PROFITS 2167: Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician Simulator

tldr

Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician Simulator 2167 is a short, high-pressure arcade train-driving game with tower defense and incremental elements. This game will throw you into an increasingly demanding gameplay loop of manual train driving, resource management and constant decision-making, all set to a relentless techno soundtrack. It's pretty short (around 4 hours to beat) but satisfying. It's inspired by the modern tech job market, shady startups, and the way people talk on LinkedIn. 

What's the game about?

In the year 2167, there's not a lot of jobs left on Earth and elsewhere - most services are now provided by Labor Liquidation Machines. But in the darkest depths of outer space asteroids and moons, where the wi-fi signal is shit, and most of the resources required for LLMs and other electronics are mined, human labour thrives. After decades of automated job search during your hibernation, you are now introduced to the role of a Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician. Congrats!

4D Gameplay: Deliver, Defend, Develop and Delegate

Imagine Overcooked, Factorio and a train simulator all arguing over who gets to stress you out the most.

You drive a train through a network of underground mining tunnels, manually hauling unprocessed minerals between stations and hubs while trying to keep an increasingly unstable logistics network alive. You deliver resources, defend your mining infrastructure, and chase ever-growing quotas under the relentless pressure of impossible deadlines and hostile fauna.

You load, deliver, and unload. Pull levers. Keep the train systems from overheating. Try not to miss a junction. Upgrade your train and infrastructure. Protect your stations from the local alien wildlife and keep deliveries flowing... until everything inevitably starts falling apart. Then the shift ends, you count your profits and losses, invest in new upgrades, and head back underground for another round.

As you play, you grow from a Junior to a Senior Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician. The job gradually becomes less about manually hauling minerals and more about building a resilient logistics network. You deploy Human Resource Units, ammunition, and drones to defend, repair, and automate your infrastructure.

Most train games are chill and cozy. Most incremental games are casual clickers. PROFITS 2167 is neither.

You're constantly making tiny decisions on the go: what next station you drive to, should you deliver the minerals or make a turn to protect another station, should you spend time repairing it or bring more defences, invest in the train, automate another route, or forget all about that and just squeeze in one more delivery before the next quota timer expires? You're never completely in control, but you're almost always one good decision away from stabilizing.

And that was my main idea in designing a game like that: focus on providing you choices and options. While many train games are satisfying, they seem a bit boring for me, too relaxed and casual. We made one about desperately trying to make one more delivery while three stations are on fire and your management somehow still expects higher productivity. A game about train delivery that requires constant decision-making and solutions-thinking.

So the game is a little stressful and somehow strangely satisfying from the way it tries to press it on you. That's exactly how I remember arcade machines feeling as a kid. Loud, colourful, overwhelming, and impossible to walk past without wanting to see what all those blinking lights and cool music were about. This game is my attempt to recreate that feeling on a PC. You don't pay for each run anymore, but you still spend every minute pulling levers, juggling systems, and trying to get better.

offical lore dump

Following the Collapse of States and the Rise of Sovereign Corporations after World War IV, monetary systems lost their meaning. The global economy fractured into a volatile market of corporate-issued tokens, with their value defined, inflated, and erased at the Executives’ will.

From that moment on, there were no citizens left on Earth - the Corporative Souvereignty has divided humanity into Assets, Stakeholders, and Executives.

By the year 2100, without regulatory control and driven by the Pure Profit Prophecy, LLM systems (Labor Liquidation Machines) had taken over most human jobs. The growing population was repurposed: billions were placed into managed stasis, sustained, and integrated into distributed computation networks as Human Resources.

After decades of automated job search, conducted while you slept in a corporate ark-datacenter silently drifting through the void of space, you are awakened by a system notification. You were granted the honour of a Job Offer for a Planetary Resource Optimization & Freight Infrastructure Technician position as a part of Profiterra Sovereign Group.

This is your last train ticket to becoming a Stakeholder instead of an Asset. You cannot refuse this opportunity.