Vehicles arrive at Factory Unit 7

For most of The Last Factory, you've been rooted in place. A factory grows outward — belts, smelters, turrets, a sprawl that creeps across the dark — but it never moves. That changes with the update we've been building this cycle: vehicles, and the whole supply chain that feeds them.

A new resource chain: petro to polymers

Vehicles need bodies, tires, and cockpit glass. So the world changed first.

We seeded sparse petro nodes out in the frontier chunks — deliberately far from spawn, so reaching them is its own small expedition rather than something you trip over on turn two. To turn that raw petro into something useful, there's a new processor: the Petrochemical Plant, which refines petro into either plastic or synthetic rubber. It drops into your logistics network like any other configurable processor: pipe petro in, choose the product, belt the output onward.

The Vehicle Bay

The Vehicle Bay is the heart of the new system. It assembles scouts from metal, glass, plastic, and synthetic rubber, then keeps them in the fight: repair, refuel, and rearm all happen at the bay. Park a damaged scout and it patches up. Run one dry and it limps home for fuel. Build it, configure it, and it becomes the home base for everything that rolls.

Take the wheel: pilot mode

Scouts can run on their own. They move, manage their own fuel, drop into a limp state when they're badly hurt, and auto-fire on anything hostile that wanders into range. That alone changes how you hold ground.

But the part we're most excited about is pilot mode. Tap a vehicle to take direct control: on touch you get a virtual joystick, on desktop it's WASD, and the camera follows you out across the belt. Drive the perimeter yourself, push into contested ground, then recall when you're done — the scout drops back into autonomous patrol.

Research that backs it up

Three new research tracks gate all of this, so it rolls out as you progress rather than landing all at once:

• Petrochemical processing — unlocks petro into plastic or synthetic rubber.
• Field mobility — unlocks the Vehicle Bay and your first scout.
• Armored scouts — tougher hulls for pushing into hostile territory.

And everything persists across save and load — vehicles, the bay's reserves, and any in-progress builds all survive a reload.

This is still in active development, and we'll keep tuning balance and feel as it settles in. More soon — that's what this DEV LOG is for.