First launched in 2022, Captain of Industry is one of the more unique twists on the factory-building automation genre out there, combining it with an element of city-building that requires you to supply and care for the health of your workers' environment just as much as your machines—meaning that too much polluting heavy industry can actually be a bad thing.
Now developers MaFi games have launched the second major update to Captain of Industry, adding an extensive map editor that lets you tweak the world and revamps all the existing maps to a new, higher standard. There's also a new player hub for people to share their creations with each other.
The update also adds hydrogen vehicles, conveyor lifts, stackable conveyor balancers, custom surfaces, improved difficulties, loans, ore sorters, improved logistics gameplay, pipe and tank coloring, and icons on fluid storage and assemblers that show what they contain and produce.
The new maps really do take center stage for this update, with dynamically smoothed edges on mountains that makes everything look a bit more realistic. There's also procedural generation on terrain features in the map editor, so that you can lay down a large area to be filled with forest or mountain and let the editor spit out the details. There are even four new models for trees and 16 new bushes.
You can check out the new community hub at hub.coigame.com, where people are already sharing cool stuff like all-in-one vehicle depots, streamlined waste disposal setups, and more. Even some good looking blueprinting for nuclear power setups, which got a huge overhaul back in Captain of Industry's Update 1 and are subsequently pretty complex.
You can read the entirety of the pretty extensive Update 2 patch notes on Steam. You can also find Captain of Industry in Early Access on Steam, where it's 20% off until April 19.