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Assembly Line Wiki Main Page[]

This is the community wiki of the factory simulator mobile games Assembly Line and Assembly Line 2. In the Assembly Line games, you start with a small amount of startup capital and a blank assembly line. The basic premise of the game is to use machines to convert basic materials in to progressively higher level products for profit. Use the profits to unlock and upgrade machines and unlock blueprints for new products that sell for progressively higher values.

Similarities and Differences Between Assembly Line 1 and 2[]

Aesthetic[]

  • AL1 has a minimal color pallet reminiscent of a retro 8 bit game. All machines are gray with simple low resolution icons. This lends itself to an overall bright and optimistic feeling to the game. AL2 not only uses much higher resolution full color images but also a dark theme. This, combined with more military-themed technologies, lends itself to an overall darker feeling.

Mechanics[]

  • AL2 largely removes the concept of production cost. In AL1, all machines consumed energy which cost currency even when not active. As the player progressed, the cost factor rapidly became irrelevant as 2 assembly lines of equal size producing the most profitable vs least profitable products have the same energy cost.
  • The energy cost mechanic of AL1 was re-envisioned by way of radioactive crafters requiring fuel and the new importer machine, which allows players to directly spawn intermediary products at the same price as their sell cost (this is the only way to gain negative currency).
  • AL2 introduces several new machines and an entirely new technology tree based on 2 new radioactive raw materials. The 2 types of robot arms and timed rollers are the only machines that were removed. In addition to the ultimate technology of AL1, the AI Robot returning, a second tree to produce AI Nuclear Bombers has been added.
  • In AL1, the technology tree had many dead ends. There were numerous branches to the technology progression to create every day objects such as phones and refrigerators. Since the per-starter profits varied greatly even among similarly tiered products, this lead to a feeling of dead ends. Many players advocated for a strategy of focusing bypassing virtually all products besides drones to rapidly progress to AI robots. This approach left large chunks of the game unexplored and even many of the intermediary components weren't used in late game.
  • By contrast, AL2 has a consistent tree that funnels toward the ultimate product. To craft the final product, every recipe in the game must be used.
  • AL2 basic products have been streamlined and made more consistent. For example, in AL1, engines were 2 iron and 1 gold gear wile circuits were 2 copper wire and 1 raw gold. This meant that each of the most basic products required in higher intermediary products had different footprints and limits on how they could be laid out. In AL2, not only is there a much greater variety of basic products, but they consistently use a design pattern of 1 raw and 1 processed material. While there are still a great number of ways to shape modules for larger builds, it's significantly easier to create tileable layouts.

Scale[]

  • AL2 is a much larger game. Not only is there over all more variety, but the upper limits on virtually everything is significantly higher. The most notable exception to this is that no machine besides starters has sub-second operation.
  • In AL1, a given assembly line has a stating grid of 6x6 and a max size of 16x16 (256 machines max). By contrast AL2 has a starting grid of 10x10 and a max size of 100x100 (10,000 machines).
  • This is likely possible due to rapid strides on the capability of mobile devices is the 6 years between the 2 games being released. AL2 is far more performant at scale, particularly with features such as using transporters across lines as AL2 is able to run multiple lines simultaneously while AL1 simply remembered a rolling average profits per second and a short memory of what items were entering cross-linked transporters.

Differences Between AL2 Mobile and Desktop[]

Missions and Ads[]

  • The desktop version is the first Assembly Line game to include Missions, a feature that allows for unlocking additional starters for crafting and selling resources to different thresholds. The desktop version does not feature ads or offline income.

Usable Space[]

  • The desktop version only supports 1 floor. Floor upgrade costs are substantially less expensive. In the mobile version, costs for chunks are based on floor and a multiple of 3x for each new chunk on a given floor. In the desktop version, each chunk increases cost by 10k.

Machine Differences[]

UX/UI Differences[]

  • The controls are obviously different to account for a different interface, including the ability to rotate multiple machines. Lastly, there are significant differences in the crafting recipes for nearly all products. The profit monitoring interface is completely different and adds a line chart of profit over time.

Music[]

  • The desktop features a fairly large soundtrack not found in any other Assembly Line game.
Assembly Line 2 Steam Image

An example of a layout in Assembly Line 2

Triple Drone Production line

An example of a layout in Assembly Line 1

History[]

The Assembly Line games are developed by Olympus and the original was released in 2017. While the subreddit remained active, well into the early 2020's, the subreddit considered it abandonware.

On February 13th, 2023, Olympus announced on the subreddit that not only was Assembly Line 2 in development, but a closed Alpha version was available. On November 30th 2023, Olympus officially announced Assembly Line 2 was available on Steam.

On July 31st, 2024, the desktop version was released on Steam. The 1.01 patch was released August 10th, 2024.

Monetization[]

The game itself has no in game purchases or direct monetization, thought the Steam desktop version is priced at $6.99 USD as of August 31th, 2024. The creator has stated that he has no intentions of further monetization.

Useful Links[]

Community content is available under CC-BY-SA unless otherwise noted.
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