Deep Dive: Text Commands, Automation Logic, and the Archipelago

One of the questions we get asked more than anything else is how the text-based command system works in Brave New Wonders. This post aims to answer all of them at once, and it’s a long one - so if you are serious about factory automation games, this one is for you!

How Text Commands Actually Work

The core difference: automatons replace belts.

In most factory automation games, material flow is a physical infrastructure problem. You lay belts, place inserters, manage throughput per tile. The logic is spatial, and you can see the entire production line as a series of connected objects on the map.

Brave New Wonders works differently. Instead of organizing belts, every item in the game is moved by an automaton, a worker unit you deploy and give commands to. The factory floor is not a web of infrastructure, but a workforce following orders.

This changes what factory optimization means, where the key to success is giving commands to instruct automatons to do a better job. Instead of throughput per tile, you are thinking about behaviours for every automaton, and the efficiency ceiling is set entirely by how well you can describe what you want.

How a Command Becomes Behaviour: Step-by-Step

Here is what happens when you write a command in the game:

• Step 1: Open the behaviour editor and type your instruction. There is no syntax to learn. You write it the way you would explain it to a person.

• Step 2: The game parses your text and generates a visual behaviour. This is a flow graph where each node is an action such as move to mine, pick up ore, or deposit to warehouse, and each transition is a condition such as if carrying an item, if the signal is red, or if the inventory is below 10. Here, you can read the entire logic chain at a glance.

• Step 3: Review the graph. If something looks wrong, you can make edits to individual nodes, change conditions, reorder actions, or add branches - the graph is yours to modify. Or, just rewrite the commands with more refined details!

• AddedStep 4You save and assign the command to an automaton. Select locations for destinations, then that’s it! It runs. You watch it work. If something needs adjusting, you can change the assignment in the inspector and it updates immediately, or rephrase it in the editor and assign it again. The commands you saved can be reused again and again in different units, until you come up with new ideas!

Your commands are never executed blindly, and you will always see the compiled logic in the inspector when the automatons are following it.

A Full Walkthrough: Building a Reactive Supply Chain from Scratch

Here is a real example tracing from simple to sophisticated. You have a smelter that needs two different resources to start production. Both resources come from different locations on the map, and you have two mover automatons available.

A new player typically starts with two separate commands - one per automaton:

• Automaton A: Collect iron plate from {iron warehouse} and deliver to {smelter}.

• Automaton B: Collect crystal shards from {crystal warehouse} and deliver to {smelter}.

Brackets are not mandatory, but adding them helps the system to recognize locations that need to be selected later.

As both automatons run their loops, the smelter gets supplied. But sometimes the smelter runs out of iron plate before Automaton A returns. Sometimes crystal shards stack up while the iron plate runs low. The system is not reactive. It is two loops running in parallel with no awareness of each other and causing the production to stall. A more efficient approach is to make the smelter communicate its own needs. Go to the smelter's settings and write a command:

• Emit a red signal if iron plate storage drops below 5. Emit a blue signal if crystal shards drop below 5. Emit no signal otherwise.

Now, rewrite Automaton A's command:

• If the smelter is emitting red, collect iron plate from {iron warehouse} and deliver it to {smelter}. If the smelter is emitting blue, collect crystal shard from the {crystal warehouse} and deliver it to {smelter}. Otherwise, stand by.

One automaton now handles both materials, responding to whatever the smelter actually needs in real time. The second automaton is free for a different task.

In just under two minutes, you wrote both commands using plain text and have automatons running a coordinated supply operation driven by live signals, with handoff logic, fallback states, and priority rules.

Scale that to twenty automatons across three production lines, and you start to understand why players who find this system do not leave it.

But that is not the ceiling - in a later stage of the game, you can use the signal system to monitor weather or a natural disaster. Use a flag to give signals to miners that work in a dangerous zone, and command miner automatons to return to safety before disaster happens.

What Happens When a Command does not Make Sense?

What if you type something that the system cannot understand?

If a command directs an automaton to perform an action it is not capable of, the behaviour editor flags the unsupported part and prompts you to rephrase. The response you may see is: “A factory can only give signals, not move materials,” or “Please specify where to pick up coal.”

If the command is interpretable but ambiguous, the game generates its best-guess behaviour and shows it to you before you confirm. You can review the graph and either approve it as-is, edit the nodes manually, or rewrite the command with more details specified.

Nothing runs until you have seen the logic, and there are no surprises on the factory floor that started at the behaviour editor.

The Archipelago: What your Automaton is Actually Building Toward

The world of Brave New Wonders was fractured into floating islands, large landmasses held aloft by Levitanium deposits, each with a distinct biome, resource set, and history. The train station is your home base, and the other islands are where the game escalates.

🗺️ The Americas: Where you Begin

Brave New Wonders takes place thousands of years from now, and the Americas island is the former site of the Ark project, one of the old world's last survival efforts. It is where humanity rekindled itself after the collapse. The terrain reflects that history: broken bridges, flooded infrastructure, rusted vehicles distributed across a landscape that has been slowly reclaimed by growth over centuries. Resources are balanced, the climate is moderate, and the ruins are accessible.

This is the starting island because it is forgiving enough to learn on. It will not stay forgiving. As your operation scales and your needs grow, the Americas becomes the foundation you are building on top of, rather than the challenge you are navigating. The constraints arrive when you cross to other islands.

🧊 Europe: the Frozen Archive

Europe is where the old world's Tower project buried its best scientists underground to find a physics-based solution to the climate crisis. They found Levitanium. The process of isolating it fractured Earth's crust in the event the records call the Levitanium Disaster. Europe is now a frozen wasteland. Power generation is nearly impossible, and resources on the surface are extremely scarce.

What Europe has in abundance is buried below the ice sheet: an enormous repository of old-world scientific knowledge, and beneath that, the ruins of the Large Hadron Collider. Something inside the Collider is still running on ancient power reserves. To reach it, you need to generate enough power to wake whatever is sleeping there. Doing that on an island where standard power production barely functions is one of the game's most demanding automation challenges.

Surviving in Europe requires redesigning your energy logistics from the ground up. The automation problems here are unlike anything the Americas prepared you for.

🌄 Africa: the solar oasis

Africa is the most agriculturally productive island in the Archipelago. Rich in sand, a unique resource that opens many alternative recipes, with a dynamic climate and open terrain. It is a fantastic location for large-scale food production.

The challenge is spoilage: agricultural goods produced in Africa have a time-to-spoil countdown. A greenhouse generating crops that no automaton collects in time produces nothing but waste. A warehouse that overfills with perishables creates a loss event. Africa rewards tight logistics timing over raw throughput. A warehouse at 95% utilisation with zero spoilage outperforms one running at 120% capacity and losing 20% of output to decay.

The greenhouse automation challenges in Africa involve some of the most interesting signal design in the game. Temperature sensors, moisture monitors, and nutrient level readers all emit distinct signals. Writing automaton commands that respond to multiple changing environmental signals simultaneously, while keeping delivery cycles tight enough to prevent spoilage, produces a logistics problem that feels genuinely different from anything on the other islands.

🌋 Asia: the Volcanic Industrial Island

Active volcanoes. Continuous eruptions. Lava flows that destroy automatons in seconds.

Asia's volcanic activity produces rare high-tier materials unavailable anywhere else in the Archipelago. These materials are required for the most advanced production lines and for Wonder construction. The tradeoff is that your entire workforce is operating inside an active volcanic environment. Standard logistics routes get cut off by lava flows, and automatons assigned to high-temperature zones degrade in proportion to how long they spend near active vents. Volcanic activities also provide an ample amount of power, which comes in pulses. Figuring out how to store and release energy is crucial if you don’t want your production line interrupted.

The command system shows its value most clearly in Asia. You can write hazard-avoidance logic directly into automaton behaviour: route recalculation based on lava signals, temperature threshold responses, emergency extraction fallback paths. An automaton on Asia with a well-written command is worth five on a calmer island. But one with a poorly written command is not sustainable.

🏺 Ruins, Relics, and the Choices that Follow

Every island in the Archipelago has ruins. These are the remnants of old-world infrastructure, research stations, automated factories, military installations, and stranger things that have sat untouched for thousands of years. Some are empty, but many are not.

Old-world machines still guard the most significant ruins, running the original directives their creators left them. They are not hostile the way a creature is hostile - they defend. Any automaton that enters their perimeter will be destroyed, and they will not stop until the perimeter is clear. You need to deal with them before you can reach what is inside.

Inside is a relic. An artifact from the civilization that came before.

You bring the relic back to your research center. You might unlock historical knowledge that reveals a buried resource cache, or a research pathway that improves automaton efficiency. Or, you might unlock a new automaton type.

We’re bringing the game to Steam Next Fest from June 15-22. Try the text-based command system, discover the Americas and the ruins, encounter the first relics, and explore the beginning of the tech tree.

Plus: your save data carries over to the full release, so anything you build during Next Fest is part of your actual playthrough. Wishlist the game now, so Steam can notify you the moment Next Fest goes live on the 15th:

View on Steam

See you at Next Fest!

-- Sala @ City From Naught