Nectar Works

Factorio is the game where you land on a planet, build a machine that makes a machine, and look up eleven hours later. Nobody is putting eleven hours into a browser cabinet, so this is the same idea folded down to one screen and one sitting: thirty cells by seventeen, all of them visible the whole time, and a run that ends when the hive falls.

It is an homage and it says so. Nothing is lifted — every line, every noise and every recipe here was written from scratch — and it is not connected to Wube Software in any way.

Learning it at the cabinet#

Everything below is also inside the machine, so you never have to read a page to play one.

The first run walks you through it. Ten steps, in order — put a forager on nectar, run a line away from it, reduce it to honey, do the same for wax, press the two into jelly, and stand something in the way of the first wave. Each step rings the tile it is talking about, lights the chip on the bar it wants, and waits until your factory has actually done the thing rather than until you have put the machine down. Sit on one long enough and it tells you what usually goes wrong with it, which is nearly always a conduit that does not quite touch what it is meant to feed.

No wave arrives until the guide has covered defending. Not on a timer — the countdown is simply held until you reach that step, because being eaten while reading how to make wax is the exact thing a guide is for. Stalling is what is capped instead: sit on one step too long and the guide moves itself on to the defence lesson and says so, which starts the clock but never before you have been told what to do about it.

Press `S` to skip it, and it never comes back on its own. Press `G` to run it again.

`H` opens the manual — four pages covering the chain, every building and what it costs, the smoke and the wasps, and the research and the keys. The run stands still while it is open. On a phone the `?` on the build bar does the same thing.

The chain#

Four steps, and everything else is detail.

1. A forager goes on a coloured patch and pulls one unit out of it every second or so. Patches run dry — the colour fades as they go — and a forager standing on a spent one wears a red cross so you can see it has stopped.

2. A conduit carries what comes out. Drag to lay a line; each tile you leave turns to point at the tile you entered. That is the only control on this cabinet that has to be right, and it is the one worth practising.

3. A reducer refines it. Two nectar make a honey. Two pollen make a wax. Two resin make a stinger. A reducer locks onto whichever raw good reaches it first and refuses the others until it has been idle a few seconds — so one belt, one raw good, or the line backs up.

4. A press takes one honey and one wax and makes royal jelly. Jelly delivered to the hive is the score. It is also the research. There is nothing else on this cabinet that scores.

There are no inserters. A machine takes from any conduit running into it and puts its output onto any conduit beside it — or straight into a machine it is touching, which is why a press parked against the hive is a perfectly good opening build. Inserters are the fiddliest thing in the genre and they are not the part that makes it good; routing is, and routing is untouched.

The smoke#

Every machine that is doing something makes smog, and the hive makes a little on its own whether you build anything or not. Smog spreads out from the hive as a dashed circle you can see, and a wasp nest inside that circle is angry — angry nests send more, and send the bigger ones.

That is the whole loop of this kind of game in one sentence: the bigger the factory, the further the smoke, the more of the map is annoyed with you. A run that never expands is safe and scores nothing. A run that expands as fast as it can is rich and dies at wave nine.

The meadow absorbs a little smog on its own, so a small tidy factory can sit at a stable level forever. Vents pull more out, at the cost of a cell and sixteen wax.

The wasps#

They come in waves on a timer that gives you 55 seconds before the first one and tightens toward 26. Each wasp flies at the nearest thing you own, which is the only reason walls work — a comb wall is cheap, tough, and the nearest thing, so it is what gets chewed instead of your conduits.

The hive does not repair, and nothing repairs it. Every wasp that gets through costs you permanently, so a good defence slows the ratchet rather than resetting it. That is what makes the run end.

Stinger posts shoot whatever is in reach, and they need stingers to do it. Stingers come from resin, through a reducer, down a conduit, into the post. A post with an empty magazine sits there with a grey barrel and does nothing, and finding that out during a wave is the lesson this cabinet is really about.

The hive pulls slightly harder than its distance says, so a factory that has walled itself in perfectly still gets visited. There is no build that ends the waves.

Research#

Ten of them, no prerequisites, and the cost is set by how many you have already finished rather than by which one you pick — so the only decision is the order. The panel on the right of the build bar shows what is queued. `T`, or a click on that panel, opens the list of all ten — pick the one you want and it is queued in one click. It used to cycle, which meant up to nine presses to reach the tenth while a factory ran and wasps closed, and a control that costs nine presses under pressure is one nobody uses.

• Deeper seams — foragers work 40% faster
• Waxed rails — conduits run 70% faster
• Hot combs — reducers work 65% faster
• Barbed shot — posts hit 70% harder
• Long guard — posts reach a cell further
• Twin piston — presses work 65% faster
• Filter comb — vents pull twice the smog
• Thick wax — everything you build is twice as tough
• Deep roots — every patch holds twice as much
• Royal ration — delivered jelly scores double

Science is jelly. A jelly delivered to the hive is a point of score and a point of research at the same time, so there is never a moment where the thing that scores and the thing that improves you are pulling against each other.

What it costs to grow#

Buildings are paid for in honey and wax — the same two goods the press wants. Every expansion comes out of the jelly it was going to make, which is why the opening minute is tight: you start with eighty wax and forty honey. A first chain — two foragers, two reducers, a press and about ten cells of conduit — is fifty of that wax and eighteen of the honey, and what is left over is roughly one stinger post and a few walls. Wave one arrives at 55 seconds, so that is the real opening decision: spend the change on defence, or gamble it on a second forager.

Clear refunds half, rounded down, and whatever was riding on the belt or sitting in the machine goes with it.

Posting a run#

Sign in with Discord and the run posts itself when the hive falls; play as a guest and it is kept as a personal best on this device instead. The board ranks on score and shows jelly delivered beside it, which is the same number twice — that is deliberate, because on this cabinet the jelly is the run and everything else is how you protected it. The arcade page has the longer version of how the boards work, and the other cabinets.