Autonauts

What the game is

Autonauts is a colony game about teaching robots, made by the Scottish studio Denki and released on PC in October 2019, with a Switch version following. You land alone on an empty planet, chop wood by hand, make a crude tool, and use it to make a better one. Then you build your first worker bot, and the game changes shape.

You do not program a bot with text. You pick up a bot, record yourself performing a task, and hand the recording back: the bot repeats what it watched you do, forever. From there the game gives you a visual editor with loops and conditions, so recordings become scripts you can inspect, generalize and repair.

The colony grows around that. Bots feed bots, resources feed workshops, and eventually settlers arrive who want food, education and entertainment, each need adding a production chain of its own. There is no combat and no way to lose. Sessions are long and the late colony is genuinely complicated, with dozens of bots running scripts you wrote hours earlier.

What you actually do

You do a job by hand until you are sick of it, then teach it away. Recording is easy; making the recording work in every situation is not. The bot will walk to the exact tree you walked to, so you learn to write instructions that say find the nearest tree rather than go here. When a line of bots jams, you open the script, find the step that assumed something untrue, and change it. Getting better means writing routines that survive a colony twice the size.

What it exercises

• Breaks a task into a sequence of steps precise enough for a machine to repeat
• Generalizes an instruction so it works in cases the author did not demonstrate
• Finds the faulty step when an automated process stops producing
• Plans a production chain where each stage feeds the next
• Judges when to automate something and when to keep doing it by hand

Why we rate it Moderate Worksheet score 67 / 100

1. FitHow much real knowledge or skill does the play itself make you use?68weight 45%

   The programming is the game, not a mode inside it: a colony beyond a certain size cannot be run by hand, so writing, generalizing and repairing routines is the only route forward. Recording by demonstration also makes the abstraction unusually concrete. The score lands at 68 because the underlying system, while genuine, stays a simplified metaphor for real automation.

2. TransferWill what you practise here work outside the game?58weight 30%

   Decomposition, generalization and debugging are the transferable core of programming, and this game exercises all three under real pressure from a colony that keeps growing. It settles at 58 because the visual language is bespoke and the concepts are never named, so you practice them without necessarily learning what they are called.

3. PracticeDoes the game make you use that skill again and again, as it gets harder?75weight 25%

   The write, run, watch, fix cycle repeats for as long as you play, and every new resource restarts it at a larger scale. The colony never finishes, so there is always another routine to write, which is why this is the strongest dimension here at 75.

What the evidence says

Editorial onlyNobody outside our desk has checked this. It is our reading of how the game plays.

The evidence level is Editorial only. The Steam page confirms the developer and the October 2019 PC release, and Nintendo's Switch listing describes the visual programming language on the product page itself. No study of this game exists in our sources and none is claimed. General research on block-based programming tools is about other software and would be misleading to cite here. What is verifiable is the structure: the game cannot be progressed past a small colony without writing, generalizing and debugging routines that machines execute.

• Autonauts on Steam ↗ · Valve
• Autonauts for Nintendo Switch ↗ · Nintendo
• Autonauts on Nintendo Mexico ↗ · Nintendo