This Handbook is not mandatory reading, despite what some chief engineers will tell you. You can comfortably beat the game without ever needing to consult it.
But if you do happen to have questions or would like to learn more about the intricacies of Machinery, you've come to the right place. If you have a question that's not listed here, pop in to our Discord.
How to play
Machinery is an incremental game. There are many varieties of incremental games, but the gist of it is having some sort of a production process, and then improving it - making it more efficient and more automated.
If you've never played such a game, the idea might sound strange on paper. But it's a very accessible type of gaming, and many incremental games command audiences of millions of players. So, give it a try!
In Machinery you start by clicking , and as your energy tank begins to fill up, you will be able to begin upgrading your generator. There are four generators altogether, and after a while you will be able to improve all of them.
Another important part of the game is warping. Once you've collected enough Antimatter, you will be able to warp, which will reset the game, but provide you with significant boosts to your generators, as well as unlocking new machines.
The basics
Louigi: The minimum recommended value is 3.
Unnamed Chief Engineer: They'll tell you that the minimum recommended value is 3. In reality, once you reach 3, holding out till 5 won't take much longer. And getting 5 will already allow you to buy a warp upgrade. So, I would personally recommend 5. And you know I'm right.
Of course, even if you warp with 2, you'll already get a x2 Antimatter Amplifier. But warping too early might lead to a situation where you haven't gotten enough of a lift, and will now have to spend a long time even reaching the previous point.
Louigi: Some players expect the first run to be much faster, probably based on the trend in recent incrementals to have incredibly fast prestige cycles.
Reaching the point when it makes sense to warp takes about a couple of hours. But believe me, it's worth it! Every bit of process in Machinery will receive a satisfying upgrade, which will automate and speed it up. And the effort of your first several runs will make it only that much more satisfying.
The lift from the Antimatter Amplifier on the next iteration will already be very significant. If you get the "auto-buy for generators" upgrade, it will also begin to be extremely hands off.
Also, make sure that your browser isn't slowing the game down. See Technical FAQ below for more info.
Unnamed Chief Engineer: Don't complain! Things will begin to ramp up quicker than it might seem. I'll give you some numbers. Reaching 3 antimatter takes about 1 hour 40 mins. Reaching 5 antimatter takes only an additional 30-40 mins. In other words, if you wait until you mine 5 antimatter, it will take you 2 hours 10 minutes. It takes me longer to smoke my pipe in the morning!
And be sure to take advantage of the overdrive mechanism. As you see the overdrive activation approaching, prioritize upgrading your power limit so that the bonus is greater!
And remember that there are 4 generators! Sometimes beginner operators miss out on the fact that those generator tabs are clickable. Don't worry! We all made those mistakes!
Louigi: You do not! Antimatter Amplifier bonus is completely independent of your antimatter cubes. This means that even if you can't buy any warp upgrades, you are still upgrading your Antimatter Amplifier which is arguably the most important upgrade to move you forward.
Louigi: There's a known issue with the Plasma generator in the in-game universe: it occasionally gives off low frequency rumble and none of the engineers know how to fix it. More context in the news ticker, but suffice to say, not anything you should worry about as a player.
Unnamed Chief Engineer: I can fix it. I just don't want to.
Louigi: The battery doesn't do anything for the generators. In fact, it drains their power and converts it into charge. But charge is what unlocks and feeds the machines. Most subsequent machines will provide powerful bonuses to your generators.
Machines are also necessary to finalize the building of the power plant.
Louigi: This means that the generator cannot be developed further and you should instead buy its new generation.
Unnamed Chief Engineer: Mathematically there's a specific reason for it - the button disappears when the cost of upgrading your generator becomes more expensive than buying the next generation. In fact, as soon as the new generation is available, it makes sense to simply buy it and not waste money on the remaining upgrades.
Louigi: This happens when some or all of the auto-buy options are switched on: triggering overdrive will lead you to automatically spend the bonus on various upgrades.
Louigi: Yes, this is by design. After your Antimatter Amplifier reaches x100, your power limit will be set to a high value, dependent on all-time energy mined. This is done to reduce the tedium of upgrading the power limit in the beginning - if kept at 50 it takes a really long time to go through even with auto-buy.
Louigi: This is probably because the strongest generator is not running. I have sometimes ran into this situation myself. This might happen during times when you switch off the Control Center and forget that it was automatically re-triggering some generators with low supply.
Louigi: There are a couple of answers to that.
On a casual level, you need to build 5 power plants. That's pretty much the main loop of the game. If you got to that point - you've officially beaten this version of Machinery.
But, strictly speaking, the challenges and Quantum Wipe offer so much more content and are such a big part of the game that a full no-nonsense completion of the game would be to obtain every challenge reward.
And Quantum Wipe offers quite a bit of replayability, too. For instance, there is no challenge like that, but once you've beaten Warpless, you might want to go for a ride with all the Quantum Upgrades activated. Just to experience how the game feels with all possible powerups.
In the future I plan to go for endless play, where you reach a point of essentially beating the game, but can then go beyond that if you like.
In fact, I considered an option of potentially endless play already for this version. I didn't have to limit the amount of power plants to 5, for instance. Could have been 50. Or unlimited!
But I have good ideas for the next layers of content and decided that there are enough additions to the game as it is. The difference between 0.99.1 and 0.99.5 is pretty dramatic. 0.99.5 is now a very mature game.
Advanced tips
There are currently two keyboard shortcuts: 'r' and 'u'. The 'r' stands for 'restart generators' and is used to (re)trigger generators without having to click on the buttons. The 'u' stands for 'Auto' and toggles auto-buy features. And it is the latter that we want to further dig into.
There are several auto-buy options in Machinery: auto-buy for generators, auto-buy for Research Lab, auto-buy for Power Limit and, finally, chief engineer's Control Center. Auto-buy options are treated as one group and Control Center as the other. If all of these elements are present and switched on, pressing 'u' will first disable the Control Center, pressing it the second time will disable all the auto-buy options. And then the 'u' can only be used to toggle the auto-buy options. So, pressing it the third time will re-enable all the auto-buy options, pressing it the fourth time will re-enable them. In other words, the 'u' will disable the Control Center, but it won't re-enable it, you'll have to do it by clicking the buttons.
If we focus on the auto-buy options, even if one of those three options is enabled, pressing 'u' will first disable everything. Pressing it again will re-enable everything. So, sometimes you will see that auto-buy for generators is off and auto-buy for Research Lab is off, you press 'u', but nothing happens. This is probably because the Engineering Den below had the Power Limit auto-buy on and 'u' first switched it off.
This auto-buy option is awesome to quickly get you through the initial upgrades. However, it's not very efficient later on in the game, as it will simply spend energy on any available upgrade. So, during the periods of active play make sure to periodically switch it off and manually upgrade generators where it makes more sense.
If sound is on, auto-buy options are on and your antimatter amplifier is boosted by either the Black Hole or the Galactic Amplifier, sometimes the generators will seem to be "choking": they will be operational, but there will be no clicking.
This is normal and has to do with the fact that the click occurs when a given generator's cycle ends. If the generator is restarted before that, no sound is played. When the Antimatter Amplifier is boosted by x5 and especially by x50, right after warping the power tank will constantly get filled up and the generators will be restarted. Eventually, normal clicking will recover.
Machinery's layout is designed to be fairly responsive. Take advantage of it. Larger resolutions might make the game seem small. I myself typically play on Chrome at 125% zoom. But in some cases zooming out is also helpful.
Also, don't forget that machine windows can be minimized by clicking on their titles.
Generator clicking is one of the defining features of Machinery. Obviously, many players will mute the game for various reasons. But keeping clicking on may sometimes be beneficial.
When the generators are restarted, their start times are slightly randomized to ensure that they form a new clicking pattern each time. This is done both for aesthetic and practical purposes: a change in rhythm can signal an important upgrade.
The Radiator is a good example here. It boosts the generator of choice, but by doing that you are affecting generator ratios. As you upgrade the generators, this ratio will change, but an active Radiator will skew the readings towards the generator it is boosting, even if it's not the most powerful without it.
Since you want to boost the most powerful generator, it makes sense to check if you are boosting the right one by switching the Radiator off, looking at the ratios and changing to the generator that is currently the strongest.
One tip, especially in late game, when cycles between significant upgrades become longer, is to watch out for the change in generator clicking. This might mean that an upgrade was applied and it makes sense to switch off the Radiator and check the ratios.
Sometimes it might be important to know when the game is saved. There are only two situations in which the game is saved automatically:
The two other methods to change the save file of the game are initiated by the player:
No other mechanism in the game will alter the save file.
The save timer stops when you warp. It also stops when you are in the power plant view.
When you go through your warp or power plant upgrades and restart, the save timer also restarts. Its counter resets to the 120 seconds countdown. This means that for two minutes you can still undo all of your warp or power plant upgrades by simply reloading the game.
Challenges
Machinery 0.99.5 offers a number of additional side-quests: the challenges.
None of these challenges are essential, and you can consider the game beat if you've built 5 power plants. On the other hand, the additional content that the challenges offer essentially dwarfs the casual part of Machinery.
Building 5 power plants unlocks Quantum Wipe and Quantum Upgrades.
Quantum Wipe will completely reset the game, but allow you to pick 3 unique upgrades out of a pool of 6. In other words, you start over, but with special powerups.
This not only allows you to experience the game in many different ways, but Quantum Upgrades are also critical to beating all of the challenges comfortably.
Louigi: As far as I know, this is an original game mechanic. At least, I haven't seen this in any other incremental, and it evolved from an initial idea of "Wouldn't it be fun to try to replay Machinery with Lifeforms Scanner already available?"
I think you'll quickly find that this adds a ton of strategy and variability to the game. And there are so many ways to expand it! I'm already working on some ideas for the next version.
At first glance, the warpless challenge might seem close to impossible: we need so many warps and so much antimatter to get through the game!
But actually Warpless Machinery is totally a thing.
It's more than just playing the same game without warping. Instead, Machinery was specifically designed to support this mode of play.
Quantum Upgrades are obvious assistants for such a quest, of course. But there is also a mechanism that will only become apparent if you don't warp and continue generating more and more antimatter. It is called the antimatter radiation effect (ARE). The gist of it is that at some point the antimatter tank will begin to radiate antimatter back out, producing a special Spillout Multiplier.
The Spillout Multiplier affects all 4 generators and is essentially a vastly reduced Antimatter Amplifier: at 200 antimatter the Spillout Multiplier becomes x2, at 300 it's x3 and so on. You can monitor the multiplier if you click on your Rank Info. Its indicator will appear once it becomes larger than x1, so as soon as you collect 200 antimatter.
Keep in mind that the Spillout Multiplier comes into play only if you are in a warpless state. Resetting the game completely, building a Power Plant or Quantum Wiping are things that will put you into a warpless state. If you're attempting the Maven Grind, you need to Quantum Wipe and keep it warpless throughout the run. If you build one power plant and then warp during the building of the second one, the challenge will fail and you would need to Quantum Wipe again to reset things.
Louigi: I personally really enjoy the pacing of Warpless Machinery and I think there are many players who would totally love the its cadence too. While I totally love the "casual" version of Machinery, Warpless Machinery has the kind of rhythm I initially envisioned for the game. It makes every upgrade more meaningful and impactful.
With warping some upgrades get glossed over since the generators become powerful and automated fairly quickly, but with this mode you can really see how balanced the prices are and how each element compliments the overall production growth. And the pacing feels more like actually working in a power plant.
Also, interestingly enough, not having auto-buy is not a problem because the game moves that much slower.
By the way, it's a small detail, but if you collect 101 antimatter or more, then save and reload the game, the page title will say "Warpless Machinery" and the background pattern will change.
Louigi: You definitely can. Whether you should or not is a different matter!
The wording in the Warpless challenge assumes sanity, and so it says you should Quantum Wipe. But now you know that it's not the only way to create a warpless state. Instead, you can wipe the save and attempt it in its raw form. I have to warn you, though, that I haven't tested it, and I haven't tested it on purpose - I wanted anyone who would want to go for it to feel like they are a true pioneer :P
Keep in mind, though, that the outcome will be exactly the same: Machinery will completely overlook the fact that you've achieved the challenge without Quantum Upgrades. If this will prove to be a thing, I'll definitely design something special for this case in the next version.
Technical FAQ
Chrome seems to provide the most consistent performance.
I have tested the game on several laptops, running Linux and Windows. Both Firefox and Chrome performed fine on Linux systems. On Windows, Chrome ran the game normally but I have witnessed Firefox slowing it down even when the tab was in focus.
I have also tested the game on Chrome on an Android phone and it ran fine.
Unfortunately, this is a known issue and many incremental games suffer from it. Vendors try to optimize browser performance, and one of the ways to get there is to reduce the speed of code execution of unfocused tabs.
I have observed that at least in Chrome leaving sound on (even if at a very low level) forces the browser to run the tab normally. This is not a universal workaround, but it has helped many players.
The primary way of solving the problem seems to have whatever your game is generating be dependent on the current time: you calculate the difference between the current time and previously saved time and multiply your currency by that amount. So, if your browser is slowing down, it will compensate by simply generating more per cycle.
I definitely plan to look into this, although it would be difficult to test since I don't have the problem with Machinery's slowing down on my end.
This would depend on how dramatic the changes between versions are going to be. So far, each version introduced such significant changes that backwards compatibility wouldn't have made any sense.
I do suspect that version [0.99.5] is very likely to be the first version that gets most things right, and then next versions are going to be only adding content, rather than also reworking it. But we'll have to see. I would rather introduce breaking changes than stop myself from delivering a better game.
Having said that, I can definitely envision writing a tool that would allow one to migrate their save to the new version. The only meaningful things to migrate would be the challenge rewards: I can imagine someone wanting to check out the new version without having to go through the whole thing again. I will definitely consider what folks think in this regard, but writing such a tool would be fairly trivial.