Brave New Wonders launches with robots you text, not belts
City From Naught's post-apocalyptic factory sim is out now on Steam, where you command automatons with plain-text orders instead of conveyor belts.
Brave New Wonders is out now on Steam, and its pitch is a deliberate poke at the factory genre's most sacred object: no conveyor belts anywhere. City From Naught, a Toronto studio, would rather you command robot armies with plain-text orders typed in any language, and it is asking $24.99 for that, with 15% off during launch.
According to the launch announcement, it is a factory automation and base-building sim set in a distant post-apocalyptic future. You mine and refine resources, link factories and logistics routes, and expand production lines with layouts that can be copied and pasted with their robot instructions intact. It is not a peaceful sim, either: old machines roam the ruins, so you place turrets to defend your bases and use dynamite to open supply routes into new territory. Steam lists it as single-player and Windows-only, with Achievements and Family Sharing, and it names LoongGate alongside City From Naught as publisher.
Pricing is $24.99 in the US and EUR 25.49 in Europe, discounted 15% for launch, which works out at $21.24 and EUR 21.66. The studio dates the release to 21 September while the Steam listing says 20 September, which is why the new trailers have landed today: a launch teaser, a second trailer called 'The Essence', and an official launch trailer on the studio's YouTube channel. The studio's previous releases are the narrative puzzles Keyword 2: Nightfall and Keyword: A Spider's Thread.
The interesting part is what disappears when you delete the belts. Factory games such as Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program turn logistics into a spatial puzzle: the real game is threading material through a grid without tying a knot. Brave New Wonders swaps that for specification. You describe the outcome in ordinary language and the automatons work out the route. The studio pitches this as automation for players who have evolved beyond conveyor belts, and promises no coding is required. That claim lives or dies on how forgiving the command parser is. If sloppy phrasing is understood, the puzzle becomes one of intent. If the parser is brittle, the puzzle becomes guessing the magic words.
Our opinion
The conveyor belt was never the obstacle. It was the toy. Making intent the input hands players a genuinely new problem to chew on, and City From Naught deserves credit for trying that in a genre which mostly ships the same blueprint in a fresh coat of paint. The trouble is that no trailer can prove the part that matters. The screenshots look handsome; they will not tell you whether typing 'send the iron ore to the north foundry and stop when the buffer is full' produces an obedient fleet or a syntax error.
The track record matters too. City From Naught's previous releases are narrative puzzles rather than simulations, so this is a genre debut for the team, and factory builders live or die on how deep the systems run after twenty hours. The demo is the honest test here: put a few hours in, and if the robots cope with the way you actually type, buy it. If you find yourself hunting for the exact phrasing the parser wants, wishlist it and wait for the patches.