Autonauts is a 2019 video game set on a random (yet mundane) planet, which sees the player programming bots to produce resources in an endless chain in order to raise colonists. It was developed by Denki and published by Curve Digital.
The Autonaut lands on a foreign planet with nothing but their guide, Otto-0, to help them set to work colonizing this new planet. The Autonaut is taught how to gather resources, craft parts, build structures, and build bots in order to automate the gathering, crafting, and construction involved in colonizing a planet.
A sequel titled Autonauts vs Piratebots was released in 2022. In it, you have to use the same automation techniques in order to defend your colony from an invading "Piratebot" army.
Autonauts contains examples of the following tropes:
- And Your Reward Is Clothes: Many of the quests give you clothing. Wardrobe to actually use them is also a quest reward a bit down the line.
- Circle of Standing Stones: The final wonder unlocked is the Stone Circle which adds a fast-forward button to the player's UI.
- Creating Life: In order to obtain colonists you pop a seed out of a dispenser, put it into another machine with a pile of food, and out pops a baby humanoid. They don't do anything by themselves and are completely dependent on the player and robots to supply them with stuff. On the flipside, even if you don't do anything, they won't die.
- Easily Detachable Robot Parts: Bots can have their heads, bodies, and drives swapped out while in the middle of work and not miss a stride. This becomes essential when you get a new tier of parts and want to upgrade your workforce without interruption.
- Firewood Resources: Trees turn into logs when chopped down, which can in turn be further chopped into planks, then poles, then fixing pegs.
- Forced Transformation: The Ziggurat wonder turns an animal or Folk placed on it into a bird which then flies away. This is the only way to reduce the number of animals or folk you have, though there's no penalty for letting them sit idle in a pen.
- Instant Leech: Just Fall in Water!: Leeches can be fished out of swamp water with a net at incredible speed and infinite quantity.
- Programming Game: In order to progress through the game with any real speed, you must program an increasing number of bots to produce resources so that you don't have to do it alone. This is done using typical programming tools of loops and conditions, presented through clicking and dragging functional blocks in the bots' memory panel. An early wonder, the Central Computer, lets you save and copy programs between bots remotely.
- Raised by Robots: As a necessary stage of the game you create the Folk, humanoid creatures that you then need to feed, house and clothe in order to harvest their "Wuv" for unlocking new production recipes. Even besides game's protagonist being a robot, you are guaranteed to offload these tasks to an entire swarm of automated bots.
- Recursive Creators: Typically the next thing after automating wood farming and chopping logs into poles and planks, is automating robots assembling more robots. Beware of careless coding running into an unrestrained loop creating a huge pile of bots. Although thankfully they won't actually do anything until you code them to.
- Tech Tree: New technologies are unlocked by completing assignments, typically producing and storing a number of lower tech items. The new tech must also be researched before it can be used, requiring the consumption of Wuv produced by Folk. Lower tech items are usually required to produce higher tech ones, like all the medicines.
- Wind Turbine Power: Late game technology requires power, and the main way to generate it is by building Windmills and connecting them with a network of belts and axles. You can build water wheels as well, and in the end you can build steam engines.
