Games Like Textorio

About Textorio

TEXTORIO

You crash-land on Kepler-442b — a planet that wants you dead. 50,000 colonists sleep in cryo-pods deep below the surface. Wake them, or die trying. In Textorio, you build a factory in pure ASCII. Raw ore becomes circuits. Circuits become machines. Machines become a self-sustaining production empire — and that empire is the only thing standing between humanity and extinction on an alien world. This is factory automation stripped to its bones. No textures. No 3D models. Just glyphs, logic, and consequences.

MINE. SMELT. AUTOMATE. SURVIVE.

Start with a single terminal and a busted escape pod. By hour four you'll have power grids, fluid networks, steam pressure, and conveyors carrying ore from underground veins to refineries you designed yourself. By hour twelve you'll be drilling through bedrock toward the colonists, fighting wildlife that evolves to counter your factory. Every machine is rendered as an ASCII character. Every system is a real system — electricity flows along wires, fluids flow through pipes, logic gates fire on signals. If you understand it, you can break it. If you can break it, you can optimize it.

THE DESCENT

You don't conquer one biome. You conquer four, and each one is a different problem. Surface — forests, river systems, ore veins, and hostile fauna that emerges at night. Your first factory is built here, exposed to weather, predators, and the slow rotation of the day/night cycle. Caves — pierced by your Tunnel Bore. Crystal seams in five color families. Geothermal vents. Glowcap mushrooms that light their own caverns. The wildlife is older, larger, and lit by minerals you'll learn to harvest. Deep Caves — magma-warm air that overheats your machinery until you research thermal management. Heavy metals you can't find anywhere else. And the fossilized remnants of structures that weren't yours. Core Chamber — the reactor. The reason for everything. Restart it and the colony lives. Fail and the cryo-pods go cold one by one.

KEY FEATURES

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Pure ASCII rendering — every machine, ore, conveyor, and creature is a glyph. Runs on anything. Reads like a system schematic.

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Real engineering systems — electricity networks, fluid dynamics with real pressure, steam-driven contraptions, and hydraulic logic gates (AND/OR/NOT/XOR/DELAY/MEMORY). No abstractions. No magic.

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Four interconnected world layers — Surface, Caves, Deep Caves, Core Chamber. Each has unique resources, threats, and engineering puzzles. A vertical lift system carries you and your goods between them.

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Silicon-based hostile wildlife — biters feed on electromagnetic energy. They don't attack you — they're trying to eat your factory. Build walls and they evolve stronger. Use turrets and they swarm in larger packs. Static defense fails over time. Adaptation is the only strategy.

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The Mote — your autonomous companion drone — an AI sidekick with three modes (FOLLOW, GUARD, SCOUT) and its own mood system. It repairs your machines, scouts ahead, defends your base, and reacts to how you play.

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BASTION uplink — the ship's surviving AI narrates your descent in fragmented transmissions. You'll recover crew logs from the previous mission as you go deeper. The story they tell is not the one BASTION is telling you.

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Self-designed factories — no preset blueprints, no templates, no auto-solver. The factory that saves 50,000 lives is the one YOU figure out, from a blank Surface to the Core.

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1v1 LAN Factory Wars — host a match against a friend, build symmetric bases, train Raiders, and try to destroy the enemy's Cryo-Vault before they destroy yours. Currently in closed testing.

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Your name in the manifest — beat the game and your username goes into the colony ship's permanent crew log.

THE WORLD

Kepler-442b orbits a K-type star 1,206 light years from Earth. The colony ship Wreckborn was supposed to land it gently. It didn't. Your cryo-pod ejected. The rest are still down there. You wake on a continent of black soil and pale grass, with a wrist terminal that still works, three days of rations, and the silhouettes of broken alien architecture on the horizon. The wildlife is patient. The colonists' pods are running out of power. Somebody tried this before you. They left logs. They didn't leave bodies.

DESIGN PHILOSOPHY

Textorio respects your intelligence. No tutorial popups holding your hand. No glowing arrows pointing at "the next thing." A 30-second briefing on the controls, then you're alone with a wrist terminal and a planet. Read, decide, build. Every glyph is a real entity. No background art. No decorative tiles. If you can see it on the map, you can interact with it — inspect it, build over it, route a belt past it, destroy it. The map is the world. Every system simulates. Electricity actually flows along wires. Fluids actually have pressure. Steam condenses back to water. Logic gates fire on real signal thresholds. The depth isn't decorative, it's structural. You can short a circuit, deadlock a pipe, or design a memory cell. ASCII isn't a limitation — it's a clarity tool. A 50,000-tile factory in ASCII reads at a glance the way a 3D version never could. Bottlenecks jump out. Optimization opportunities reveal themselves. Your factory becomes legible the same way a circuit diagram is.

ABOUT THE STUDIO

Textorio is built by one developer at Hyena Studios in Anykščiai, Lithuania. No publisher. No marketing budget. No focus groups. Just code, ASCII, and obsession. Your factory is your survival. Make it beautiful.