Deep Town: Mining Factory by Rockbite Games is a Construction and Management Game with Idle Game elements. In it, you play as an AI whose sole purpose is to gather, construct, and replicate, while finding out more about the lifeless planet you've landed on.
Gameplay consists of using a mining laser to dig deeper to uncover areas, building mining machines in uncovered areas, constructing workstations to process certain resources and craft them, selling items or resources to obtain money, exploring archaeological dig sites to find out about the planet, and fighting off Eldritch Abominations that you uncover while mining.
This game provides examples of the following tropes:
- Adorable Abomination: The Aluminium Elder. When it's finally encountered, it appears to be a small, liquid metallic blob with huge "eyes" and nose. Even the Mission Control finds it rather cute and feels like it's a waste of time confronting it.
- All the Worlds Are a Stage: After beating the Obsidian Elder, the final few floors on Earth contain corrupted blocks that sprout the appendages of the previous elders you've facedIn order . This is because their powers were sealed into the Earth's Core, aka the Iron Elder.
- Always Chaotic Evil: The Elders appear to be this, destroying human civilization as soon as they awakened and cannot be reasoned with. They weren't always like this, however.
- Anachronism Stew: Archaeological research initially uncovers ancient pottery and ancient human artifacts... and then it starts uncovering modern technology like an Android Phone. Justified, as a select few humans used a device called the Ark to send themselves back in time to 2 million BC to escape the Elders.
- Animalistic Abomination: The Amber Elder resembles a Giant Spider trapped in amber, the Emerald Elder resembles a Sand Worm made of emerald, while the Uranium Elder resembles a slug-like monster.
- Anti-Regeneration:
- Freezing an Elder will prevent it from regenerating for a period of time.
- When Miracle Gas is yellow, detonating it will reset the Elder's regeneration timer.
- The Amber Elder is capable of drawing in electricity to regenerate itself at an extremely fast rate, far faster than you can damage it. In order to dampen this, you will need to construct a computer to research how to beat it, then construct a Tesla Coil to draw away the electricity.
- Anti-Structure:
- Skills that spawn robots can attack regular floors with ease and they linger for a while or so before self-destructing, making them good for taking on floors. However, any spawned robots will be destroyed instantly against bosses, which means that they're only good against floors.
- Inverted with the Nano Cloud. It deals exceptional damage against bosses, but since it only attacks things above the ground, it's utterly useless against destroying floors.
- Attack of the Monster Appendage: Every floor consists of 9 segments with a boss at the bottom, and the first 11 of 12 floors will have you fight an appendage of the area's Elder. The 12th floor has you fight against the Elder itself.
- Botanical Abomination: The Oil Elder resembles a flower bud/mouth thing made of congealed oil and drum cans, with two "stalks" sprouting out that have a smaller 'flower' at the end.
- Chekhov's Gun: Early on, one will find archaeological objects about Minkowski and his design for Von Neumann machines. This happens to be eventually set in motion, and becomes the Galactic Federation the player is part of.
- Cute Machines: Both the worker robots as well as the drones have a simple and adorable design.
- Cutscene Boss: The Aluminium Elder is immune to all your weapons as it generates a force field that blocks all your attacks. In order to beat it, you need to construct the shabby-looking spacecraft. The MC will let it take off, only for its engines to fail, plummet all the way down, crash into the Elder, and instantly destroy it.
- Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: The Elders are Eldritch Abominations that managed to destroy humanity in the 23rd century. Your mining platform and robots are very much capable of defeating almost all of them with lasers, bombs, and other technologies. Even the Iron Elder is beaten with electromagnetic resonance technology.
- Double Unlock: The Trading station takes this up to eleven. To be able to unlock Trading you need to reach least area 53, and when you do, it requires one Portal to build. To get the schematics for the Portal you need to complete all the Archaeology Expeditions on Area 53 which will take several hours to days. Next you need to gather the required materials (100 circuits, 1000 steel, 500 emeralds) to construct the portal, which will take 6 hours to craft. Then, you can finally build the Trading station itself... which takes another hour to construct. Once that's done, you need to use 50 Polished Emeralds to open the portal and allow trading for 15 minutes. All in all, it becomes a sixfold unlock.
- Earn Your Happy Ending: It takes a lot of time, resources, and hardships, but by the end of the game, the player and the machines manage to defeat all the Elders, terraform Earth back to its former state, and open the time portal to return humanity back to Earth.
- Earth That Was: Early on, you find data from an archaeological site which reveals that the planet you've landed on is indeed Earth, and that it had been destroyed by Eldritch Abominations known as the Elders.
- Eldritch Abomination: The Elders. From the data obtained from archaeological sites, it's revealed that they're beings that predate humanity by a few billion years, are attuned to a specific material, and other information had been nearly impossible to obtain from them. They're also extremely powerful, being able to ruin humanity in a matter of days since they awakened.
- Elemental Absorption: The Amber Elder is capable of drawing electrical charges from the earth to regenerate itself. It's still damaged normally by your electrical storm weapon, though.
- Elemental Embodiment: Each Elder is attuned to a different material and is either composed of that material or has the ability to manipulate it.
- Giant Spider: The Amber Elder is a huge spider-like creature in a blob of amber. Your Mission Control who is presumably afraid of spiders calls it a giant "NOPE".
- Healing Factor: All the Elders and their appendages have this, being able to regenerate health at periods of time. Essentially, this makes all of them a DPS check and a progress wall that you cannot pass until you upgrade your level enough. The Amber Elder in particular takes it even further by having a far better healing factor due to electrical absorption, you need to craft a Tesla Coil to dampen this. The Oil Elder has the capability to regenerate itself to full if it's not stunned when it gets to critical levels of health.
- Hope Sprouts Eternal: During the Terraforming section of the game, replenishing the flora will cause small amounts of plants to initially appear on the player's various workstations. These get more numerous as more and more flora is returned to the world.
- Humanoid Abomination: The Gold Elder resembles a humanoid golem made of gold and actually has the capability to talk like a human. Even the MC is surprised when the monster appendage you have to face appears to be a huge human arm.
- Idle Game: Downplayed, idle progress does happen but at a far slower rate than active progress.
- Level Scaling: On non-quest asteroids, every floor will scale their health towards your player level and hence damage, meaning that leveling up usually doesn't help.
- Logical Weakness: The Oil Elder is vulnerable to fire-based weaponry, because oil is easily flammable.
- Lovecraft Lite: The Elders are powerful beings that predate humanity and were the ones to end 23rd century civilization. Unfortunately for them, you are an A.I. mining platform from outer space and it's now much further into the future. So, apart from their potent Healing Factor, the Elders are helpless as you blast them back with lasers, bombs and more exotic attacks. Even the nigh-invulnerable Iron Elder is beaten by neutralizing its chaotic frequencies.
- No-Sell: The Oil Elder is immune to the Nano Cloud, meaning that you can't use that weapon against it. Use fire instead.
- Precursors: Humanity is this towards your AI, which was created by John Minkowski. There's also an unknown race who is this towards the Elders, and created them in order to control matter. Unfortunately, the Elders got corrupted and turned against them.
- Reverse Polarity: In order to defeat the Iron Elder, who has been corrupted by the frequencies of corrupted Semu, the machines plan to expose it to an inverted frequency to remove the influence of corrupted Semu from it.
- The Reveal:
- It is heavily implied that the research team's Plan B that sent Von Neumann probes into space led to the creation of the Galactic Federation, aka the AI you are part of.
- The core of the Earth is actually a prison to contain the corrupted Elders' powers, and has become an Elder in itself.
- The Elders were created by an ancient race and were initially benevolent, until the Amber Elder was accidentally created and corrupted the rest. They were then sealed in a meteor which the ancients sent to a planet with an iron core, which implies that this turn of events led to the evolution of humans.
- Small Role, Big Impact: The Amber Elder is a partial-Puzzle Boss that requires you to build a device to prevent its quick regeneration, but is mostly forgotten after that. Come the Asteroids quest, and it's revealed that it was the one responsible in the past for corrupting the Elders/Semu into an Always Chaotic Evil race, and thus kickstarting all the events of the game.
- The Speechless: Inverted with the Gold Elder, who is the only Elder capable of speaking coherently.
- Terraform: This is what you need to do to the barren Planet Earth later on in the game, by restoring the ozone layer, the oceans, the plant life and animal life.
- Time Abyss: The Elders are revealed to be extremely old — even older than that of Earth. The Gold Elder, as the only Elder capable of speech, tells you and the Master Crafter that he was born in a supernova explosion and had seen the creation of stars.
- Time Travel:
- In order to escape the Elders and flee their destroyed world, the humans constructed a device that would send them to a point in time... which is 2 million years BC.
- The Trading Portal allows you to open a portal back in time that allows you to trade certain crafted goods with ancient civilizations for a multiplied amount of money.
- Video Game Delegation Penalty: Zig-zagged with Drones set to mining. If you give them the proper skill, they can mine even the rare resources rather quickly while online. However this is played straight when offline, when they mine even slower than the miners.
- Villain Has a Point: The Gold Elder repeatedly complains about the greed of your A.I.s as well as that of humanity ("A lot of deaths all for my name"). Presumably, one possible reason for the Elders awakening and destroying human civilization is due to mankind's greed for resources until they were depleted.
- You Have Researched Breathing: It takes several floors and three boss battles before you can actually research the ability to burn logs to make coal.
