If you’ve put a few hundred hours into Satisfactory or Factorio, you already understand most of Mindustry. You also understand none of it - because Mindustry is the one game in this genre that puts a countdown clock on your factory and sends a swarm of enemies to eat it.

Here’s the elevator pitch: imagine Factorio had a baby with a base-defense RTS. You mine resources, snake conveyors across the map, and assemble a production chain - but the whole time, waves of enemies are spawning, and your conveyor belt is feeding ammo into turrets that have to hold the line. It’s free and open source under the GPL, though buying it on Steam gets you achievements, seamless multiplayer, and Workshop support. And after a three-and-a-half-year wait - v7 landed back in November 2022 - version 8 finally dropped in April, and it’s the best on-ramp the game has ever had.

I’ve been back in it for a couple of weeks. Here’s what changed, and how to actually survive your first sectors instead of bouncing off.

The single most important thing in v8 is that the Serpulo campaign got completely rebuilt, and it fixes the exact problem that used to scare people off.

In the old version, the campaign map was chaos. You’d clear Ground Zero, then get flung to some random sector halfway across the planet that demanded resources you hadn’t unlocked yet. New players had no idea where to go or why.

In v8, sectors are laid out to match the tech tree. You expand outward from Ground Zero in a sensible order, each new sector roughly matching what you’ve actually researched. Every sector now has a unique icon so you can read the map at a glance, and all those bland procedurally-generated base sectors have been swapped out for hand-built, player-submitted maps. The result is a campaign that teaches you instead of testing you - a progression curve that respects the player’s time rather than gatekeeping with confusion. Anyone who’s read Manu Games’ take on progression systems that respect your brain will recognize the philosophy.

If you bounced off Mindustry before v8, this is the patch to come back for.

Mindustry’s trap is that it looks like a sandbox, so factory players try to build the perfect base. Don’t. You’re on a clock. Build a working line, not a beautiful one. Here’s the priority order I’d give any newcomer on Serpulo.

Copper, immediately. Drop Mechanical Drills on the nearest copper and run a conveyor straight back to your core. Copper is the foundation of everything early - walls, turrets, more drills.

Then a couple of Duos before the first wave. The Duo is your starter turret. Place two or three covering the direction enemies spawn from, and - this is the part people forget - feed them copper with a conveyor. An unfed turret is just a decoration. Wall the gaps with copper walls so chip damage doesn’t reach your blocks.

Next, lead and graphite. Lead unlocks the next tier of buildings; graphite feeds better turrets and power. Get a small line going while your Duos buy you time.

Then power, and don’t let it dip. Early power comes from Combustion Generators burning coal, so you need a coal line feeding them before you lean on anything electric. The moment your grid browns out, your walls and turrets stop, and that’s how runs end. Build a buffer of batteries and over-provision generation. Solar panels and later Thorium Reactors take the pressure off once you’re established.

The rhythm is always the same: stabilize defense, expand production, push out, repeat. If a wave is about to overwhelm you, it’s almost always because a supply line broke - ammo, power, or walls.

v8 quietly fixed the part of Mindustry that used to feel clumsy: controlling your units. There’s now command queuing, so you can chain orders instead of babysitting every move. There are stances - boosting, patrolling, holding fire - so your units stop suiciding into turrets when you just wanted them to guard a chokepoint. You can issue mining commands to pull specific resources, have units continuously ferry payloads, and rectangle-select multiple unit factories at once to mass-produce.

A few other small wins worth knowing on day one: you can ping the map (default key P), which is essential in multiplayer; building plans now sync to other players in co-op; and you can pre-configure sorters and unit factories as plans by ctrl-clicking the ghost before it’s even built. Pathfinding got smarter too, so units take fewer dumb routes through your base.

Launch pads were reworked. Sending resources between sectors now requires a landing pad at the destination, not just a launch pad at the source. If your interplanetary supply chain seems broken, that’s usually why - build the receiving end first.

Difficulty modifiers exist now, too. If the new campaign feels too punishing, or too soft, you can dial it. No shame in it; Mindustry’s enemy scaling is steep, and there’s nothing to prove by white-knuckling Ground Zero.

Then there’s Erekir. Once you’ve got Serpulo under your belt, the second planet is a different beast - no universal conveyors, everything moves on ducts and payloads, and turrets demand direct supply lines instead of belts. v8 added new ammo types and a few utility and production blocks for Erekir, but the campaign rework hasn’t reached it yet; that’s slated for a future version. Treat Serpulo as your tutorial and Erekir as the graduate course.

If you want a factory game you can min-max in total zen, stick with Satisfactory. But if the idea of defending your supply chain, of throughput that has consequences, sounds fun, Mindustry v8 is the most approachable it’s ever been, and it costs nothing to try. It also sits in the genre’s quietly principled corner of free, no-ads, no-microtransaction games - the same design ethos behind privacy-first game design. Download it, clear Ground Zero, and see if the clock gets its hooks in you.

Next time you watch a wave break against a wall you built thirty seconds ago, you’ll understand why this one’s been a cult favorite for years.

The Assembly Line is published by Manu Games, makers of Tideward, a peaceful idle RPG native on every Apple device. Learn more

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