Belts, Smelters, and the Endless Horde
The factory you build to survive is the same noise that calls the dead to your door.
Spent the day on the spine of the thing: the loop. Miner bites ore out of the dead ground. Belt carries it. Smelter renders it down to plate and ingot. Assembler turns that into the only two things that matter out here — ammunition and the next machine. In Godot it's a graph of nodes ticking on a fixed step, items as lightweight structs riding belt segments, no per-item physics, because forty conveyors of rigid bodies would melt the frame before the horde ever got close.
The belts are the easy part to describe and the hard part to feel right. A belt has to read as alive — ore lurching forward, backing up when the smelter chokes, starving when the miner runs dry. I'm faking the motion with a scrolling shader on the belt mesh and discrete item slots that advance on the tick. Cheap. Convincing enough that when a line jams you see it jam, ingots piling up like bodies at a gate.
Every machine sings to the dead
Here's the rule that makes it a game and not a spreadsheet: noise. Each placed machine emits. A miner is a low industrial heartbeat. A smelter roars. An assembler clatters. I sum the emitters into a heat value on the nav grid, and the horde's pathfinding bends toward the loud. Build a bigger factory, draw a bigger crowd. The thing keeping you alive is the same thing ringing the dinner bell.
So the belt is a confession. It feeds ammo to the wall guns, and the guns feed the dark — and the belt's own clatter is what put the dark at the wall in the first place. You can't quiet the factory without starving the guns. You can't feed the guns without waking more of them. The player designs their way into that corner on purpose, the way I designed myself into shipping a factory game by March.
Tuned the emission falloff for two hours. Too quiet and the horde wanders off and the tension dies. Too loud and a starter base gets swarmed before the first smelter finishes a heat. Landed somewhere that felt like standing in a cold building listening to something approach, knowing exactly why it's coming.
Tomorrow: power. Right now the machines run on faith. They should run on a grid that browns out when you overbuild, so the choice isn't just how loud but how much can the wreck actually carry before the lights — and the guns — go dark.
Loop closes. Ore in, ammo out, horde inbound. Working as intended, which is the problem.