REFINEMENT CHAINS
Multi-stage material processing — ore smelts to ingots, ingots forge to parts, parts assemble to products — where each refinement step adds value and requires infrastructure.
- SOLO-DEV COST MEDIUM
- TIMING REAL-TIME / TURN
- COMMON IN AUTOMATION · CITY-BUILDER · SURVIVAL · BASE-BUILDING
Factorio is the cathedral (iron plates into gears into belts into assemblers, chains nested until the rocket), Satisfactory verticalizes the same idea into sprawling elevation-spanning factories, Anno's production chains (grain to flour to bread) built the city-builder economy template decades ago, and survival games run pocket versions — Valheim's ore-to-ingot-to-forge pipeline gates each biome tier. Designers build chains because intermediate steps are where the gameplay lives: a one-step recipe is a transaction, but a five-stage chain is logistics — each stage needs placement, throughput matching, and transport between stages, so the production graph becomes a spatial optimization puzzle whose difficulty scales with chain depth. Chains also create economic texture: intermediates have value (trade the ingots, stockpile the gears), bottlenecks become diagnosable (the factory starves at the copper-wire stage), and mastery is visible — a beginner's spaghetti and an expert's clean bus solve the same chain. Ratios are the hidden curriculum: when one smelter feeds two forges feeding three assemblers, players learn throughput arithmetic without a single tutorial. Key decisions: chain depth per progression tier (deepening chains is the automation genre's difficulty curve), whether byproducts and side-inputs complicate the graph (oil processing's multiple outputs is Factorio's famous complexity cliff), and transparency tooling — production statistics and flow diagnostics that make bottlenecks findable. Pitfall: depth as tedium — chain stages that add hauling without adding decisions (the intermediate that exists only to be carried between two machines) lengthen the graph without deepening it; every stage should pose a real question of placement, ratio, or routing, or it's just distance wearing a recipe's clothes.