Welcome back to The Conveyor Belt — your roundup of everything sliding down the line in factory and idle games this week. Grab your coffee; this one’s a two-minute read.

The headline this week is gloriously weird: TEXTORIO launched into Steam Early Access today (June 11) at €3.99. It’s a full Factorio-style automation game where every tree, belt, machine, and angry alien is an ASCII character — but layered with color, animation, lighting, and weather so the whole grid actually feels alive. It’s a solo, no-publisher project with a feature-complete core loop and a 15–30 hour playthrough, which is a lot of factory for the price of a sandwich.

If you’d rather your conveyors carry lunch than circuits, Snacktorio also rolled out earlier this month (June 4) — a cooking-automation sim that swaps iron plates for sandwich assembly lines. And keep one eye on the horizon: Factorio’s experimental 2.1 branch is still expected to crack open by the end of June, so mod authors should start limbering up.

Dyson Sphere Program: proliferate your intermediates, not just your finished goods. Most players spray Mk.III proliferator (+25% extra products) only on the final assembler and call it done. But the bonus compounds — if you spray the ore, then the ingot, then the component, then the final product, each step multiplies the last. Set up a sprayer at every refinement stage and dedicate a side belt looping proliferator back onto itself to keep it self-feeding. Players skip this because it feels fiddly early, but late-game it’s the difference between one Dyson sphere and three.

A thought on offline progression: the goal isn’t to maximize the numbers you rack up while you’re away — it’s to make coming back feel good without punishing you for forgetting to check in. Manu Idle treats your time away as a calm catch-up rather than a guilt trip, which is harder to design than it sounds. If you like this stuff, the team wrote about the tradeoffs here: https://manugames.com/blog/offline-progression

This week we’re tipping our hard hat to the belts-only megabase crowd. There’s a long-running corner of the Factorio community building enormous bases with no bots, no main bus, and no beacons — routing everything by belt alone, balancing through clever geometry instead of balancer tiles. Watching an 800+ SPM base run purely on conveyors is the factory-game equivalent of a Rube Goldberg machine that actually pays rent. If you’ve only ever bussed, it’s worth a rethink.

Still poking around Satisfactory 1.2 mostly to stand in the new rain and feel something, and squeezing in late-night Dyson Sphere runs to test that proliferator tip above. Send us what’s eating your evenings.

The Assembly Line is published by Manu Games — makers of Manu Idle, a peaceful idle RPG for iPhone, iPad & Mac. Learn more →

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