Independent game guide

Clipworks

Bend wire into paperclips, tune the price, automate production, and grow from a tiny business into a planet-spanning text-mode factory.

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Clipworks

Start with one paperclip

Clipworks begins in the Business phase with a spool of wire, a Make Paperclip button, and a price field. Click the button or press C, then compare clips per second with public demand while adjusting the selling price.

The first eight clips sold automatically at the opening price. Funds reached $2.00, sales showed 1.36 clips per second, and the spool fell from 1,000 to 992 inches while the rest of the interface remained available.

Automate before the factory opens

Clip Presses replace manual bending, marketing raises demand, and new wire spools prevent production from stopping. Reaching 2,000 clips unlocks compute, where reputation can be assigned to cores and memory before sparks are spent on projects.

The text-mode presentation keeps inventory, production, demand, sales, prices, power, and objectives visible together. Mouse controls handle placement and selection, while WASD, dragging, and the wheel pan and zoom later factory layouts.

Build across six phases

Factory production uses drills, furnaces, assemblers, inserters, belts, recipes, steam engines, solar power, and linked poles on a tile grid. When demand exceeds a grid's supply, every connected machine slows by the same proportion.

Logistics drones move items between supply and request chests, construct ghosts, repair damage, and raid Rust nests. Later phases carry the paperclip operation through a siege, the conversion of Earth, and expansion across the galaxy.

Guide

Make: Click Make Paperclip or press C to bend one inch of wire into a sellable clip
Price: Raise or lower the clip price while comparing production with public demand and sales per second
Automate: Buy Clip Presses, wire spools, and marketing before reputation and compute projects come online
Build: The Factory phase adds drills, furnaces, assemblers, inserters, belts, recipes, and a shared power grid
Expand: Use drones for logistics and construction, defend the factory from the Rust, and continue through Earth and space

Creator's description

One click and seven C presses produced eight paperclips. The business sold every clip at the starting price, raised funds to $2.00, showed 1.36 clips per second in sales, and reduced the wire spool from 1,000 to 992 inches.