation and economy games: the player designs, balances, and debugs a flow network where every ratio matters. Designers use them to create gameplay that compounds — each new tier of product recontextualizes the whole existing factory — and to make optimization itself the endgame, with throughput and layout as self-set goals. Key decisions: chain depth (Factorio's deep graphs versus Anno's shorter consumer-goods chains), ratio legibility (players need production statistics and bottleneck visibility, or the game becomes spreadsheet archaeology), byproducts and loops (oil processing's waste handling is the classic complexity spike), and spatial constraints that make layout matter. Pitfall: chains that grow in size but not in kind — later tiers must introduce new problems (fluids, trains, pollution), not just longer conveyor belts.
- Dev effort: Large
- Timing: Real-time
- Common in: automation, city-builder
Seen in
- Factorio
- Anno 1800