Research tree: unlockable blocks as a gold-linked node graph

About this game

Developer: Anuke · Publisher: Anuke · Platform: PC (Steam) · Art style: Pixel art · Screen type: Tech / Research

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What to study

Mindustry's research screen is the factory drawn as a family tree. Every unlockable block, drill, conveyor, turret, logic gate, sits in an octagonal node, and the gold lines between nodes are the only explanation the game offers: build this, and that becomes possible. There are no stats, no costs, no flavour text in frame, because the tree's argument is structural: progress is a branching bill of materials, and the shape of the branches tells you which production chains are deep and which are short before you read a single icon. That the planet glows faintly behind the graph matters too, the tree is not a separate menu world, it is the campaign map re-expressed as prerequisites. Frame at about 1:21 in the v7 trailer (Steam; manual extraction, the scene-change pass found no cuts in either trailer, so this frame comes from a 1 fps dense probe of the tree segment).

Patterns

How the screen is arranged.

tech-tree

Components

Parts on screen.

Tree / web

Screen inventory

• the whole screen is the tree, nothing else: dozens of octagonal nodes, each holding a tiny pixel-art block icon, turrets, conveyors, drills, power nodes, factories, joined by thin gold lines into branching chains, with no window chrome, header, or side panel in frame; the camera pans across it, so the visible slice is a cut through a much larger graph
• progression reads through the lines, not labels: a single horizontal trunk runs along the bottom and throws vertical branches upward, each chain rising from a plain base block toward more elaborate, coloured descendants, conveyor arrows and green-lit logic blocks mark the advanced ends, grey silhouettes the unbuilt ones, so the tree's shape is the tech ladder, drawn as plumbing
• the backdrop is the campaign itself, dimmed to near-black: a planet's curved limb and faint sector hexes glow behind the nodes, tying every unlock to a place on the map rather than to an abstract menu, research here is geography made into a diagram
• there is no cost, no tooltip, no selected node in frame: the shot presents the tree as a system to be read at a glance, not a single decision to be made, which is the honest view of a game whose progression is a factory's bill of materials

Top 3 colors

#000003 26%#000000 22%#120b06 21%

Top three palette colors by share. The remaining colors make up the rest.

Source and credit

© Anuke, Mindustry screenshot: Steam trailer (v7), Anuke, shown for design study and commentary. PlayCraft is an unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Anuke.

Source tier 2 (publisher-released) · screenshot: Steam store page · Steam page

Source details

Fetched 2026-10-28. verified 2026-10-28: manual extraction candidates/manual-tech-tree-81.png @ 81.0s in the v7 trailer, MD5 edda4a40993026ef3992acd4fb8485fe, from the verified-clean curl-shim download (79,300,655 B, MD5 cc37c1d84d079bfbfe5a104505ca1df2; full decode to null with -xerror exit 0, zero error lines, manual/decode-v7.err), inspected visually at full resolution (1920x1080 native); the node graph, gold links and block icons legible across the frame; no trailer text or marketing overlay in frame

no published policy found (checked 2026-10-28); fair-use study use, takedown honored within 48h

Rights holders: see Copyright & takedown.