Spinoff of cute little Factory Town turns it into a sprawling spreadsheet exercise

The industrially-inspired town building game Factory Town has a spinoff as of this week, packing the entire experience of building up and expanding an oddly factory-like society into a series of oddly spreadsheet-like screens. All of which depict the details of an oddly factory-like society. I think you get my drift.

My drift being this is a great game if you, like me, enjoy complex production chains, optimizing incomes to match outputs, and—generally speaking—when numbers go up. There's a demo if you're curious.

It starts pretty simple, with a few clicks here and there generating resources and putting up buildings full of workers to craft things with those resources. From there, it becomes ever-more-complex as you choose what items to sell at market and which to use as intermediary steps for more advanced goods.

As you proceed you'll learn to produce power, and expand into new biomes, opening up the range of challenges and quests available to you. Those new biomes have new advantages, but also lack certain things, leading you to create inter-town trade routes to empower your towns.

Eventually you start to do increasingly difficult quests, each of which gives you new perks that make certain production choices more or less powerful. For my part, I felt like the information available to you was quite good: I always knew where—and what—I needed to make more stuff. 

You can find Factory Town Idle on Steam for US $5, 30% off for a couple more days.