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Last weekend, as Monster Hunter Wilds bore down on us like a stampeding wildebeest, my eye was caught by furtive movements in the leaves underfoot. Behold the creepy extravagance of Microtopia, a strange and engrossing factory builder in which your factories are run by cyborg ants.
Created by Netherlands-based Cordyceps Collective, it gives you landscapes of buglike diodes scuttling about on pin connectors, harvesting bolts and other scrap for a queen who resembles a pregnant clump of capacitors. Insect strategy games are startlingly abundant right now, but Microtopia goes a little further than many both in its eerie Darwinian presentation, and in trying to portray how ant colonies “think” while meeting expectations for management sims.
While you can direct ants individually, the game is all about laying down pheromone trails that tie resources or facilities together, while also dictating the behaviour of the ants that follow them. Echoing academic research into how ant nests may resemble computer networks – aka the “anternet” – Microtopia portrays these trails as circuits, with logic gates that, say, limit how many ants can join a particular trail, or send an equal number of ants down each branch in a forking path.
Developers Cordyceps stumbled on the “anternet” concept care of a Kurzgesagt documentary series, and were immediately captivated by how scent trails “naturally” organise the behaviour of individual ants. “‘Explorer’ ants wander around randomly until they find food or another point of interest,” they told me over email, responding appropriately as a group. “Once they do, they follow their own scent trail back to the colony, reinforcing the path for other ants to follow.
“The more successful trips ants make, the stronger the trail becomes,” the developers continued. “As food gets depleted, the scent fades, and the process naturally redirects resources elsewhere. In essence, this behavior functions like an algorithm, where simple rules lead to complex, adaptive solutions, similar to how slime molds find efficient pathways. It seemed like the perfect match to replace this algorithm with player interaction.” The idea of these being cyborg ants, meanwhile, stemmed from art director Floris Kaayk’s old film project The Order Electrus, a fictional documentary about mechanical insects spawned by derelict industrial areas.
As an occasional fan of factory sims, I’ve relished being Microtopia’s tycoon hivemind. While there’s a lot in the game you’ll recognise from other sims, with stockpiles, workshops, and smelters forming hierarchies of increasingly specialised building commodities, the ‘pheromone logic’ both puts a spin on the fundamentals and invites reflection on the conventions of factory management games.
Before I get into all that, a couple of more drive-by observations. Firstly, the controls are nicely elastic: once you’ve pegged out a pheromone trail, you can seize nodes and threads and drag them about, which makes it easy both to adjust your factory layout, and to confuse yourself by doing so.
Secondly, one important structural element is that your ants are mortal, with different categories of worker having different lifespans. Accordingly, your scent trails will eventually develop a grisly embroidery of bleached and curled-up husks. If you’re fond of factory sims, this might sound like a recipe for frustration, but in practice, you can set things up so that newly grown ants join your networks continuously, and feeding your queen regularly enough to maintain your population is an enjoyable challenge.
If Microtopia stands up well as a genre piece, what makes it intriguing as a development story is how Cordyceps’ understanding of ant behaviour has worked with or against those genre expectations, to say nothing of the idea of ants as machines.
Sometimes, the game’s mingled inspirations agreed with one another. Take those worker categories. They’re not just germane to the needs of a factory sim, but derived from “ant castes, a feature unique to eusocial insects where members of the same species have a different appearance from each other”. The devs also wove their campaign around the real-life process of queens producing gynes, or younger queens, to fly out and form colonies in other biomes.
At the project’s most ambitious, Cordyceps experimented with, as it were, letting the ants take over the simulation. “For quite some time we initially went with making the game revolve around realistic ants and went through quite a few iterations,” they said. “Though from a gameplay perspective they were required to construct buildings, smelt iron and the like.” They also thought about giving the ants “culture and intelligence”, a fascinating prospect, though I’m not sure what these terms mean in the context – how does one define or measure the culture or intellect of an insect collective?
Ultimately, however, the devs decided to set limits on the antsiness of the ants for practical purposes. Microtopia’s scent trails consist of straight paths between nodes, for example, because real-life ‘anternets’ are too “organic and painterly” for humans to follow, bulging and scribbling through soil, bark and leaf. “It allowed for easier adjustments and made larger networks clear and comprehensible,” Cordyceps commented.
Cordyceps also decided against martial elements, or simulating real-life clashes between rival ant colonies or other insects. “Even though robot soldier ants would be very cool to have, Microtopia is not a game about destruction,” they explained. “Building the inner workings of a colony takes time and is a very involved process. After hours of work, it wouldn’t be fun to have to start over after some rude neighbor had to come and raid your larvae.”
While I don’t think Microtopia needs a conflict element, this does feel like a slight missed opportunity – I can’t help thinking of the scientists who’ve used Age Of Empires as a reference point for ‘invader’ ant behaviour. I’m also curious about how the element of competition might have affected Microtopia’s portrayal of scent trails as algorithms: apparently, certain species of ant can hijack the trails laid by ants from other nests, rather than hunting down food sources themselves. Hacker ants, perhaps?
Above all, though, I’m interested to discuss what it means for our understanding of ants to portray these creatures and their homes as motherboards or factories, with all the associated cultural baggage. How does bolting together all these ideas contribute to our ability to live alongside them?
Cordyceps hope that Microtopia resists the “more classical view of ants” as “pests”, and presents them instead as “industrious” beings – “an interconnected structure of different ranks of ants within a colony, all cooperating with such grace, as if they were one big organism.” But it’s not just about modulating our attitudes toward ants. On another level, Microtopia is, of course, parodying the effects of the industriousness of human beings. It unfolds against the backdrop of a sprawling neon landfill, and the ants themselves are pieces of self-propagating electronic waste.
For Cordyceps, Microtopia “is a satire in a way, where even in an environment polluted by humankind, life will find a way to survive and thrive.” At once appreciative and cautionary, it “showcases the incredible achievements of nature and holds a mirror to our own human society, in both its successes and failures.”
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Kurt Indovina
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