Microtopia is an automation game for innovators – without conveyor belts

Debora Pape

11.3.2025

Translation: Patrik Stainbrook

Conveyor belts for transportation? New automation game Microtopia prefers using ants. And they’re just waiting for your commands. I spent hours tinkering with my logistics network, and had a lot of fun along the way.

There goes another ant somewhere it shouldn’t. It’s even carrying valuable ant larva. I need those in my hatchery! How did that happen? Somewhere, a logic gate must’ve led the busy ant down the wrong path. And there are plenty of logic gates in Microtopia, acting sort of like signposts. Time and again, the odd little crawler ends up on unwanted paths or dies on a forgotten loop due to my poor planning.

Microtopia is an automation game in the vein of Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program – just different. Instead of conveyor belts to transport the resources and products you’ve manufactured, small creatures reminiscent of robot ants pick up the slack. This feels new, presenting different challenges compared to conveyor belts. My ants run tirelessly along fixed trails, picking up any materials they come across along the way. Until they grow old and die.

The aim of the game is to keep expanding your ant colony. You use research points to unlock new buildings, ant species and technologies – the game’s increasingly complex. Everything in Microtopia revolves around logistics: using filters – called logic gates – you try to guide the ants so that everything arrives where it’s supposed to.

A cycle of life and death

You need a queen to actually command the ants, so I place her somewhere in the middle of the chaos. She has an entourage of four immortal robot ants, who take on her first tasks. In truth, the queen is nothing but a larvae production factory. If you need more worker ants, you have to feed the queen with energy balls that grow on certain plants. You use ant trails to harvest the energy balls, transport them to the queen and deliver the resulting larvae to incubators for hatching.

She works like every production building: you throw something in and something comes out on the other side. You melt scrap into iron in the same way, processing the iron into screws and plates after that. If you feed the queen quickly enough, her energy bar will increase. After a while, she’ll level up, producing more ants per minute. Regardless, you have to maintain quick deliveries. Levelling up the queen takes a long time at higher levels.

Crucially in Microtopia, ants hatched this way only have a short lifespan. You have to ensure a constant supply of fresh larvae; otherwise your entire production and transportation network will collapse. This is what sets Microtopia apart from other automation games. Not only do you build a logistics network, you also have to ensure that new ants are continuously fed into the necessary cycles.

In other words, I spend hours working on ways to optimise my logistics and find a good balance between a limited number of ants and the numerous end products to be manufactured. I always enjoy tinkering around, and the hours just fly by.

But workers grow old too. At that point, they’re converted into flying drones using a piece of fabric, for example. By recycling, you get the maximum amount of labour out of your larvae.

You use age gates to filter out old ants from my busy ant colony. It’s one type of the many logic gates that exist in Microtopia. If an ant reaches a gate, the game checks whether the set filters apply or not. In this case, it checks if the ant is old. If it is, the creature is guided via the gate to a branching path, into a recycling building, for example. If not, it continues on its original route.

Microtopia offers a wide array of logic gates. Using them correctly is the key to a functioning ant colony. It reminds me of software programming. «If this, then that» loops and the like. Tinkering with it is great fun – but also requires a lot of micromanagement.

For example, I used a counting gate to specify that five ants should always work in the connected iron production facility. If this requirement is met, the gate closes until a space becomes available again.

But if you need more iron, you also need more ants. So you have to adjust the gate and let eight ants through, for example. However, this means that three fewer ants will reach other areas, and you can’t produce more ants on demand to compensate.

In other words,production sites further up the line grab workers and always produce at full power, while ones further down hardly get any ants. Additionally, there’s no gate that lets every third ant through, thus separating two-thirds of the passing ants. You simply have to find ways to distribute the available number of ants according to demand.

Counting gates in combination with time gates are one option. The latter only allow one ant to pass through every X seconds. This is fiddly to adjust and can’t be easily adapted to new situations. Especially not when a bunch of production lines are affected.

Only after many hours do I realise how important the efficiency of each individual ant is. One ant more or less in the production system can make a big difference. Route optimisation is just as important as the number of ants. It makes a huge difference whether a forager who’s already harvested fibre from the first plant still has to walk the entire route or takes a shortcut back to the collection camp early.

Each ant should walk the shortest possible distance in order to work as much as possible. Constantly rebuilding and optimising the entire system is part of the process. Fortunately, conversions cost me nothing but time – you get all my resources back when I tear something down. This way I’m always experimenting with new production setups, tearing down and rebuilding. I haven’t had this much fun working out ideal routes for a long time.

So far, I don’t know of a way to copy and paste buildings to quickly build a new production line according to an existing scheme. I can’t even copy the production scheme set in one building (e.g. screws) and transfer it to others. No, I have to open each building individually and set the scheme.

It’s particularly annoying that I can’t see where a scheme is already stored and where it isn’t. Just as an idea, symbols on buildings could indicate which products are produced, distributed and stored there. I usually have to click on a building to see this important detail.

This is even more annoying with flying ants that transport goods between different islands: not even a click on an individual critter indicates which item it’s carrying. I have to zoom in close to see the transported good – many components look confusingly similar to boot. I hope that the development studio will deliver improvements here.

Microtopia has been available on Steam since 18 February 2025. The game was provided to me by Goblinz Studio for testing purposes.

Debora Pape

Editor

Debora.Pape@galaxus.de

Feels just as comfortable in front of a gaming PC as she does in a hammock in the garden. Likes the Roman Empire, container ships and science fiction books. Focuses mostly on unearthing news stories about IT and smart products.

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