Assembly Planter

I was enjoying watching Donut build a sweetberry farm in Minecraft, and I had an epiphany… I really love automation farming! It scratches a really specific itch in my brain, yet I’ve never sought out a game exclusively for that purpose. I still play Farm Together, in fact I created a whole-ass website just so you guys wouldn’t have to scroll past my weird, crunchy posts on that game, but 150 hours in much of my fun centers around figuring out mechanisms that let me automate… basically anything, so I can passively rack up resources while I’m running around decorating houses.

Factorio is the go-to automation game, but I wanted something more farmy and after poking around a bit, I landed on Assembly Planter. I played for about 30 minutes, and was like eh I’m over it. But I came back later that afternoon and at some point the hook got sunk deep. Deep my friends.

Assembly Planter is a 20-level optimization sandbox puzzle. The early levels, which walk you through the game mechanics, require you to plant seeds to farm resources, but once you hit later levels the farming gets abstracted to the point it’s more of a factory automation game. I really enjoyed the middle section of the progression, where I had a convoluted farm chain that really slapped and I could sit there and watch it do it’s thing. As you progress, much of the challenge hinges on fitting increasingly elaborate machines into the limited building area. You unlock a Shrinker feature that allows you to shrunk larger machines into 1 block machines to save space. The boxy machines are less fun to watch, but it is still satisfying to see all the resources popping out.

I feel like the pacing is good. Every level a new production goal is set, and I usually end up completely tearing down whatever I had built because the new goal requires serious optimization and my current Frankenstein setup isn’t gonna cut it. I love optimization (as a coder, I spent so much time refactoring code, purely for fun) and within the confines of Assembly Planter it’s mostly fun, but around level 15, I started to get just kind of… overwhelmed with it. I kept trying to create self-feeding machines in the shrinker, which it turns out is impossible until you actually unlock self-feeding collectors. I got past this by setting really specific intermediary goals, like creating a crate assembly line so I can expand my stack size, or farming earth orbs to expand my farm area.

Level 16 unlocks transmutation, which are resource shortcuts. So you can go from 30x lead > Gold, rather than Dirt>Sandlion>Sand>Cactus>Compacted Sand>Gold. This changes things up and gives you a lot more options for the long-tail crafting resources.

I’m currently on level 18, and my goal is to figure out a way to craft 1 gold per second passively. But before I do that, I think I’m gonna have to solve my dirt generation problem and build another crate factory. If this sounds terrible to you, you might hate this game! But it’s $5, so if you wanna try the genre this might be a good entry point.