Mid-Next Fest Dev Update and a Deep Dive on the Wonders

We’re five days into Steam Next Fest, Pioneers!

What you’re Sharing with Us

We have been reading the feedback, watching the streams, and tracking the discussions from everyone around the world. We read every bug report and feedback submission, so don’t forget to share your thoughts with us, and consider leaving a review over on the Brave New Wonders demo page.

The feedback button is in the game and the survey is in the main menu. If you have been playing and have not filed anything yet, now is a good time. Your input is actively informing what we are building, and we appreciate your comments!

Here are just some of our favourite highlights we’ve gotten from you so far:

• Really solid demo overall, surprisingly satisfying especially for a first timer in the genre.

• Definitely recommend if you love strategy and factory builders like Factorio, etc! I can see it being very addictive once you really get going on building stuff.

• I've played this game for 10 hours, and over that time, it's constantly surprised me. There's multiple continents to explore (several different maps), each with unique secrets hiding in them that can affect your gameplay. The automation feature is also something I've never seen in any other game with how extensive it is.

• I really like the system, the vibe coding is very very very fun and approachable for someone who is not good at coding.

• Insanely fun. an actually unique twist on the genre that's innovative and refreshing.

And our true favourite…

Damn that's a lot of spaghetti.

Deep Dive: The Wonders, and Why No Two Runs Play the Same

With only a few days left, we want to provide you with a deep dive into Wonders, what they actually are, and why they matter.

A Wonder is a megastructure, roughly the size of a city district. It is also a fully operational automated facility that you build, supply, and maintain. Most factory games have win conditions that are essentially score thresholds: build enough of something and you have won. Wonders work differently, completing a Wonder does not end the game, it changes the game.

✈️ The Airship Wonder

The Airship is the first major Wonder in the game: it is a flying factory platform and global freighter.

Before the Airship is complete, you are confined to the Americas continent. You can see the other continents, but you cannot reach them just yet. The entire mid-demo is built around this constraint and every decision you make is in service of the capability to expand.

Constructing the Airship requires building dedicated supply chains for its components. The Airship construction challenge is an optimization problem that runs across your entire existing factory, plus the new production lines you are standing up in parallel.

When construction is complete, the Airship becomes a mobile factory. You can build production lines on its deck. It flies routes between continents on commands you give and is simultaneously the vehicle that unlocks a new continent and the logistical backbone connecting your expanding intercontinental empire.

☀️ The Floating Levitanium Sun Wonder

The Levitanium Sun is a colossal fusion reactor. Completing it dramatically increases your civilization's power output, enough to run the most energy-intensive production lines.

The construction and operation of the Levitanium Sun is one of the most demanding logistics challenges in the main campaign.

The reactor runs on short-lived radioactive isotopes, and these cannot be stockpiled: they decay too quickly to transport from anywhere else. They must be produced on site, continuously, in a dedicated production line running in parallel with the reactor's consumption rate.

This means designing a supply chain with a hard real-time constraint built into it. If isotope production falls behind reactor consumption, the Levitanium Sun throttles its output. If the gap is large enough, it shuts down completely. Getting it back online from a full stop is significantly more difficult than keeping it running in the first place.

A complete Levitanium Sun support operation typically involves: isotope production automatons running tight loop commands calibrated to the reactor's consumption rate, monitoring automatons checking production output and flagging discrepancies, emergency supply automatons on standby with commands that trigger only when production drops below a threshold, and the reactor facility itself emitting a continuous cascade of status signals that your entire support network is reading in real time.

A well-designed Levitanium Sun support chain runs indefinitely without intervention. A poorly designed one requires constant manual attention: the difference is entirely in how clearly you have written your automaton commands.

⚙️ How Wonders Improve Experience

Completing a Wonder triggers an Innovation Surge: a wave of new objectives and capabilities that layer on top of your existing empire rather than replacing it. The game does not reset, it expands.

Each Wonder also awards permanent bonuses that alter how your production works going forward: the Airship changes your logistics topology entirely. Supply chains that previously required building all infrastructure on one continent can now be serviced from another. The Levitanium Sun changes your energy budget so fundamentally that production lines you previously could not afford to run become standard operations.

The full release will have seven Wonders, each unlocking a different aspect of the game and demanding a different kind of logistics mastery to build and maintain.

A complete playthrough at full release, with all seven Wonders constructed and operational, represents over 40 hours of gameplay per run.

🔁 This Is A Different Game For Different Pioneers

While many pioneers enjoy exploration and are eager to uncover the secrets of past civilizations, others prefer to focus entirely on factory automation.

We created a comprehensive, detailed tutorial in the demo. Once you complete all of the trials, you will have access to the full power of the command system, including logistics and signal coordination.

While continuously optimizing your entire factory empire is one way to play the game, you can also complete the whole game by using simple, straightforward commands and deploying more automatons. As you unlock new automaton types through tech tree and relic discoveries, a logistics strategy that was optimal at the beginning may become suboptimal once you have access to a new automaton type.

To fully release an automation fan’s creativity, we will have a sand box mode in the full game where pioneers will have unlimited resources and a big enough playground where you can build as many spaghettis as they want.

Community events are also planned for the full release. Collaborative challenges where the global player base works toward a shared goal, such as collectively producing one million advanced materials within a week to construct a bunker against an incoming solar storm event, will reward every participating player with a special achievement if the goal is reached!

🖥️ More Streams this Week

Find more streams and more video content on Brave New Wonders this week before Next Fest ends on June 22. Here’s an updated schedule:

*Schedule is subject to change

🗨️ Help us by Leaving a Review!

Thank you to everyone so far for playing the demo. We are now among the top ten most played automation games during Next Fest! We hope you’ve been enjoying building your factories and commanding your automatons!

While the game is still a work in progress, we’d love to hear from you by posting a review over on the demo page. Every comment counts and it will help more players discover the game!

Have fun building, Pioneers!

Sala @ City From Naught