Starting your industrial revolution in the post-apocalyptic Archipelago requires knowing your operational center right away. Pinpointing the official Brave New Wonders research location is essential because every milestone—from manual mono-wheel drilling to automated mover logic—ties directly back to this central depot. Without identifying the primary Brave New Wonders research location early on, your pioneer will waste valuable time hauling raw materials across expansive ruins without advancing through the tech tree.
In City From Naught's automation simulation, development does not rely on scattered research laboratories placed haphazardly across the grid. Instead, scientific progression is anchored to a specific arrival point where technological unlocks, structural blueprints, and relic adaptations take place.
Where to Find the Brave New Wonders Research Location
Identifying the starting Brave New Wonders research location begins the moment you step foot on the Americas continent. When Pioneer Mera arrives in this post-apocalyptic world, your initial landing structure is the Train Station. This train station functions as your permanent base of operations, primary storage depot, and central scientific facility for the first continent.
The train station serves as your arrival point on the Americas island, positioned near several small starter deposits of metal ore, crystal shards, and coal. The Americas represents the former site of the old world's Ark project, where broken bridges, flooded infrastructure, and reclaimed debris shape the landscape. While other factory games allow you to construct standalone research labs across the dirt, this game channels technology unlocks through the station terminal itself.
Whenever you need to review scientific progress, open the technology tree menu by pressing H. However, simply selecting a node on your interface is not enough to complete a project. Consistently navigating back to this initial Brave New Wonders research location ensures that your harvested plates, refined shards, and specialized science packs are physically or automatically deposited into the train station's intake inventory. Pioneers can easily navigate around the hub by toggling between a focused view and a free camera using Tab, or switching to an overhead top-down perspective by pressing T. If structures are misplaced around the station, they can be moved instantly with no penalty using the relocate feature.
How the Train Station Tech Hub Operates
The train station interface manages scientific discovery through a structured deposit system. You do not gain passive research points over time; every advancement requires physical items crafted by your pioneer or manufactured along automated production chains.
Steps to Complete Research Projects
- Open the technology tree menu by pressing the H key on your keyboard.
- Select an available node and click Set as Focus to mark the project as active.
- Review the required materials displayed in the top inspector panel.
- Gather or manufacture the requested intermediate components in your inventory or logistics network.
- Travel to the train station hub and open its interaction menu.
- Transfer the required resources from your mono-wheel backpack into the station slots, or press Shift-click to deposit matching stacks.
- Click the Research button to immediately finalize the unlock and gain access to new structures or automaton behaviors.
Because interacting with your designated Brave New Wonders research location requires physical component transfers, keeping your production arrays close to the station significantly reduces transit downtime during the opening stages of the campaign. Early infrastructure relies on a Solar Power Collector providing 4 MW of energy, distributed across your assembly lines via power poles that each support up to six wire connections.
| Research Project | Unlocks & Structures Granted | Intermediate Materials Required | Primary Functional Purpose |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mono Mining | Smelter structure, manual drilling | 2 Metal Plates | Enables mining of metal ore and crystal shards |
| Energy 1 | Solar Power Collector, Energy Cells | 10 Industry Research Packs | Generates 4 MW of clean base power |
| Combat 1 | Weapon Factory, Gunpowder, Dynamite | 25 Industry Research Packs | Clears fallen tree barriers to reach infinite mines |
Expanding Technologies Through Relic Discoveries and Trials
Not all scientific progress occurs solely through standard item crafting at smelters and factories. To unlock high-tier mono-wheel upgrades, weapon systems, and specialized automaton behaviors, you must venture out from the main hub into the surrounding ruins of the Americas continent.
Directly south of the train station lies an abandoned ruined house marked with a mission flag. Inside, you discover an old-world relic: a sleek, transparent container with a front-facing display panel, reinforced casing, and shoulder straps. Successfully completing the Trial of Capacity at this location unlocks custom text-based prompt instructions for your automatons and increases your backpack carrying capacity from 200 to 300 items. The trial challenges you to supply 10 metal plates and 10 refined crystals processed one at a time based on whether the trial building signals red or blue. The plain-language command system uses an AI model solely to interpret text instructions in any language into visual behaviour graphs, which can also be inspected and manually modified.
Further down the map, an abandoned vehicle along an overgrown elevated highway yields engine components that boost pioneer movement speed by 50 percent. Another trial at a drone wreckage pile tests signal coordination, requiring metal plates to be delivered when a crane signals green and hauled back when it signals red; exploring this completed site unlocks personal combat capability, allowing you to press R to enter battle mode and shoot hostile machines. Bringing these relics back to your home base at the train station unlocks secondary branch nodes in the tech tree, allowing you to invest spare science packs into permanent mono-wheel speed and backpack capacity upgrades.
As noted in early player discussions, several obstacles across the southern wilderness block access to large, infinite resource deposits, including pure nodes that yield materials at 1.5 times normal speed. Clearing fallen logs requires dynamite produced inside a Weapon Factory using gunpowder (crafted in smelters from coal) and thermal plates (crafted from crystal compounds). However, community members frequently caution against blowing up every fallen tree in sight. Leaving specific tree barriers intact prevents hostile machines in red combat zones from invading your central corridors, funneling hostiles through single choke points instead.
Automating Deliveries to the Central Research Depot
Hand-feeding components into the train station quickly becomes tedious once recipes scale in volume. Setting up dedicated manufacturing lines for science packs is the most critical milestone for early-game automation.
The first dedicated science item you must produce is the Industry Research Pack. Crafted inside a General Factory, each pack requires:
- Refined Crystals (processed from raw crystal shards in a Smelter at 6 per minute)
- Metal Plates (smelted from raw iron ore in a Smelter at 6 per minute)
Each recipe cycle in the General Factory takes 20 seconds, producing two packs at a time. This yields a base rate of six research packs per minute from a fully supplied facility.
Supplying your active Brave New Wonders research location with automated science packs removes all manual friction from tech unlocks. To build a hands-free supply loop without conveyor belts, implement the following automaton configuration:
- Position a General Factory adjacent to two Warehouses—one dedicated to metal plates and one dedicated to refined crystals.
- Build an Automaton Factory nearby, insert a Compute Core collected from drops, ruins, or fallen enemy drones, and deploy a standard Mover automaton.
- Configure a mover bot to pull metal plates and refined crystals from the warehouses directly into the factory inputs using simple delivery behaviors or a merged multi-stop command.
- Place an output Warehouse directly between your General Factory and the train station platform.
- Deploy a dedicated delivery mover instructed to transport completed Industry Research Packs into the output depot.
Once your science packs accumulate inside the staging warehouse, you can quickly grab full stacks to complete multi-tiered unlocks like Combat 1, which requires 25 packs. Players can also utilize blueprint mode (Space) and clone tools (Ctrl+D) to duplicate functional factory and automaton setups across their base in seconds, with cloned automatons retaining their assigned behaviors.
Scaling Outposts, Sky Pillars, and Wonder Construction
As your technology tree branches outward, the functional reach of your Brave New Wonders research location expands into regional infrastructure projects. After mastering basic intermediate crafting, your General Factories produce Simple Kits and Cortex Chips to assemble Automation Research Packs, while Weapon Factories manufacture Ammunition Mark 1 from metal plates and gunpowder.
This progression unlocks Gun Turrets for automated base defense against hostile drones. Base defense becomes vital when expanding south toward the Sky Pillar—an ancient mega-structure that unlocks your first Wonder. Building structures within the red warning boundary around the Sky Pillar triggers organized counter-attacks from hostile combat machines. Setting up three Gun Turrets supplied by a dedicated ammunition mover ensures that incoming waves are repelled. By programming turrets to broadcast a red signal when their inventory is empty and green otherwise, a single mover can automatically resupply any turret in need, while damaged structures auto-repair shortly after combat ends.
Step one of activating the Sky Pillar requires delivering a massive stockpile of resources to the site. Completing this objective allows you to build your first Wonder: a massive airship that doubles as an airborne fleet of factories. The airship allows pioneers to lift their base into the sky and travel across the Archipelago to distant continents and biomes, including the snowy reaches of Europe, arid deserts where sand is melted to glass, and volcanic zones rich in rare resources.
For updates on patch notes and full release schedules, visit the official Brave New Wonders Steam Store page to check verified announcements and system requirements directly from the developers.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where is the primary Brave New Wonders research location on the Americas map?
The primary research location is the Train Station where your character first arrives on the continent. The station serves as your central science hub, home inventory storage, and the physical interaction terminal for all technology tree investments.
Can you build secondary research hubs across the island?
No, you cannot build standalone research labs on the ground. All formal research tree progress on the starting continent is processed through the main train station hub, though regional outposts and logistics routes are used to haul distant science components back to it.
How do you deposit items at the research location?
Press H to open the tech tree, select your desired upgrade, and click Set as Focus. Once the project is focused, walk to the train station, open its inventory interface, and transfer the required items from your backpack into the deposit slots.
What should you research first at the train station hub?
Your first research unlock should be Mono Mining, which costs 2 Metal Plates and grants the Smelter structure along with manual drilling capabilities. Follow this immediately with Logistics 1 to unlock Warehouses and Sentries for automated resource storage.