A factory automation game in 3D, where your factory never sleeps

Is there a 3D factory game for Mac?

If you play on a Mac, you know the problem: many big 3D factory games skip macOS. Openworld takes another road: a voxel sandbox on a whole, round planet — walk straight and you come back to where you started — where automation is part of the survival game, in first person. It runs natively on Apple Silicon and Intel Macs, on Windows and on Linux, with the same worlds and the same servers. More on that in our sandbox guide for Mac.

You don't open a separate “factory mode”. You mine coal and iron in your first caves, you build a Furnace to make your first iron… and one day you get tired of carrying ore by hand. That's when the conveyors come out.

• 5kinds of links: items, liquids, power, signals, rotation
• 20simulation turns a second, on their own thread
• 0add-ons to install: it's all built in
• 3systems: Mac, Windows, Linux

How it works: nodes and links

Openworld's automation fits in one idea: nodes joined by links. A node is anything that holds, makes or uses something — a chest, a Furnace, a metal mill, a tank, a pump, an electric motor, a solar panel, an antenna. A link is what you lay between two nodes:

• Conveyors carry items (ore, coal, ingots…).
• Pipes carry liquids and gases, from a thin pipe to a huge pipeline.
• Cables carry electricity — or, for signal cables, a simple signal.
• Shafts carry rotation, from a motor to a pump.
• Optical fibres carry signals very far.

Every node has ports: a socket for items in, one for items out, a power socket, a shaft socket… Hold a link in your hand and look at a machine: its sockets show up, coloured by what they do — in, out, or both. Drag your link from one port to another, the path follows your gaze (around corners, up stairs), and both ends snap onto the right socket.

Conveyors: items that ride on their own

A conveyor is a glass tube in which you see your items slide by, one after the other. It comes in three grades, from a basic belt to an express one that moves many times more items a second. Lay it from a chest to a machine and the machine fills up; lay it from the machine's output to another chest and the products leave by themselves. Nothing is ever duplicated: an item is in a chest, in a tube, or in a machine — never in two places at once.

Gravity helps you: a conveyor or a pipe that goes downhill carries for free over a short drop. To climb, or to go a long way, you add a booster pump fed with electricity, and on a very long line a repeater that relays it. And when several machines need the same coal, a junction shares a link between several outputs in turn.

Pumps and fluids: water, oil, lava

The pump is the first machine that really changes your landscape. Turned by a shaft, it draws the liquid in a zone under and around it — water, oil, lava, milk or kerosene, with a filter in its sheet — and pushes it into its pipes, toward a tank or a machine. When you place it, the game counts what's in its reach; it pumps that amount even when its land is unloaded, and the level really drops in the world when the chunks come back.

Around the pipes you find the whole plumber's kit: valves you open by hand or by a signal cable, junctions that split a flow, a large tank of several cubic metres, and a tap that fills your bucket from the pipe behind it. Two pumps side by side never count the same voxel twice: the older one keeps its share.

You shouldn't be able to run a huge factory with just a rabbit in a cage turning a shaft you sped up with a gearbox.

Tom Pascard, Openworld's developer

Engines, shafts and gears: power is conserved

That quote is the rule of the whole system: what flows through your base is power, and it never comes out of nowhere. An electric motor, fed by a cable, turns a shaft; shafts in wood, iron or steel carry more or less power; gear wheels that touch mesh together and change the speed (a small one driving a big one turns slower, and the other way round) — but never the power. A shaft loses a little on every metre and each mesh costs a bit: put your gears near the motor. Ask too much of a shaft and it slips.

The pump has a speed it likes best, the motor another: matching them with the right gears is half the fun. Too fast or too slow, its efficiency falls.

From ore to kerosene

Here is the big chain most players aim for, and every link of it can run on its own:

1. 1

   Find the deposits

   Coal and iron in your first caves. Oil under the lowlands, where black bitumen seeps give a giant field away, or in small lenses 20 to 60 m down. Our guide to resources says where to look, our guide to caves how to go down.

2. 2

   Smelt

   Ore and coal by conveyor into the Furnace, its iron ingots out by another; back in the Furnace, iron and coal become steel, and the metal mill rolls sheets, wire, pipes and cables for the better machines.

3. 3

   Pump the oil

   A motor, a shaft, a pump over the lens, a pipe to a tank. A giant field holds far more than a small lens. The pump keeps drawing while you're elsewhere.

4. 4

   Refine

   The refinery splits each cubic metre of oil into kerosene, petrol, diesel, natural gas and tar, each cut leaving by its own pipe — or makes plastic.

5. 5

   The launch pad

   Kerosene is one of the propellants real rockets burn — and the factory reaches the rocket. The refinery fills empty dewars with RP-1, the gas plant fills them with liquid oxygen, methane or hydrogen, and a fuelling tower on the pad pours the dewars in. Every part is crafted too: see our rocket guide.

The same oil and kerosene also burn in a generator to make electricity, and solar panels add free power by day — less during a solar eclipse, since the sky is real. Powering a whole base — panels, batteries, cables, switches — is in our guide to electricity and radio; making it a place you want to live in, with lamps and furniture, is in our decoration guide.

A factory that keeps running when you're away

This is Openworld's signature: a machine doesn't stop when you walk away. Every node and every link is also kept in the game's own simulation — the OVM, for Openworld Virtual Machine — which runs on its own thread, turn after turn, across the whole world, even where no chunk is loaded. Fill your forge, take your rocket to the Moon, come back an hour later: the iron is there, as if you had stayed. Your circuits and logic gates live in the same simulation: a clock, a counter or a tank alarm keeps ticking while you're gone.

And if your factory grows huge? The simulation slows down a little (you'll see it in the debug screen and on a small badge), but the game itself stays smooth: they don't share the same clock. A server can also choose to simulate only the loaded areas; then a factory far from every player sleeps until someone comes by.

Where does automation fit?

Openworld isn't a factory game first — it's a survival sandbox where automation is one of the ways to play, next to exploring, building, flying and going to space.

If you want to build a forge in a valley, a pipeline to the sea and a launch pad on the next hill, with friends, on a planet you can walk around — that's Openworld.

Automating with friends

Factories shine in multiplayer: one friend runs the mines, another the furnaces, a third lays the pipeline. On a server, everything keeps running as long as the server runs — the night shift never clocks out. See how to play with friends on Mac, PC and Linux, or host your own server so your factory never stops.