How to Play Empire of Gears
Empire of Gears is an idle factory game you play in your browser. This page covers everything you need for your first session — no account required to read it.
1. Make your first cash
A new factory starts almost empty: a small grid, a hand-crank generator and a tap button. Tapping produces cash manually. It's slow on purpose — the whole point of the game is to replace your own taps with machines that run without you. A minute or two of tapping is enough to afford your first real machine.
2. Buy a machine in the Shop
The Shop lists every machine you can currently afford, with a tooltip explaining what it produces and what it needs. Early machines like the solar panel and hand-crank generator are self-sufficient: place them and they produce. Later machines are converters — a steel press turns raw material into plate, an assembly table turns components into finished goods worth far more.
3. Place it on the grid
Machines occupy a footprint on your factory floor, from a single tile up to 3x3 for the biggest buildings. Placement matters: converters pull inputs from machines they're connected to, so a press sitting next to its supplier keeps running, while a press stranded in a corner sits idle. Connector lines on the grid show you what's feeding what, and every machine delivers straight to the Hub.
4. Set a recipe
Converters need to know what to build. When you place one, a recipe picker opens automatically; any machine still missing a recipe shows a pulsing SET badge so you can spot it at a glance. Choosing a recipe tells the machine which inputs to consume and what to output, which in turn determines what its neighbours can use.
5. Watch the Data tab
The Data tab is your control room. It shows cash per second, what each production chain is contributing, where a chain is starved of inputs, and your overall factory progress. If your income has stopped growing, this is where you find the bottleneck — usually a converter with no supplier, or a machine whose output nothing is consuming.
6. Reinvest and expand
Every machine you buy raises cash per second, which shortens the time to the next machine. That compounding is the core loop. When the grid fills up, you can unlock extra floors and map sections to keep building. Progress is saved to your account and keeps accruing while you're offline, so you can check in a few times a day and still grow.