Mindustry is a tower defense game released under the GNU GPL 3 license available for GNU / Linux, Android, Steam, macOS, and Windows.
The principle of the game is to try to defend your base against waves of attacks successive enemy robots. For that, it is necessary to extract mining resources on the map and to launch a true automated industry for the transport and treatment of materials: mines, conveyors, processing plants, power grid and oil pipelines.
Many times it is just a matter of putting towers on the map, but either all the towers are the same or there is so little space that there is not much location strategy to develop.
But Mindustry, takes the concept even further: In general, just destroy enemies to automatically accumulate points that allow you to build new towers or upgrade them. Here the resources depend on the player to extract them from the ground and transport them, process them, use them as building materials and finally send them to the tower.
The base unfolds from space to earth in a desert valley of a lifetime, but where there are many deposits of coal, copper, lead, sand, water, oil and more.
But still there is an enemy base that regularly sends its flying drones and crawlers ready to coldly destroy any form of somewhat sophisticated machinery that they find on their radars. Therefore, it is not a predefined path for enemy units to follow.
We can, for example, decide to block a certain cannon strategically using titanium walls to force the attackers to follow a passage where we have placed all our artillery.
On the other hand, this entire industry takes up space on the map and is therefore very vulnerable to attack by mad vengeful robots.
Also, let’s talk about it, sometimes it is a real headache to find out how, for example, to get silicon to supply the tower, knowing that to build a silicon foundry, it requires lead, but also that the foundry uses sand and coal as raw material for the production of silicon.
Electricity must also be supplied to the smelter, which is obtained from a combustion generator that works with coal. And now you have to link all these factories with a bunch of conveyor belts, and you need to quickly use bridges, routers and classifiers to make sure that each resource gets to the right place (under penalty of blocking the entire production chain). And that’s just the beginning, because it gets even more complicated when you add thorium and other more advanced materials.
An interesting point is that after having built meticulously a complex of walls and different types of towers intertwined with healing spotlights, it is possible to save the group of buildings as a plan (schematics) and then reuse it without having to manually reposition each building.
Another interesting point is that it is possible to play online against other players in a game of two or forty-one.
There is also a map editor, and while there is no custom map catalog yet, you can find several on the project’s Discord.
Finally, tThere are also a lot of modifications available, but I still haven’t had time to look.
How to install Mindustry on Ubuntu and derivatives?
As mentioned at the beginning, Mindustry is a multiplatform game so We can find installers for both Windows, Mac, iOS and Android of the game.
In the case of Android, you can find the game in the Playstore or in F-Droid. In the case of iOS, you can also find the game in the AppStore.
On the other hand, in the case of Windows, Mac and Linux, we must visit the following repository where we will find the indicated packages.
For those who are interested in being able to install this game on their systemThey can do so by following the instructions we share below.
In the case of Linux we have two options to install the game, one of them is to download the source code and compile.
The other method is simply with the help of the Flatpak packages, so this method is the simplest and only requires having the support installed.
And to install the game, just open a terminal and type the following:
flatpak install flathub com.github.Anuken.Mindustry
