▶ TL;DRCaptain of Industry is the factory game for people who wanted Factorio to push back. The mining and terrain are excellent, and the maintenance and settlement systems give every production chain consequences. Rough onboarding, a sagging late game and an open-ended early access keep it at 8.2.

In Factorio a bad layout costs you time. In Captain of Industry it can cost you the colony. You land a small crew on an island where the trucks burn diesel, the machines wear out and the people running them want feeding, so a shortage in one chain turns up three chains later as a factory that has stopped.

MaFi Games put it into Steam Early Access on 31 May 2022 and it's still there, now at version 0.8.7 after Update 4.2 in July. It's single-player, Windows only, and A$50.95 at full price. I'm giving it an 8.2. Almost everything holding it back sits in the first few hours or in what happens once the island gets big.

You dig the hole yourself

The terrain is the best thing here. Ore is part of the hillside. You paint a mining designation on the slope, assign excavators and trucks to a mine control tower, and they cut it down one bucket at a time. The rock nobody wants has to go somewhere, so you mark a dumping zone, and the usual answer is the ocean. Tip enough waste off the beach and the island gets bigger.

An open-pit mine cut into a red hillside in Captain of Industry, with yellow excavators loading haul trucks on several levels, dust trails behind the trucks, and ore storage silos and a rail line at the bottom of the pit.
Excavators loading haul trucks on a pit wall. The dust trails are trucks on the haul road above. Screenshot via Steam / MaFi Games.

You build the ramps that get trucks down to the pit floor, and since Update 4 amphibious excavators can keep digging below the waterline. A few hours in, the island looks like something you did to it. I haven't had that from another factory game.

Trucks do the general hauling without being told. You never draw a route. A truck sees that the smelter wants coal and a storage has some, and it goes. That makes the early game fast to set up. It also makes the fleet a shared resource that every job on the island competes for, which matters later. Belts and pipes take over the high-volume links once you can afford them.

+ PROS

  • Fully deformable terrain you mine, dump and reshape yourself
  • Trucks handle general hauling with no routes to draw
  • Settlement, pollution and maintenance give every chain consequences
  • Train networks that dispatch themselves since Update 4.1
  • Three free major updates in 2026

− CONS

  • The first hours bury you in tabs and designations
  • One shortage can spiral into a dead colony
  • Performance still drops on big late-game islands
  • Paid train DLC while the base game is in early access
  • No 1.0 date, single-player and Windows only

A factory with a town attached

The settlement is what separates this from Factorio. Your workers need housing, clean water, power, healthcare and household goods, and they eat what you grow on the farms. Look after them and they produce Unity, which you spend on edicts, quick repairs and claiming resources on the world map. Let waste and pollution build up and they get sick.

Every chain has two outputs, the product and the mess.

Oil is the clearest case. Refining crude gives you the diesel you wanted plus by-products you didn't ask for, and each one needs a use, a tank or a flare before the refinery backs up and stops. Working out where the leftovers go is half of every design, and it's the half I enjoyed most.

A dense oil refinery in Captain of Industry, with distillation towers, storage tanks and layers of colour-coded pipes stacked over each other, two flare stacks burning with black smoke and cooling towers at the edge of the sea.
A late-game refinery. The two flares at the top are how you get rid of gas you have no other use for. Screenshot via Steam / MaFi Games.

Maintenance is the real boss

Every vehicle and most machines draw on a pool of maintenance, which you make in a depot. While the pool is healthy nothing happens. Once a machine's maintenance falls below 75 per cent it rolls for a breakdown each month, and at zero the chance is 50 per cent. There are three tiers, and one can't stand in for another.

This is how colonies die. The parts line runs short, the excavators start breaking down, less ore arrives and fewer parts get made. Diesel works the same way, because the trucks hauling for the refinery run on what the refinery makes. It's the system I swore at most. It's also why a stable factory here feels earned. You have to keep a working line working.

The Captain of Industry statistics window on the maintenance tab, listing consumers such as diesel locomotives, conveyors and pipes beside a pie chart in which diesel locomotives take 30.43 per cent of the total.
The statistics screen splits maintenance by consumer. On this island the diesel locomotives take 30 per cent of it. Screenshot via Steam / MaFi Games.

Trains, and the DLC argument

Trains arrived in Update 3 last year and MaFi has spent 2026 on them. Update 4 in March added tier 2 locomotives, bridges and waypoints. Update 4.1 added train networks that dispatch themselves, and 4.2 added universal wagons that carry any cargo at three quarters of a dedicated wagon's capacity. Rail is now the right way to move bulk ore across the bigger maps, and it takes a lot of pressure off the truck fleet.

A black steam locomotive, two red and yellow diesel locomotives and a blue and yellow diesel locomotive lined up at a level crossing in Captain of Industry, with a yellow dump truck waiting beside them and loaded freight wagons behind.
Steam and diesel locomotives at a level crossing. These come with the base game. The DLC adds electric and nuclear ones. Screenshot via Steam / MaFi Games.

On the same day as Update 4, MaFi released Trains expanded, a A$14.50 DLC with electrified track, five more locomotives (one of them nuclear) and wagons for molten metal. Selling DLC for a game that's still in early access has cost it goodwill. The recent Steam reviews include thumbs-down from players with hundreds of hours who say they love the game and object to the DLC.

MaFi's answer, in the Update 4 post, is that 'optional DLC helps us fund continued work on the core game'. I think that's fair for now. Everything you need is in the base game, and all three updates this year were free. I'd still rather it had waited for 1.0.

Where it drags

The first hours are the weakest. The build menu is tabs inside tabs, mining and dumping designations take a while to click, and the tutorial messages explain each system without telling you which one is about to kill you. One new player wrote on the Steam forums in December that it took them 25 hours to find the keys that turn off auto-snapping. MaFi knows. Simplifying the early game and overhauling mining designations are both on its list for 1.0.

The far end has problems too. The space program from Update 3 asks for long new chains of station parts and pays out in asteroids you mine for late-game ores. That's a lot of factory for a modest reward.

A white rocket with side boosters lifting off from a launch pad on a hilltop in Captain of Industry, trailing exhaust over an island covered in factories, housing, forest and a harbour.
Rockets are where the endgame starts. Past this point you're building a space station and pulling asteroids down to the island. Screenshot via Steam / MaFi Games.

Performance is the other late-game worry. Update 4.2 made product rendering 10 to 20 times faster and took MaFi's benchmark map from 23 to 78 frames per second, and a Steam review posted on 2 October by a player with more than 1,400 hours still says big islands have become unplayable for them. The world map, where your ship sails off to find trade partners and refugees, is thin next to everything else. A redesign of it is on the 1.0 list too.

Four years in early access

There's no date for 1.0, and the roadmap warns that it is 'for transparency, not a guarantee'. Roads, multiplayer and a settlement revamp are all on it. If one of those is the reason you'd buy, wait.

What's here is already a full factory game. The tech tree runs from smelting iron to nuclear reactors and rockets, there's a sandbox mode and a map editor, and since 4.2 you can browse mods, maps and blueprints from the COI Hub without leaving the game. Steam has it at Very Positive, with 90 per cent of 11,668 reviews recommending it.

Watch the trailer

Captain of Industry Update 4 launch trailer, from MaFi Games' official Captain of Industry channel.

Verdict

Captain of Industry is the factory game for people who wanted Factorio to push back. The mining and terrain are the best I've played in the genre, and tying the factory to a town that eats and gets sick makes every chain matter. The opening hours are rough, the late game sags, and it's still in early access after four years with no finish date. At A$50.95 it's worth buying now if you like your logistics with consequences. If you play Satisfactory to relax, this will stress you out.