Mindustry
A tower-defence game about building automated factories on alien planets. The supply chain is the game.
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Play Mindustry →Opens in a new tab on the original host.
Controls: WASD to scroll. Scroll wheel to zoom. Left-click to place. Right-click to remove. Lots of hotkeys — press H in-game.
Mindustry starts as a tower defence game about defending a core from waves of enemies. Somewhere in the second hour you realise the defences are beside the point. The point is the conveyor belts.
The game is built around resource chains: ore gets mined, transported across conveyors, smelted, transported again, loaded into a crafter, combined with something else, and finally routed to a turret that needs it to shoot things. When the chain works, it is deeply satisfying. When it doesn’t — when a single conveyor junction is backwards and you don’t know which one — it is a puzzle that rewards the kind of brain that enjoys untangling cables.
This is a web build compiled via libGDX, the same code that runs the desktop and mobile versions. It is not a demo or a limited port. The full game, all campaign maps, sandbox mode, and the ability to load community-created maps all run in the tab.
Why it’s on the guide: GPL-3.0, genuinely deep, made by one person (Anuken), and a representative of the factory-automation genre that has shaped a decade of indie game design. Also: the conveyors are addictive.