Greetings, Groundbreakers.

We’ve been looking forward to sharing this update with you for the last few months. Mass transport systems are pretty awesome in factory automation games, and we’re excited to finally showcase our take on the mechanic with Techtonica’s Monorail System.

Read on to learn more about how the Monorail System works, see how you can ride it, and explore some of the concept and design work that brought it to life.

Let’s ride.

Please keep your hands and feet clear

The Monorail System is a collection of buildable machines, components, and equipment that serves as Techtonica’s mass transit system for cargo (and, occasionally, Groundbreakers). It consists of Monorail Depots, Poles, Haulers, and the Railrunner.

Groundbreakers place two Monorail Depots some distance apart on powered Powerfloors with Accumulators. They connect those depots with tracks built by placing Monorail Poles. Then, it’s all about loading, packing, and shipping.

The Monorail Depots also feature ports to ensure this mass transit serves its purpose in furthering that sweet, sweet automation process.

Hauling items over cavernous distances

The Monorail System is meant to come in handy when you need to get lots of products or materials across vast distances in Calyx.

We love those wild and large buses, too, but they are expensive and rather painstaking to build.

Instead, the Monorail System is put in place by much simpler means. Sure, the Depots are more expensive than Conveyor Belts, but they’re loads easier to afford, manage, and deploy when you consider the scale required to reach factory outposts.

More on the Railrunner… soon

We mentioned the Railrunner above and even showed a brief glimpse of it in the video, but we’ll have loads more to share regarding how it works in the future.

For now, we have a GIF that we genuinely enjoyed snagging.

Sketches and graybox animations of early Monorail concepts

Whenever we show off a new big feature, mechanic, or machine, we try to include some of our concept work.

We had plenty to choose from for the Monorail System.

First, this early sketch of the Monorail Depot reveals some interesting development tidbits. We knew we wanted ports to ensure automation, and we also knew we wanted to make sure players could see the Haulers–which we called crates back when this was drawn–as they load, but we weren’t quite sure what the transition would look like.

Obviously, we solved that, but here’s an early mock-up of the animation process for the Haulers as they were loaded and shipped.

What we wound up with isn’t too far off from what you see in the GIF above.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to update my avatar for our Discord.

Techtonica’s releasing into Early Access this year. Thanks for reading, Groundbreakers!