Foundry is a first-person voxel factory game from Channel 3 Entertainment, released in Early Access in 2024. Think Minecraft meets Satisfactory: you mine resources, place assemblers and conveyors on a grid, and scale up from hand-mining to sprawling automated factories. Up to 4 players share a single persistent world.
Foundry's factory simulation is computationally interesting — every conveyor, assembler, furnace, and miner ticks on the server. Late-game factories with thousands of placed buildings will push any host, and the difference between a smooth server and a laggy one becomes obvious around the time you automate electromagnets and start scaling ingot production.
We run Foundry on Ryzen 9 7950X / 7950X3D nodes specifically because single-thread CPU performance is the bottleneck for voxel factory games. 8 GB RAM comfortably handles a small factory; by the time you're producing electromagnets at scale you'll want 12–16 GB to avoid chunk unloading under memory pressure. NVMe storage matters for voxel save/load performance — every new chunk written to disk.