For a long time, Incremental Factory existed in abstract space. Parcels connected to parcels, resources flowed instantly from A to B. It was elegant — the whole game lived in one clean loop.
And for a while, that elegance was enough. There's something beautiful about a system that clean. But we could feel the ceiling. Not a content ceiling — a complexity ceiling. The game had one dimension of challenge, and once you understood it, every new production line was a variation of something you'd already solved. We could have polished what we had and called it a day — but that would have meant saying no to everything we could feel this game wanting to become.
So we gave Incremental Factory a world.
The v0.8 beta is available now on the Steam experimental branch:
Steam Library → Incremental Factory → Properties → Betas → select "v08-beta"
A Hex-Based World
The map introduces something the game never had before: where.
Expanding your territory means access to more base resources — but those resources need to get to where they're processed. That's where hubs come in. Each hex can hold a hub, and each hub type serves a different role:
Extraction Hubs — where raw resources come from
Production Hubs — the factory building you know and love, now embedded in a larger world
Warehouse Hubs — where construction resources go
Research Hubs — where science goes
Outposts — where military supplies go
Think of hubs as the world-map equivalent of parcels. How you arrange them, how you connect them, which ones you build where — that's an entirely new layer of decisions that didn't exist before.
Ships & Logistics Networks
With geography comes distance. With distance comes a logistics problem worth solving.
Build ports on coastlines, commission ships, and set up shipping routes between islands. Ships show their cargo state at a glance — reactive fill bars so you can see at any moment whether they're loaded, empty, or in transit.
Connected clusters of hubs now form Logistic Networks, sharing construction resources across the network. As your factory sprawls across the map, managing these networks becomes a game within the game.
We've done a lot of iterations on the ship system and its UI, and it's in a good place for the beta. More iterations to come to get it from good to great — but one step at a time.
Military & Expansion
The world isn't empty. Enemy bases occupy hexes. Spend resources on military, clear them out, and unlock new territory. New islands, new resource deposits, new space to build.
The open map changes the pacing in a way we really like: when you hit a wall in one direction, there's always somewhere else to push. Another island to reach. Another hex to claim. Another deposit to connect back to your network.
Finding Your Way
v0.8 changes a lot. While we had tutorials before, this is the first proper guidance system — instead of requiring you to read walls of text, it guides your actions right where they happen. New players get walked through the early game step by step. Returning players get help bridging the gap between what the game was and what it's becoming.
The Ongoing War on Friction
This one is less a feature list and more a design philosophy we keep pushing further with every update: find the trivial clicks, eliminate them, and make factory building as seamless and flowy as possible.
Some examples from this update:
Create parcels directly on existing edges — no menu diving required
Alt-click to stamp out entire production clusters in one action
The Alt key has quietly become a Swiss army knife — bulk operations, quick-build, smart defaults, all context-sensitive
Dozens of smaller QoL touches that are individually minor but collectively change how the game feels to play
We'll keep doing this. Every update, less friction. The Factory Must Flow.
[When building a Node Parcel with Alt pressed, the system infers your intent and builds out an entire production cluster]
Under the Hood
Not everything that matters is visible.
On the surface: performance optimizations, smoother rendering, more stable saves with better error handling.
Beneath the surface: significant refactoring, improved test coverage, architectural cleanup. The kind of work that doesn't make for exciting GIFs but makes everything else possible going forward. We've been investing in the foundation so we can build faster on top of it.
None of this happens without the people who play, test, and push this game forward with us. Every bug report, every design suggestion, every hour spent testing — that's what shapes where this goes. This has always been a collaborative build, and it always will be.
Try It
Steam Library → Incremental Factory → Properties → Betas → select "test"
This is a beta. Things will break. That's the point — your feedback directly shapes what we work on next.
Feedback & Community: Discord
We gave the game a world. Now we get to fill it. We're strapped in for the long run — there's a lot of potential underneath, and we're just getting started.
The Factory Must Grow.