Mindustry: Open-source automation tower defense game | Hacker News Reader

Mindustry: Open-source automation tower defense game

mindustrygame.github.io

567 points0x000042112 comments

Mindustry is such a great game. I sunk tons of hours in both campaigns with a friend of mine.

For those who come from a Factorio background, Mindustry has less automation and more combat. Also a Mindustry map does not take 50 hours to complete; rather it will take a few hours and may sometimes take several tries as some maps can be fairly hard. Space is limited as compared to Factorio, so space-efficient designs do matter, especially for defense (you want to pack towers tightly, with the constraint that towers must be fed by a conveyor of ammo or a pipe of liquid, or both). You also need to consider that you often need different combinations of towers in order to defeat different types of enemies.

Overall, a very well-made game and very addictive.

Sounds like something I might try. Factorio has a tower defense element that never really works because the attacks are too small, my base is too large, and I always just wipe out the biter camps. That's an aspect of the game that clearly needs a lot more challenge, but lots of players just ignore it and build.

For my first half-dozen tries, I always built may bases far too compact. I really had to learn to use the space available to me. A game that rewards compact building might be just for me.

You have the difficulty sliders and the death world preset and an entire enemies tag on https://mods.factorio.com. What more do you want?

Mods are great, but they generally lack cohesion. I agree with OP. I wish that instead of passive upgrades and only a couple tower/ammo variants, the game had a deeper tower defense aspect.

It'd be nice to have more enemy and tower variants, with certain types of towers working better against certain types of enemies - or towers that debuff enemies instead of hurting them. Maybe there could be structures that attract nearby enemies so it'd be easier to direct where attacks hit.

I think stuff like that would keep the tower defense stuff from loosing relevancy in the late game while staying fun.

I should suggest warptorio here: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/warptorio2

You should try Warp Drive Machine: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/Warp-Drive-Machine

for me Factorio combat was overall boring and just drudgery, and just adding unfun pressure.

Some mods change biter behaviour to make them smarter, such as Rampant. Others change the entire gameplay loop, like Warp Drive Machine. The mod ecosystem is huge, and it's far too early to claim you know for sure it'll be boring.

I always play factorio with no combat. Just disable all biters, so they don't even show up on the map

The pathing of the enemies in Mindustry feels somehow more like a classic tower defense game. I think they come from a small number of points and are primarily focused on your “town hall” type structure.

They’ve certainly got a lot of overlap, but Mindustry feels like a tower defense game that has a good factory builder added on, while Factorio feels like the other way around.

Anyway, two great games.

Better combat in vanilla is a reasonable ask. They're right, the combat isn't fun!

RTS elements. It’s really tedious dealing with base defense and biter expansion prevention if you want to build a rail world type of base (and have the map for it). Artillery helps somewhat but the range is limited by radar arrays’ range.

Let me build a bunch of units, set up patrols, feed them with resources, and actively deal in an automated way with Biters thinking my land is their land :)

Try Rampant?

It makes you optimize for different things which is why I prefer it to Factorio even if the tech and crafting tree is less developed.

I find the new trend interesting, to sell the game on Steam, but have a link to Github with the actual source. So free for developers and people who care to find out. Thats fair, I think, but I would prefer if the direct donation model would be more established among the masses.

But this link points to the general site, with lots of options and also directly the free version. Kudos. Will try it out later.

It’s because it’s sold on Steam mostly for the features that directly integrate with Steam (like joining friend’s games). If you don’t care about that, the game is free :)

That's not because you didn't know about it that it is a "new trend"

https://github.com/Poussinou/FLOSS-Games-on-Steam

https://store.steampowered.com/curator/38475471-Libre-Open-S...

It's nothing new, and also exist in the tooling side of things

https://store.steampowered.com/app/431730/Aseprite/ - https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite

Aseprite isn't open source.

What are you talking about? The parent comment literally linked the GitHub repo with the Aseprite source.

But that repository doesn't have any FOSS license. Only I can find is "EULA.txt" which contains stuff like:

> (c) Prohibition on Reverse Engineering, Decompilation, and Disassembly. You may not reverse engineer, decompile, or disassemble the SOFTWARE PRODUCT, except and only to the extent that such activity is expressly permitted by applicable law notwithstanding this limitation.

And more. Doesn't seem FOSS, more like "readable source" or similar.

They switched from GPL in 2016: https://dev.aseprite.org/2016/09/01/new-source-code-license/

That is actually fair idea. I am going to try it with an Android app - paid in G Play Store, free in FDroid.

DAVx⁵ operates under the same principle and they seem to have success with it.

https://www.davx5.com/

wow, thanks for that, i didn't know you could build it yourself. I have a nextcloud and was irked that i had to shell out cash for something i had considered non-essential, syncing calendars.

Now i am going to try it out for free and buy it if it works without issue, awesome.

It's available on F-Droid. https://f-droid.org/en/packages/at.bitfire.davdroid/

as does OSMAnd

It might have been free on Play Store a few years ago when I tried it, maybe just very cheap. I was looking for a fun game on my Amazon tablet after installing Play Store, and Mindustry delivered.

Buying on steam is a donation basically? Why is it not?

Because of the cut steam takes I guess. And fixed price, and a middleman, and depends on a central platform, etc

available (nearly) anywhere, built in support forums, refund capability, and until a couple of years ago being able to use bitcoin to pay (buy steam gift cards with bitcoin). family sharing - where another computer can play games you've bought if it's on the same network, is also a nice feature. I know it doesn't matter here because the game is open source (or whatever), but in the general sense it's reduced my spending on games. When my kid wants to play a steam game i either do work or play a game on xbox for windows, gog, battlenet, whatever. As i type he's playing BeamNG on his computer via my steam login on my computer.

Also, i am a bit biased. I'm part of the steam class action, and potentially will receive $500 or more from valve due to their "cut".

Damn, this is the first I've read about the steam class action. Did you just sign up via one of the firms advertising online?

The first one I found wants a 40% cut of any settlement. I have no basis to know if that's reasonable or not - on its face it doesn't seem crazy, and 60% of something is still more than nothing, but I can't help but wonder if there's a better deal out there. How are you being represented in the class action suit?

I got an email about it earlier this year from some law firm. I'm not sure what their cut is, but that amount was my "cut" of what they would attempt to recover before "needing" to go to arbitration. You had to have spent money on the steam platform between june of 2016 and january of 2022 (iirc); i don't know if there was a dollar amount trigger in involvement.

Mindustry has other ways to donate directly if you choose. The dev obviously thinks paying steam a cut is still worth it in increased sales and marketing.

Plus developers who want the steam version or just want to support the makers.

Aseprite (pixel art editor) has this sort of “if you can build it you can have it” arrangement.

I wonder what percentage of would-be-paying users are getting it for free. I guess it’s probably significant but still nothing close to a majority.

Shapez.io does the same thing - and not having to figure out another JavaScript build process in my spare time was easily worth ten bucks.

I noticed e.g. Cyberduck do the same. It's open source software, you can download it on the website for free. But if you want to have it one click on the App store it's $24.

Plenty of previous discussion at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422522 (Mindustry – Open-Source Game, 135 comments)

Great game, though a bit addictive.

Thanks for the warning, I suppose it is - and that's why I stick to my guns and won't play it. Since playing Age of Empires II online around 2000 took such a heavy toll on my study habits to achieve a 2000+ rating at the time, my mantra goes by the saying: "An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure". ;)

And here I am, a new player of Factorio and wishing I stuck to my prevention. On another note my factory is growing!

Do not install Space Exploration mode! Save yourself 400 hours.

Wait for the official Space DLC and all the 2.0 QoL improvements next year instead!

I’ll be surprised if they actually release in 2024 I’d assume 2025 is more realistic.

Hmm, I had to google this mod [1]. Seems really cool, but it also does sound a whole lot like the factorio expansion [2], so what is going on here?

(I been eagerly awaiting the factorio expansion for a while now!)

1: https://mods.factorio.com/mod/space-exploration

2: https://techraptor.net/gaming/news/factorio-expansion-space-...

They hired the mod creator (as an artist) and, from the Factorio Friday Facts blog posts[1], the expansion has some inspiration from the space mod but is not the same.

[1] https://www.factorio.com/blog/

Oh, that is amazing! Thanks for pointing me to the blog!

If you like Factorio and are at all interested in game design I can highly recommend every one of those blog posts.

It’s amazing how time and time again a they describe a feature and you’re like wow this is perfect and then later they’re like “here’s how to fix all the problems you don’t even notice”.

The mod is older, and they hired the modder to work on the expansion. From the blog posts the expansion is a lot closer to vanilla then the complex mods.

The factorio team hired the person behind the space exploration mod to integrate it into factorio.

Earendel was employed by Wube in February 5, 2021

https://factorio.com/blog/post/fff-365

Don't look at Dyson Sphere Program.

A very long time ago, my dad prepared me for this risk by buying Civilization just before my high school final exam. I graduated with 268% on Emperor.

and how were your high school grades?

Still pretty good. I do sometimes wonder if they could have been better, but nobody cares about that anymore. And nobody is going to take that 268% away from me.

It’s funny how saying a game is addictive makes many people want to try it, but people like you and me take it as a warning. For me it’s because I succumb to addictions more easily than most.

All through lessons learned. It’s difficult to quit playing in the initial years, but as the time passes it becomes easier.

It’s a mostly harmless addition there is no monetization beyond the initial purchase.

Fascinating that the review is basically "it's too good".

This is funny to me and maybe worth mentioning. In prison they charge inmates for this game on the tablets, is that legal? It's AccessCorrections or Access something, I know for a fact, I played it for years and now hate it because of the associations it draws for my uneuphoric recall of doing time. They also charge for Andors Trail, another open source project.

Just curious, but was it an US prison ? I have trouble seeing them allowing the prisoners to play game. Also, how are the prisoners supposed to make money to pay for the game ?

Thanks in advance.

There are paid jobs in the prison for the inmates. They are not very good, but it's a thing. You can also send funds to an inmate's commissary account, if somebody you care about is in there.

It's legal to charge for distributions of GPL licensed projects. The OSI definition [1] specifically notes it's one of the freedoms in licenses considered open source.

Back in the mid 2000s I recall seeing drama about projects like The GIMP being repackaged and sold. While legal, the sellers exploited information asymmetry to profit from people unaware the software was available for free. The counterpoint is that distributors do work packaging the app -- maybe AccessConnections contributed some value by reviewing the content as a trusted third party.

So yeah, it's legal but might not be ethical. Open source licenses do require the source code and license to be accessible to the end user. This can be tucked away as a link in a credits screen. I'm not a lawyer, so I'm curious whether a link counts as source code distribution if you know your end users won't have unrestricted access to the Internet.

[1]: https://opensource.org/osd/

they what???? That sounds like legal racket to me. US prison industry is disgusting.

Mindustry is fantastic. Played the Erekir campaign twice. I didn’t like the Serpulo campaign. It’s almost like two different games.

Erekir is automation plus RTS. Serpulo is automation plus tower defense.

I think it’s nice that you can do both. There’s also ways you can turn Serpulo into RTS if you gather enough guys :)

I'm the opposite. Longtime Serpulo fan who really enjoyed the game and just can't stand the Erekir RTS style game at all. I don't want to build or direct troops in a Factorio game. That's literally the opposite of what I want.

Bummed at the direction of the game and how they abandoned Serpulo as they pivoted. Serpulo never got finished/balanced and likely never will now.

> I don't want to build or direct troops in a Factorio game.

You won't like upcoming Industrial Annihilation then probably.

I enjoyed Planetary Annhilation and this game claims you can let the AI do all of the RTS and just base build, so I would enjoy it.

"Build impressively productive bases as your primary focus and delegate advanced artificial intelligences to do the fighting for you. Or, roll up your sleeves, and get hands-on by leading the real-time strategy action yourself."

If in Mindustry the AI completely controlled the units, I would be fine with that.

I am just long past my 200 action per minute starcraft RTS clicking days. Hyper-controlling individual units is not a fun meta.

These days i use wemod or cheatengine to bypass the challenge in games. I buy games to support the arts, and play games to see the story or experience the art. But the second a game has a time sink element, i break out the cheats to bypass it. I don't mind challenging content, but i give each game maybe 5-10 "reload from checkpoint" before i bypass the content with a cheat.

back when i used to "compete" in starcraft, i don't know what my action rate was or anything. I didn't micro that much, either. I never played terran, only protoss and occasionally zerg if my opponent was a well known zerg-er. at one point i was top 10 in the world, and i forget if that excluded or included cheaters. That was something we used to joke about, me and my competitive gaming friends, especially the RTS leaderboards - "ranked 23rd, but everyone above me is an obvious cheater!" After starcraft and Total Annhilation, went on to getting ranked top 10 in a few FPS (never counterstrike, barely played, oddly), and leaderboards on indie games. Having a newborn took the steam out, no pun intended.

Me too - I've almost finished my second play through Serpulo, but Erekir didn't click with me at all.

My one observation/criticism is that as you progress through the game, it shifts through different stages, making the game very different to play:

Early - essentially start from nothing (or very little) on each map, balance mining and infrastructure development while simultaneously protecting yourself

Mid - usually not feasible to start from nothing, but taking resources with you to a new map often makes winning very easy

Late - you absolutely have to rely on massive external resources to stand a chance, meaning you have to spend a lot of time developing the infrastructure to ship resources to wherever you're playing next. (Also, the code that 'ships' resources between sectors seems unreliable and maybe buggy.)

I really enjoy the challenge of balancing within 'early'; mid is a lot duller, as is the infrastructure development.

I bought this game after playing the open source variant for some time. It was just what I wanted, because Factorio isn't focused so much on defence, but this is. The game underwent a huge overhaul and is much more fleshed out. I need to get back to it and try and complete the campaign.

This game will suck you in. It's wonderful. A great holiday game actually. Good timing on this post.

I first played it because I heard it described as "Factorio lite", which seems fairly apt after playing it. It's not nearly as deep as Factorio but it scratches the same itch.

Its PvP mode is also excellent. You can complete both defense and offense by laying supply lines. It's possible to ambush the opponent's supply lines as well, gaining a significant advantage on the front lines before the enemy detects the disruption in the power facility and logistics system. This is what I consider one of the most important characteristics of a real-time strategy (RTS) game.

It would be better if one could steal expensive components from the opponent's conveyor belt (like processors in Factorio)

Though open servers with team modes had huge griefer problems when I tried it.

Also on Flathub: https://flathub.org/en-GB/apps/com.github.Anuken.Mindustry

Slightly off topic, but does anyone have any resources / tips on how to build your own tower defense game with multiplayer? Been deving for a very long time, but game dev feels like a completely different beast.

I feel like mindustry is a great example of just trying something.

If you were to ask this question in a game dev forum, people probably wouldn't recommend you to look at Java and yet mindustry uses Java and made it work.

I guess something along the lines of JavaScript with Websockets would also work really well and you wouldn't have to worry about building for different platforms. Research some options for JS game engines and get cracking (possibly with copilot, it's not too bad at getting one started).

I think it's entirely feasible for you to have a working prototype before the new year rolls around.

And mindustry does it really well in Java. The game doesn't use much cpu, even on large maps and runs on windows, mac (including apple silicon). Graphics looks good too

Game dev options are huge these days, but Java isn't a bad choice: mature platform, good VM, cross-platform. I would guess javascript is further behind in performance, but with Electron/Cordova, it's a valid cross-platform choice as well. Or one could explore lesser known tools like Haxe. And then there are monolith dev kits like Godot. Heck, even Lua is still around thanks to Roblox. There's so many options!

Web games used to suck, but wasm + webgpu seems like a great combination for reasonable performance while also allowing indie devs a way to avoid forking over 15-30% of their profits to middlemen.

> and yet mindustry uses Java and made it work

I'm pretty sure the game I've spent the most hours playing over the last few years is written in java - Slay the spire.

Minecraft was originally Java too I think.

The Bedrock edition of Minecraft (XBox, Microsoft store) is in C++. The original is still built with Java and called the Java Edition (unless I missed some big news the past few years)

Bedrock probably has more players but 99% of all videos are made in Java edition.

Sad that mojang went bankrupt after 1.7.10, though.

I just dove into this the last few months working through a Udemy course on building a vampire survivors clone in Godot 4....highly recommend (here is the author talking about it https://youtu.be/Yd-sndQnWIo?si=yWU9WJ2roSVlMzDE). I was amazed by the tooling and had a blast doing it. I'm primarily a backend dev and this scratched a different itch. There appear to be some RTS courses but I can't vouch for them. I would find one that looks interesting and dive in. I typed out all the code and did the steps as he did and feel like I learned a ton. I am still looking to learn more about multiplayer in Godot 4, but I found a few YouTube videos and it doesn't look super complicated, especially if you are not concerned off the bat about cheaters. Additionally I have been following this project (Godot 4 MMO), the code is organized pretty well: https://jdungeon.org/ but very early in development

I'm a game-dev outsider, but I've come to romanticise the idea of creating a tower defense game myself. Ever since Warcraft III it's been one of my favourite genres, but everything I've played in the intervening years seems to fall short of something that leaves me wanting more.

Had no idea it was OSS! Regardless, I have 0 regrets paying for the game, absolutely amazing one.

It's one of the only games I play! I have it on Android and one thing I like is that it's fast to open up and play a bit, save, and then quit. No ads or a bunch of intros to try to skip, etc.

I love this game and even more the distribution model. Do you want a free game? Use officially available sources. Do you want to support the developer or have Steam integration? Buy on Steam. Just want to donate? Donate. Want to change something in the game? Git clone.

I would love to see a video of the game, perhaps that would be a good idea for the home page.

YouTube has thousands of Mindustry gameplay videos.

I for one would rather not have to click through heaps of grimace-faced thumbnails, "heeeyyy guuuys" and the other .. idiosyncrasies of the content-creator industrial complex just to get a frickin' glimpse of the gameplay.

So a short official clip would make a nice amendment to the homepage.

I just think it's a good idea for a game's website to have a video of the gameplay.

You may have missed it since it's midway down the page but it has a Steam offering and those almost always come with video (as is the case here, too): https://store.steampowered.com/app/1127400/Mindustry/

Mindustry – Open-Source Game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32422522 - Aug 2022 (135 comments)

Mindustry: A open-source sandbox tower defense game - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25626286 - Jan 2021 (6 comments)

Mindustry was a great game prior to the campaign rework, which in my opinion made things harder to progress and really enjoy. But if you've never played it, I still really recommend it as it's a cross between lighter factorio and a tower defense game.

If someone has played both this and Factorio, could you possibly compare the 2 games? Thank you!

In mindustry you build smaller factories, mostly to power turrets/build units to attack an AI. Focus is on tower defense. Logistics is cute but minimalistic. Each level takes 30-60 min on a casual play though.

Factorio is much more in depth on logistics and is a single "level". Takes 30-60 hours on a casual first playthrough.

Mindustry is more arcade and tower defense, with scenarios instead of an infinite map and a meta progression between scenarios where you unlock tech.

Mindustry is great on mobile. The resource aspect is quite simple compared to Factorio - drills never run out of a resource, for example. But you can make some fairly complex bases - https://shkspr.mobi/blog/2022/02/mindustry-scrap-to-everythi...

Mindustry is more "Tower Defence" focused. Waves of enemies attack and you have to build turrets to stop them. As the game progresses, you can build units which can attack the enemy's base - so it become a bit of an RTS game.

So there is a superficial similarity to Factorio - discover and unlock new things, build a base - but it is much more focused on the attack/defend paradigm.

After a combined 1000 hours between the two, I find Factorio easier and much more satisfying. Factorio's base building is very explicit, while Mindustry's is very limiting. The main reason for me saying this is that in Mindustry all production buildings output their goods in all directions which makes it really annoying to design efficient layouts. It's also harder to play co-op in Mindustry because the maps are so small. Maybe my preference would be swapped if I had played Mindustry first rather than Factorio, but whenever I play Mindustry I think "wow I'd rather just play Factorio".

Mindustry is still awesome though, especially considering that it's open source.

Mindustry encourages compact designs due to limited space in levels where factorio has infinite space that encourages sprawling designs. In that context, the all-side output is critical for Mindustry's compact layouts.

I find Mindustry layouts a lot less tedious compared to inserters everywhere and I greatly prefer the Mindustry conveyor flow controls.

I do wish Mindustry added another transportation layer where physical transport between sectors was required rather than generic space launches. It would give a much more cohesive feeling to the various levels.

> The main reason for me saying this is that in Mindustry all production buildings output their goods in all directions which makes it really annoying to design efficient layouts.

The armored and plastanium conveyors prevent this.

The difference is what the primary focus of the game is, I think.

Mindustry is a tower defense game that uses factory style base building as added spice.

Factorio is a base building game that adds some tower defense elements as added spice.

Has anyone tried Dyson Sphere Program with the recent combat update? How does it compare to Mindustry?

Looks quite nice, and brownie points for Java.

Apple and open source are odd bedfellows

Does it make sense to publish Deb packages for this game?

Also this commit: https://github.com/Anuken/Mindustry/commit/5548e727501793479...

While I agree that commit message could benefit from punctuation for readability, the change diff itself seems quite reasonable.

It’s 6 words long, there’s no point in punctuation.

why punctuate your nine word post

It's 6 words long no punctuation

It's 6 words long? No, Punctuation!

Mirrors exactly my feelings on Android development.

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