A living factory game from Banish Studios

Brood
Factory

Grow a living factory. Consume the world.

It fell into Iowa farmland on a Tuesday. By autumn it had a name.

Coming soon to Steam

Windows · macOS · Single-player

The hive

You are the queen.

Something fell out of the sky over Linn County, Iowa, and took root. You are its queen, the hive's own body. You walk the creep, claw ore and biomass out of the ground, carry it inside you, and grow organs wherever you can reach.

Then the organs take over. Extractors chew the earth. Cilia ripple ore from organ to organ. Digesters render it into chitin, and morph pools grow chitin into everything else. Every organ is grown from what the hive already makes, so each one you grow makes the next easier. A few plates a minute become a few hundred, then thousands.

Every organ also breathes spores, and the wind carries them over the farms.

Painting of the Seed of Oblivion: a mound of dark carapace and bone horns around glowing amber eggs, wrapped in red tendrils.
The Seed of Oblivion. Every hive begins as one.

A factory that eats, digests and grows

  1. CreepLiving ground. Every organ roots in it.
  2. ExtractorsChew ore, biomass and brimstone out of the earth.
  3. CiliaTwo lanes of rippling muscle carry it all.
  4. FeedersSnatch what passes and feed it in.
  5. DigestersRender raw ore into chitin.
  6. Morph poolsGrow chitin into parts, and parts into organs.
  7. Hearts and lungsBeat vitality through the hive.
  8. Evolution pitsTurn essences into what the hive becomes next.

Scale

Grow it, then grow it again

Start with one burner extractor and a handful of chitin. End with rings of digesters circling a throne nine cells wide. Cilia bend into slopes, sweeps and full rings; burrows carry them under one another; forks and splices split and braid their lanes.

Blueprints, planners, copy and paste and undo keep pace with you as the hive sprawls out across the county.

Fluids and power

Plumbing that breathes

Methane seeps from vents and tar from the wells under the farms. Pipe them through living vessels into rendering vats and boiling glands, crack them into fuel and acid, and boil water into steam for great lungs.

Sun membranes drink the daylight and fat lobes store it for the night. At the far end of the tree, black hearts burn glow eggs and breed what they burn.

Logistics

It never sleeps

Day turns to night and the hive glows through the dark. Great worms haul freight through living veins, under knots, stations and schedules. Carriers fly between sacs, fetching what you ask for and building what you plan. Drift nexuses fling cargo clear across the map.

And when it all needs to think, a nerve network of neurons and glowcaps lets the hive count, compare and decide.

The brood

Hatched to hold the line

Brood nests house your warriors, and the Seed hatches every one they ask for. Call an escort to walk at your side, send it in, and pull it back.

  • Skitter

    Swarm

    Fast, fragile claws, cheap and many. Swarm and surround riflemen.

  • Spitter

    Ranged

    Acid against ground and air, from behind the front line.

  • Bulwark

    Anchor

    Heavy carapace that shrugs off rifle hits. A slow, stubborn front.

  • Burster

    Sacrifice

    Gives itself in a corrosive burst among clustered troops.

  • Needler

    Mainstay

    Sprays needle spines at ground and air. High damage, thin hide.

  • Bombard

    Artillery

    Lobs acid globs nine cells that splash everyone nearby.

  • Gargoyle

    Flyer

    Flies over walls. Its glaive bounces through three targets.

  • Behemoth

    Colossus

    A colossal armoured beast whose claws cleave all in front of it.

And the queen herself

She fights at their head. Her right arm grows from a claw into a needler, an acid sprayer and a bombard. Mantles armour her, and symbionts fill her body: legs for speed, a ward, a brood pouch that builds around her, eyes for the night, and in time, wings. If she falls, she is reborn at the Seed.

The county

Iowa fights back

The farms notice first. Farmers stack hay bales across the roads and take down their rifles. The police throw up blockades. The military walls you in with checkpoints and firebases, one wall at a time. Push far enough and the National Guard rolls in with tanks, flamers, rocket troops and helicopters.

The further the hive spreads from where it fell, the harder they hold.

  1. Home countyFarmers' barricades
  2. Near countryPolice blockades
  3. Far countryMilitary checkpoints
  4. Deep countryFirebases
  • Farmer
  • Trooper
  • Soldier
  • Flamer
  • Gunship

Overheard in Linn County

  • Ever since that rock fell, the soil's been warm.A farmer
  • I found a purple rock! It's warm!A child
  • We tried to stop 'em with HAY BALES?!A farmer at the barricade
  • Nobody's trying to get in. Everybody's trying to get out.A state trooper
  • We're not stopping it. We're slowing it down.A soldier at a checkpoint
  • God, it's all purple. All of it.A gunship pilot

The end

Birth the Leviathan.
Or blot out the sun.

Feed the hive's apex essence into the Leviathan spire and launch it to win. Or stay. Sky wombs let loose sun-eaters that never come down, the hive's spores rise for good, and the daylight fails, field by field, until the planet is the hive's.

Watch

See it move

Screenshots

  • Concentric rings of glowing organs around a throne at night.
  • A throne of carapace and horns at the heart of a hive, warriors around it.
  • Warriors overrun a red farmhouse and its fields while soldiers fire.
  • Long production lines of organs glowing amber in the dark.
  • A column of warriors crossing a road between fields.
  • A refinery of organs, bladders and coloured vessels between two ponds.
  • A battle across golden fields, explosions and gunfire.
  • A row of ribbed organs with open mouths, lit green in the dark under pipes and bladders.
  • A circular hive spreading over farmland seen from above.

Footage from the game in development.

Coming soon to Steam

Brood Factory is coming to Steam for Windows and macOS. The store page is on its way: check back here for the link.

Coming soon to Steam

Press

Fact sheet

Developer
Banish Studios, Inc.
Publisher
Banish Studios, Inc.
Platforms
Windows, macOS (Steam)
Release
Coming soon
Genre
Factory building, automation, base defence
Players
Single-player

Downloads

Press and business: hello@banishstudios.com