Big budget free-to-play open world action RPGs are a dime a dozen these days, and here comes another one. Arknights Endfield is the latest to hop on the “Genshin Impact-like” train. Despite sharing the series name, this is a very different experience to Arknights, the free-to-play tactical strategy-RPG. In fact, it has one cool thing that I personally haven’t seen in these style of games: a factory builder.
It was so odd to see myriad of ads for this game showing off the combat, the characters, the streamers respectfully looking at the characters—all of which did nothing to pique my interest, only for a sponsored video by creator Let’s Game It Out to get me installing this after seeing the first 10 seconds.
How dare Arknights Endfeld not let me know it’s also an automation game.
But here’s the thing: I personally do not find these style of gacha games interesting. I tried Genshin Impact at launch and was not convinced by it. Zenless Zone Zero did something cool at launch but the game has since evolved in a direction I don’t vibe with anymore. The last gacha game I enjoyed was about race horse girls, maybe too much. It’s why I simply refused to even cover Arknights Endfield until now.
So I come in here offering a peculiar perspective: is it worth playing through Arknights Endfield just for the factory builder aspects?
The short answer is no, you better like the rest of the game as well.
But also, this is not to dismiss the factory builder component, because despite its set limitations it’s as fun of a time sink as the genre’s greats.
How Factory Building in Arknights Endfield Works
In Arknights Endfield, the main character is the Endministrator of Endfiled Industries. Yes, punny job title, but they’re also supposed to be this super respectable, powerful figure who kickstarted civilization life on Talos-II thanks to groundbreaking tech and discovery. This is all to glaze up your amnesiac, mysterious playable character which will be lore-dripped through the many story quests currently available about a month since launch. And also, the game really makes an effort to position this industrial entity as the good guys. We’re helping people with all this automated manufacturing.
And that’s the premise of the factory building. Called the AIC (Automated Industrial Complex), you’ll be automatic production lines to create products which you can then sell to local outposts to help them grow from the state of a refugee camp into a respectable frontier town. You are given a set plot of land where you can freely place your machinery and its accompanying conveyor belt, as long as it’s within the borders.
Don’t expect to go all chaotic and make a spaghetti mess or a rat’s nest in Arknights Endfield. With space being so limited and with only access to one plane (you can’t build vertically), the room to mess about is rather little. And it’s an understandable design decision. Think of the gacha gamers who suddenly has to interact with a whole new, different, kind of gameplay that seems way too complicated at first.
You can build the factory in 3D space (like a third-person Satisfactory), or make use of an overhead 2D camera to really make you feel like you’re playing Factorio. Though you don’t control your character anymore in this view, you’re a disembodied cursor that can plop buildings and belts from thin air. The controls on the controller are workable, there is some learning curve to it in remembering that buttons in different menus do different things.
The one thing I find slightly annoying is how buildings and other belts don’t overwrite existing belts. So you have to paint the screen and remove them first before plopping down a new building or pre-made belt layout. On that note, the game is missing a mirror function to flip a copied layout/blueprint, something I would have found useful and expected out of a factory builder.
Thankfully, Arknights Endfield includes a full list of tutorials intended to guide newcomers to factory building to learn the ropes. Rewards for completing them is a premade blueprint, so players who just want to move on from the factory building as quickly as possible can just follow the prompts in the tutorial, do the bare minimum, plop a blueprint and do some minimal belt connecting and go.
While that’s cool and very accomodating, Arknights Endfield assumes everyone is a newcomer to factory building. I know my way around factory builders but the game insists I sit through and go do the tutorials, and even then, the game holds my hand so tightly by not allowing me to mess about and demand me to follow the instructions very rigidly to complete them. If there’s an option where it can adjust the hand-holding tightness to accommodate factory builder veterans, I would appreciate it. Think of how games like Civilization VII has advice tips that only introduces you to features new to the entry, but will leave you to it when it comes to basic mechanics. I know why this machine is producing anything, I purposely turned it off to clog up all conveyor belts to ensure maximum efficiency! Let me cook!
When you set aside that, Arknights Endfield’s factory building is fun and satisfying to figure out. There are long production chains and machines with lower or higher throughput. So figuring out how to balance the number of machines required to maintain consistent output while avoiding unexpected traffic jams on the conveyor belt should feel like home for the experienced line engineers, real or otherwise. It still has that jigsaw element where there is a way to optimise the factory layout so that it can use less power pylons, less empty space, and be modular.
And Endfield’s take on factory building has its own unique charms as well. With space being limited, the amount of input and output are severely scarce, and not much room to put more conveyor belts. In the early game, you’ll be looping from the center of the factory back to itself. Only with later upgrades you can add additional input/output holes through the Depot on the sides of the factory plot. Also, you don’t get splitters and mergers from the get-go. That means early game factories will have to be hogging more space than it should. Mergers being a really late upgrade is a painful one.
It’s still worth meeting the game at its terms rather than fighting it, as Endfield’s factory building truly shines when you try not to just use your fundamental factory building skills.
For the longest time, I was struggling with building an endless supply of crops. Not because it’s hard to do, but I keep running out of space. For a Buckflower, there’s the Buckflower itself, the Buckflower seed and the Buckflower powder that you need to have in consistent supply. My style of building requires one input belt and three output belts for each item. And there’s at least four more plants-based production lines like this you need to make and there’s just not much space to work with! Merging the three outputs and you’ll risk having one of the three items clog the entire line, and at least for now there’s no resource sink to safely dump excess materials.
By following the tutorial and unlocking the associated pre-made blueprint, I received an epiphany. The blueprint doesn’t even have an input belt at all! Just have enough seeds or plants at hand, and since you produce twice the seeds out of one plant, you can dedicate one planter for production, and another to loop back to the same seed-making machine to guarantee infinite plants and seeds. Genius.
Once you learn the system’s intrinsic intricacies that only applies in Endfield, like you don’t need to use all the input/output ports of a machine, and you absolutely need to have one belt/splitter/converger to connect one machine to the next, then you can start having fun assembling the jigsaw puzzle that is the industrial complex.
As an example, this is a modular build for low capacity batteries I constructed purely on my (rather limited) factory building game experience. Looks decent and compact, but there’s a bunch of mistakes here that I learned soon after. The Thermal Batteries (which you can feed the low capacity batteries into to generate power) are not connected—they needed to be flipped the other way around and have it connected with a splitter from the belt up top. Having the input materials connected in a series of four was bad for throughput (obviously) when these can be arranged in a series of two, the two different materials coming from either side.
Being able to make this, and then iterate it further is the fun that any good factory builder or automation game offers. Arknights Endfield provides a bunch of problems to solve, with a pretty long production chain to go through. This is still early-to-mid game level of complexity.
Endfield’s factory plot sizes are limited in size, even after getting upgrades, but you do get multiples of them. These are unlocked more or less after every story quest parts (In Chapter 1, there’s four parts, processes as it’s called). You don’t get much of a sprawl, but that plains of the Core AIC Area is not the only place you can erect your industry.
Since Endfield is an online-only game that runs on servers, it offers a benefit for the factory building: you can leave it idle and come back with stacks of materials. There is a limit on this, it only runs automatically for a week where it will stop and require you to log back in to have it run again. And not all factories from different regions can run in the background. It’s all understandable limits, can’t just let servers run those factories of people who might not even going to log back in now can you?
So, what do you get from engaging with the factory building? Two things: materials to craft equippable gear and healing items, as well in-game money. Crafting gear is using materials you made is cool (I wish you can craft them in bulk). Having the ability to produce plants and healing items mean that I have to force myself to ignore those tempting Buckflower plants designed for you to pick and handcraft a few heals (why pick up five of them all in a bunch when you have a stack of 11,000 if them back at the factory that’s just a fast travel loading screen away?).
The in-game money can be spent to buy some useful items, even rare weapons. But it’ll take some time before your factory becomes a proper money-making machine. You need to set up more elaborate production lines to really get those big bucks out of the outposts. Which is probably too much busywork for some folks, as Endfield also offers other mini-games to earn big bucks quick. It baffles me that the 10 hours of configuring the two factory sites I had opened up only earned me about a 100K while the first Death Stranding-style delivery job I did earned me a cool 177K in just minutes walking about.
This is why I don’t recommend playing Arknights Endfield just for the factory builder gameplay alone. It’s good, but it’s ancillary at best. It takes a lot of story progress to really unlock all of the factory builder features, and it doesn’t really offer you great rewards other than the satisfaction of having a satisfactory factory. It is fun to engage with, and nothing is monetised in regards to the factory building experience. If you managed to produce that much battery consistently that’s your handiwork (and maybe a friend’s blueprint).
But if you don’t like the one-button-mashing combat that has mechanics only discoverable through reading the descriptions carefully, the run-of-the-mill chase-the-mysterious-villain-as-you discover-your-mysterious-self story plot, that’s too much suffering for so little. I’m 30 hours in (15 of which is likely just messing with the factory builder) and I have yet to unlock all factory plots available in the current version of the game. I think the rest of the game is rather perfunctory, nothing really grabbed me, but I admit that I was never the target audience for this.
(There’s also the tower defence mini-game associated with the factory building. It’s nothing to write home about other than it being a nice homage to original mobile game.)
Closing Thoughts
That being said, Arknights Endfield has done a tremendous job with its factory building gameplay. This is bound to be someone’s first foray into this strategy game niche, and I hope these folks will continue to ride the conveyor belt and experience other decent factory builders.
As a person who has logged in too many hours into Satisfactory, Shapez, Shapez 2 and Dyson Sphere Program, Arknights Endfield is just as good as the best of them. I don’t recommend you playing just for the factory building, it’s only a fun time if you genuinely do enjoy the rest of the game. You have to eat the gacha-filled vegetables before you can consume your industrial complex desert.