Do you like Factorio and Mindustry? Play free production game DeFacto

If you enjoy building conveyor belts and depleting natural resources, then you've been pretty well served lately with games like Factorio and Mindustry. But what if you're not, what if you have a few spare girders and pipes lying around, and nowhere to put them? Enter DeFacto, a free production game you can play in your browser.

I remain in mild awe of what people are building in Pico-8. Inspired by Factorio, and released a while ago, DeFacto is a still-impressive game where you mine resources in space, and then usher them towards vending machines to earn a steady stream of moolah.

That's how you get started anyway. Have a read of the itch.io page for further tips. There's a lot here, as in most production games, but placing things can be a little fiddly—it can be a little difficult getting structures to connect together.

For more great free experiences, check out our roundup of the best free PC games.

Tom loves exploring in games, whether it’s going the wrong way in a platformer or burgling an apartment in Deus Ex. His favourite game worlds—Stalker, Dark Souls, Thief—have an atmosphere you could wallop with a blackjack. He enjoys horror, adventure, puzzle games and RPGs, and played the Japanese version of Final Fantasy VIII with a translated script he printed off from the internet. Tom has been writing about free games for PC Gamer since 2012. If he were packing for a desert island, he’d take his giant Columbo boxset and a laptop stuffed with PuzzleScript games.