Autonauts

Autonauts is a colony-and-automation sandbox where every action a robot performs has to be taught to it first. You arrive on an uninhabited planet, gather sticks and stones by hand for the first few minutes, and craft rudimentary tools that let you build the first workerbot. From there, the game becomes a visual-programming puzzle: you demonstrate a task to the bot, the script editor records the steps, and you refine the loop until the bot performs the job reliably without supervision.

The programming language is Scratch-style block-based, designed to be learnable in minutes but deep enough to express genuine logic — conditionals, loops, multi-step sequences, inter-bot coordination. Each tier of bot upgrades expands the available instructions and the kinds of tasks they can be assigned. The economy stretches across gathering, building, cooking, fishing, tailoring, farming and animal husbandry, with the eventual goal being colonists — beings that depend on your bot empire for survival and progression toward transcendence.

The Fully Automated update added Settlement Mode, a fresh challenge where you build a 300-bot metropolis under significant constraints. Other updates have added the Bot Database for quickly sharing code between bots, refined scripting abilities, upgraded storage transporters and a dedicated Signs Tab for managing larger colonies. The visual style is low-poly with a bright, consistent palette, which gives the whole game a relaxed, attractive presentation that matches the gentle puzzle pace.