Game 37: Little Rocket Lab

Little Rocket Lab is a Factorio - style game that features you in the role of Morgan, a girl who has returned to her hometown of St. Ambroise and needs to use her engineering skills to make improvements to the place or possibly just ruin people's lawns. It appears to be a more casual experience than Factorio, and I suspect the engineering challenges will be a bit more bite-sized than trying to build one giant planetary monster factory.

Morgan's dream is to go back to working on a rocket she was building with her Aunt as a child, but the silo has been shuttered for years.

I need to obtain my initial resources by cleaning up junk around the place and mining some ore deposits that Auntie has cleverly left lying around the yard.

I may have been a tad overzealous in cleaning up the scrap around the house because I also managed to destroy the wind generator that powers Auntie's house.

Better fix that before she notices.....

In short order I've got a basic working assembly line - load in coal and iron into the furnace and it makes iron bars, which an assembler turns into iron plates which can then be used to manufacture conveyer belts.

The interface is clean and simple and it's easy to start making the machines that will take over people's jobs.

I don't know if Auntie wants a little resource factory in her front yard but she's getting one.

I can't fully automate just yet - I still have to mine ores by hand. That's rectified by going to the University, where you can give Rebecca a whole pile of gears to get her to teach you how to build a drill that will mine ores for you.

I like that St. Ambroise is full of people who used to know Mo, which prompts them to give some backstory.

Also, a random dog shows up and Morgan decides that the dog belongs to her now.

Leo is cute and all but he has a collar and therefore clearly belongs to someone else.

Armed with my new university research, I set up drills (which aren't drills, they're boxes with grinders on their rear ends) to mine Auntie's ores and a couple machines to turn them into useful components - I needed a little extra power to run the whole assembly.

Auntie if you are having a conniption about the wind turbine on your walkway I have dire news about what the future holds for your yard

There's actually a lot of Stardew Valley going on here - Morgan gets up each day and time ticks on by while you're doing things, and you can spend your time making machines or just exploring the picturesque town and talking to people, and you need to go to bed to end the day.

I even found an abandoned quarry complete with little slime monsters that attacked me.

I don't have much luck making progress by meeting people, so I focus on the University research for a bit and eventually get the components to repair my old robot buddy, Pico.

Morgan immediately uses him to break into the old rocket silo and see what's going on.

As expected, it was simply abandoned and nobody's been working on it.

Morgan resolves to repair the broken down systems and get things back on track.

I'm curious as to why Auntie doesn't want Morgan doing this... though, I suppose since Auntie's place is about 50 feet from the rocket silo her house would probably be destroyed if we were to actually launch a giant rocket from here.

On the other hand, ever since someone turned Auntie's front yard into a cluttered component factory it's become a pretty unpleasant place to live - really, we'd be doing her a favor.

Speaking of favors, I'm covering the roads with these handy conveyor walkways to help myself get around faster. The townsfolk are not pleased with them.

My early goal is full automation - right now I'm still hand-loading coal into furnaces, so I'm focusing on the university research projects until I can build entirely self-sustaining factories (with the caveat that the resource nodes I've found so far do have a limit and will run out eventually - even the smaller ones have several thousand ores so they'll last awhile). I'm sure there are projects and people around town I can help but I suspect THEY are too lazy to be loading their own coal, if I'm going to be building... I don't know, the Mrs. Dotson's Drastic Flower Hydropump X 3000, I don't want to have to run by her place every day with a backpack full of raw coal to keep her flowers from dying.

Having repaired the Silo, Auntie admits she hasn't had the heart to continue working on it after Morgan's mother died.

Morgan correctly notes that her (and my) emotional need to build the rocket trumps her Aunt's grief.

Now that Auntie is back on board with Morgan Von Braun, we need to repair the main silo doors and supply a significant amount of power to the structure. I could easily supply the power by expanding the wind turbines, but I've discovered another power source... for some reason the town's buildings are all generating a bit more power than they actually use.

You know the church really doesn't need to be using any power except on Sundays, and it's not stealing if they weren't using all this extra wattage anyway.

So having connected about half the town via a makeshift power grid overnight (Surprise folks!), in the morning Auntie awakens to an operational rocket silo.

Morgan's expression is easily worth enraging the tiny population of St. Ambroise

I love that the lights are now flickering whenever I enter buildings that are connected to my makeshift power grid, I'll be sure to hook up the entire town soon.

Now that the rocket silo is operational, Spring abruptly ends and Summer begins - to get the rocket underway I'm going to need additional components, like electronics which have to be imported from elsewhere. That means I've got to fix the lighthouse so that ships can safely dock at the pier and trade can resume.

Seems like nothing got properly maintained after Mom died.

Before that however, I think it's time to start building a factory to serve my own needs - a factory dedicated to making all the parts I'll need for future factories, so conveyor belts, assemblers, power poles, all of that. The rocket silo has an area laid out with some larger resource nodes and plenty of building space.

The Factory factory is off to a pretty solid start - immediately I'm finding that space is at a premium and it's messier than I would like because even the relatively generous amount of space in this area ends up being very cramped when you want to do a lot in it. It's already producing basic components like conveyer belts and power poles, I'm hoping to expand it to produce every type of machine I'm currently building by hand.

First one to inform OSHA is a goddamn snitch.

Because time passes within the game you actually need to take breaks from building the factory to go to bed, which is actually kind of nice as it both gives a sense of 'this took X days to build', and also gives you a natural stopping point for YOU to stop playing the game (Yeah, I'm looking at you, Factorio. "Just one more machine" my ass.)

The Factory factory could be better designed and I learned a lot building it, but I resist the urge to tear it all down and make a better version (for now). Time to get cracking on what I need to get done for Summer.

The lighthouse is easy enough, and having all my main factory components pre-manufactured is already making these next parts run smoothly.

Please stop being quite so grateful for my efforts

The presence of the lighthouse immediately means that ships full of old computers want to dock here (at least someone else in this town appears to be as fast with administrative and trade work as I am with machines).

It's a brave new world, folks - the tavern will not be accessible for the foreseeable future.

I'm starting to see the beginnings of people's storylines - Sabrina's a girl that's been hating on Morgan ever since we met.

Sabrina resents me for being capable of doing things.

Sabrina is fiddling with a non-functional radio and Morgan offers to help, I'm confident we'll be best of friends by the time I've fixed all the stuff she's unable to figure out.

Summer ends as Morgan finishes the first stage of the rocket - time doesn't actually pass in this game like in Stardew Valley, instead you just spend X days in 'Summer' or whatever season it is until finishing the next stage of the rocket, at which point the season advances along with the story.

Elise decides that now is a good time to ask me to help fix the Observatory.

Maybe you'd have the spare glass you need if you hadn't made all those fancy windows.

My quest for quartz to turn into glass sees me returning to the mines. Unfortunately I can't just kill the little slime monsters that live in here so I have to evade them while I'm mining.

Not being allowed to murder cute little creatures just doesn't sit right with me.

It's probably an irrational fear, but I'm concerned about using up all of the available resources on the surface - the factory factory is rapidly burning through its remaining iron nodes so I need to find a better source of materials for the long term.

And then speak of the devil, fixing up a broken-down train results in an unlimited supply! I'd assumed the mines would eventually become my long-term ore source but I'll accept rail shipping all day.

Infinite material of my choice for a simple repair job - at least they pay well in this town.

I'm going to start engineering a long-term resource extraction system over at the railyard here and once I've got that I can connect it to a bigger, better factory factory - I've noticed that I get a lot of odd jobs where people will pay me for for random parts so it'd be good to just set up manufacturing for every item and component in the game and work on making it expandable.

Ma'am have you tried checking inside all the furnaces and assembling machines that she could have wandered into, there are absolutely no railings here.

I've been thinking about sectionalizing areas for a revised factory factory with room to expand - with infinite resources coming in from the train station, I'll be able to set that up as my main source of ores and all remaining ore groups on the map can just be funneled into the overall system I build for transporting the ores around.

The first problem to solve is power - I still only have windmills for a power source, and those produce more power when they're on the coast.

Say Hello to Green Energy and goodbye to nice views of the ocean.

Next, there's a series of tasks to increase the number of train cars that will carry ore in, so I'll want to get those done - my current factory is suffering all sorts of breakdowns as it runs out of its original ore sources, but it's served its purpose in getting me to this point. There's some real dirty jury-rigging involved to eke enough components out of what's left to get the train cars rolling, but I've now got three cars coming in daily loaded with iron, copper, and coal - more than enough for a good setup.

The railyard is now a hive of mechanical activity, shipping boxes full of resources.

I'm sure the Mayor won't mind his new view of progress.

Haphazardly bulldozing the old factory left quite a mess behind

And the townspeople are very unhappy about the power situation

A new, massive factory begins to take shape....

That's when catastrophe struck, but not in the game.

I fell victim to a sudden, severe mental illness.

The experience has given me a whole new perspective on a lot of things. One of the most important things I learned is that sometimes people don't treat other people with the dignity and care that they deserve just for being people. In a sense I've been doing that here too - I've been running roughshod over the townspeople here partly as a joke, and partly just because it was easier to do.

I think there's nothing wrong with having done that in a videogame since the characters in them aren't real people. That said, during my experience I saw people with mental illness treated like they were something less than human, and right now that makes me want to change how I've been playing Little Rocket Lab. So just for me, just for this game, I'm going to start treating the townspeople decently.

This town still needs the factories I can build - economically, this place is dying and the people don't have much they can do about it. So the factories still get built - the difference is that I'll be trying to route machines through unpopulated areas and try to find the balance between inconveniencing people and making a functional factory. You might be concerned about how I'm doing - the answer right now is that I'm taking things day by day, and considering how far I've come from the state I was in, I'm optimistic.

Back to the game! It took me awhile but I've largely cleaned up the mess and removed most of the 'manufacture everything' factory.

Resources have been re-routed around St. Ambroise rather than through it.

Instead of a 'make everything' factory I'm now building much smaller, self-contained 'as needed' factories which I'll destroy and re-build as needed.

This factory just makes flow meters and heavy motors, once I have all I need I'll remove it.

Doing things this way means that space isn't really an issue and I don't need to be efficient - there's no time limit that I have to act upon and I can just take things slowly from here on out.

I think there's a balance to be struck between setting up little one-off factories like these vs. building a permanent 'make basic factory components' factory, so my plan is to just continue building these as needed and if I regularly find myself running short of a particular component type I'll set up something permanent for making it.

In the meantime, since I'm waiting on parts to get made I figured out I can give the townspeople gifts, which makes the various bugs and plants I find every so often useful.

Hey Watts I hope you like snails because you're getting one.

My plan to treat the townspeople well has hit a snag...

Turns out the people here are really, really dumb

I worked very hard to modify these systems so that people could safely walk around them and sometimes that's just not enough for these people. Look, folks have gotta meet me halfway here, there's a way to walk around it, it looks pretty damn obvious to me, and if they're just too dumb to find it, that's on them.

In other news, I have discovered a new superpower - laziness.

Behold the power of sleep.

Time continues to run while sleeping, so I can just throw together whatever haphazard and inefficient factory I want and then just sleep in bed for a week and bam - job's done! Using my new laziness power I get everything ready for the next stage of the rocket.

Unfortunately, Morgan herself gets lazy too and she starts cutting corners...

Catastrophe strikes again and the entire rocket Silo burns down.

Morgan rushes in to try to save... I actually have no idea what she could be trying to save, it's not like she can carry the rocket out of there. Toasty the giant toaster robot rushes in to save her.

Winter's arrival finds Morgan facing the consequences of her mistake.

Wait, why is Toasty still in here if it got Morgan out safely? After saving Morgan, Toasty must have rushed back inside for some bread or something so this is really its own fault.

Winter's objective becomes the repair of Toasty - and also brings a new, delightful aspect to the game. Lots of people now want Morgan to build a factory inside their homes to manufacture components - I guess they missed the wondrous experience of having their town overridden by machines and now want to make their domiciles completely unlivable.

Thanks very much for the space. if you can make it to your kitchen it's still usable.

This also means that the town factory is back on the menu since now people's houses are producing components.

Thankfully Toasty isn't that hard to repair now that I have these house-factories, and it doesn't take me long to get it back on its feet.

Welcome back big guy!

Winter ends with a new problem - the Mayor has safety concerns after the fire and decides to call a town hall to resolve whether work on the silo should continue.

Auntie sums up the problems with the town nicely.

In a heartwarming scene everyone in town (except my washing machine) votes to continue the rocket project. Spring arrives and the silo is repaired and Morgan is ready to work on the final stage.

The last stage is a huge job so I just break it into chunks - my factories right now can produce some of the needed components, so I clear out all those first. Since this is the last part of the game, I can just disassemble each factory as it finishes the final parts, then I can re-use the factory components to create other factories for the rest of the pieces I need.

It's been a fun game, I don't think it necessarily capitalized as much on the social / Stardew Valley side as it might have (I didn't see myself ruining people's houses after I decided to treat people decently but sometimes life just work out that way). The factory side has been very detailed and fun to work with and it's a nice cozy factory experience.

It occurs to me that there hasn't been any reason given as to what the rocket is for - other than 'Because Mom wanted to'. Ah well, maybe that's enough of a reason to do it anyway.

I'm pretty sure this launch wrecks St Ambroise, we launched directly from the silo with most of the town's houses about a block away.

I like to think of it as my last act of kindness - now that the townspeople can't live in their homes anymore I'm at least doing them a favor by destroying their homes so they can collect on the insurance money and move to a better town.

For anyone still concerned about me, I've fully recovered from my mental health episode and am feeling like myself again. I'm going to be all right and I can't wait to start the next game for this blog and the next chapter of my life.