Captain of Industry Beginner’s Guide: 6 Essential Tips for New Players

by Mike Alexander / Articles, Misc. Guides / 01 Apr 2024

The incredibly impressive colony and simulation management game Captain of Industry by MaFi Games has just been released in Steam Early Access. As the leader of a small group of people escaping a calamity in their homeland, it is up to you to make a new life in a new place for yourself as well as those who chose to travel with you.

Starting with minimal manpower, you will build up an industrious community that is responsible for manufacturing all sorts of goods. At the same time, you’ll need to tend to the needs of your growing colony and workforce. If you’re eager to dive into Captain of Industry’s unique mix of management gameplay styles, then you might find some helpful guidance in this Captain of Industry Beginner’s Guide. When you’re ready to become an industrial superpower, fire up your factories, and let’s get started!

Keep Your Trucks Running

Perhaps one of your most important assets in Captain of Industry is your fleet of trucks. These vehicles will do all of the transporting of materials from one place to the next, as well as collecting raw materials from their various locations. For instance, you can assign trucks to collect rood from forests or scrap from buildings. To keep all of your trucks running, you will need a steady supply of fuel to keep them topped up. You can build a fuel generator for this purpose, and if you do it early on you’ll be golden for your entire playthrough. Remember, if your trucks run out of fuel, your goods aren’t going to be going anywhere.

Build a Laboratory

As you are getting your colony and factories situated, it would be a wise idea to build a Laboratory fairly early. You’ll start your game with a good amount of supplies, but none of it will last forever. Especially once you start ramping up production and your colony welcomes more people into it. Building a Laboratory will give you the ability to construct new buildings like the aforementioned fuel generator, among other things.

Get Mining!

Before you can begin manufacturing goods, you’re going to need a source for raw materials. The primary way you’ll start collecting metal ores is via mining. There will be plenty of deposits for you to take advantage of, all you have to do is build a mining depot right next to it. Then, you can set the area you’d like to mine and assign both excavators and trucks to that location so that materials can be collected, and then transported to another location for processing. Once everything is processed, it can then be used in any number of manufacturing endeavors.

Build a Chain of Production

Building production chains is not a new concept in gaming. Recent games like Factor.io and Satisfactory have both captured the minds of gamers everywhere by allowing for some truly crazy and elaborate production chains. Things can get that complex in Captain of Industry too, but not right away. First, you’ll want to focus on building smelters to process all of your raw ore. At this stage, your trucks will drop off the material at the smelter and pick up the finished product, but you can build out the process to include conveyor belts and storage silos to keep things going smoothly.

Time to Construct

In order to construct buildings and other useful things in Captain of Industry, you’ll need quite a lot of construction parts. Construction parts are made up of iron, concrete, and wood, all of which will have to be sourced or processed separately for this undertaking. This process can be mostly automated as well once you have the conveyor belt/storage concept figured out.

Keep Your People Happy

We’ve done a lot of talking about the processes of Captain of Industry, but who carries all of these actions out? Who drives the trucks, mans the smelters, and maintains the storage areas? Your citizenry, that’s who. As your manufacturing empire becomes more complex, your population will also grow to meet the growing demand for manpower. This is a good thing, but it also means that the needs of your people will also increase. That means keeping them fed and happy, which can become difficult if neglected for too long. Food takes time to grow and cook, so you need to make sure that you have enough growing at all times to support all of those hungry bellies. It will also take water to grow, which can be piped from somewhere, or you can just pray for rain.

Mike Alexander

Mike has been playing video games since he was able to hold a controller, having been fascinated by Sonic 2 on his mom’s Sega Genesis. That fascination and passion for the art form has grown exponentially nearly 30 years later, and he doesn’t see that fading away anytime soon.
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