$19.99Autonauts Teach robots to run everything
Record simple tasks, teach them to your workerbots, and watch your colony grow from sticks and stones to a self-running world of farms and workshops.
Is Autonauts worth it?
Autonauts is worth it if…
- you like building systems that run themselves while you watch
- you enjoy gentle puzzles with no fail state and no rush
- you want a colony sim where the settlers are adorable robots you trained yourself
- you have patience for showing each new bot the ropes one action at a time
- you liked the idea of Factorio but wished it looked friendlier
Screenshots
Teach a bot by doing
You press record, show a fresh workerbot how to do a job, and it copies you. Grab an axe from the crate, chop trees until the axe breaks, walk back for a new one: that is now the bot's whole life. Wrap the steps in a loop, and it keeps going forever. No code to write, just actions to arrange, and the visual language grows with you through loops and conditionals. The trick is that the bot only knows what you showed it, so a lumberjack with a broken axe and no plan stands still with a blinking thought bubble until you decide whether to hand it a spare or build a bot that makes axes. Every small gap in a routine is a new problem to solve.
From sticks and stones to a working world
You land with nothing and pick up the basics by hand, because someone has to. Then come the crude tools, the first storage crates, the first bots, and slowly the chores leave your shoulders. Forestry runs itself: planters, choppers, a bot that hauls logs. Add farming, fishing, cooking, tailoring, animal husbandry, and each new job is another little machine of bots feeding bots. The game rewards automating even small things: a bot whose only job is holding a flywheel next to the next blueprint that needs one. When it all clicks and the colony produces while you just watch, that is the feeling people come back for.
A calm planet, your pace
Nothing here rushes you. The low-poly world, all bright colours and soft shapes, stays friendly even when your bot count climbs into the hundreds. You can log off mid-project and pick it up later, or spend a whole session doing nothing but reorganising storage routes because it bothered you. It is the kind of game where the reward for good work is less work, and watching the bots do it.
Colonists who need you
Bots are happy with instructions. Colonists are not: they need food, housing, clothing and care, and keeping them supplied is what turns your bot economy into a colony sim. Your production lines end at real people, and pushing their needs further, better meals, warmer clothes, proper homes, is how you guide them toward transcendence. It gives all that automation a purpose: the lumberjack bot's endless trees become someone's dinner, and the kitchen line you built at tier two keeps feeding them at tier six. The story of your colony is the story of what you decided to automate next.
Questions you might have?
Do you need to know how to program?
No. You teach bots by recording actions and arranging them in a visual, Scratch-style editor with loops and conditionals. It is designed to be easy to pick up, and the challenge is logical thinking, not syntax. Plenty of people who have never written code get deep into it.
Can you share programs between bots?
Yes. The bot database lets you store scripts and hand them to new bots, and a recent update made sharing code between bots much quicker. It saves you from re-recording everything, though a bot doing a similar job with different items still needs its own adjustments.
What is the repetitive part?
Training. Because bots learn by watching you do the task, setting up each new production line means demonstrating the steps yourself, and with dozens of bots that adds up. The bot database and script copying soften it, but if hands-on demonstration sounds tedious to you, that is the trade to weigh.
