Microtopia Guide: How to Build a Thriving Robot Ant Colony
Image Credit: Cordyceps Collective, Microtopia
Welcome to Microtopia, the factory-building game where you play as the hive queen of a robotic ant colony. Forget conveyor belts—your workers follow pheromone trails to gather resources, build supply chains, and expand your mechanical empire. It’s a fresh take on automation, blending ant logic with strategy.
Here’s a basic guide for the game and how to start off well.
Step 1: Establishing Your Colony
Every great empire starts with a queen, and yours lands like a futuristic drone. When placing her, remember: she has an input side (food goes in) and an output side (worker ants come out). Set her down near key resources like scrap and energy pods, so you don’t have to waste time hauling from across the map.
Your first workers will appear automatically, but you’ll need more. To do that, you need an incubator—essentially, an ant factory. Place it near the queen and create a pheromone trail between them to streamline the process.
Step 2: Pheromone Trails – The Ant Highway System
Instead of placing conveyor belts, you’ll draw trails for your ants to follow. Here’s how it works:
Place a pheromone trail from resource piles to the queen.
Ants will automatically follow it, picking up and dropping off materials.
If the trail loops, ants will keep cycling indefinitely.
This system is simple but surprisingly powerful. Ants can’t walk through objects, so plan your trails wisely to avoid blockages.
Step 3: Expanding Production
Now that you have a steady stream of resources, it's time to start producing goods.
Key Buildings You Need to Unlock Early On:
Smelter – Turns scrap into iron ingots (a critical material).
Workshop – Produces screws and other advanced components.
Stockpile – Stores important resources.
Build these near your main trails, so ants don’t have to wander too far.
Pro Tip: Ants interact with the first object they touch on a trail. If they’re ignoring a building, adjust the trail so they hit it before moving on.
Step 4: Managing Your Workforce
At first, your workers only last 5 minutes before breaking down (they are robots, after all). But you can upgrade them in a combiner, merging two weak ants into one stronger worker with double the lifespan.
Later, you’ll unlock:
Inventor Ants – Used to research new technology.
Flying Ants – Needed to reach new islands.
Make sure you constantly produce new ants so your colony doesn’t grind to a halt.
Step 5: Unlocking the Tech Tree
Once you have Inventor Ants, they’ll unlock new buildings and upgrades. Some key early techs include:
Radar Towers – Reveal new islands to expand your colony.
Plant Cutting – Lets you harvest fiber for new materials.
Iron Tile Flooring – A fancy upgrade that improves movement speed.
Your ants will need to feed the inventors for research to progress. Just like real life—except with fewer unpaid internships.
Step 6: Expanding to New Islands
Eventually, your starting area will feel cramped. Once you build a Radar Tower, you can discover new islands with unique resources like copper and rare plants. But to reach them, you’ll need Flying Ants.
To make flying ants:
Combine two upgraded workers in a special building.
Assign them to long-distance routes.
Watch them zip across the sky like robotic pollinators.
Once you’ve established a foothold on another island, you can set up supply chains to bring rare materials back to your main base.
Final Tips
Use Dividers & Counters: These let you split resources evenly between different buildings. No more bottlenecks!
Plan Efficient Loops: Try to make circular trails so ants don’t get stuck.
Upgrade Ants ASAP: The longer they live, the less you have to replace them.
Don’t Neglect Research: New tech unlocks better automation tools.
With these tips, you’ll go from struggling to manage five ants to commanding a high-tech insect empire.
Good luck, Hive Queen!
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