Skyline Works is a factory game played in the air. You are the Foreman for Tallow Rim, a town on the rim of a rift valley called the Cleft. Its floor is brine-soaked mud, so everything moves on rails, ropes and lanes strung between towers.
Each Works gives you a map, a small starting store and a contract: a list of goods the town wants delivered to its dock. You build producers (a clay pit, a kiln, a salt pan), hang a carrier between them, and watch the bar at the top fill as goods arrive.
A load is one tonne of bulk goods, or the same weight in crates or small parts. Every number on the screen is in loads or scrip.
The valley has four kinds of ground. Rib is bare bedrock and free to build on. Terrace is firm ground. Sump is mud: a tower can stand there only on piles, which cost 8 scrip and take twice as long. Cliff and water take nothing.
The tiles you can build on, and how far each carrier reaches between two of them, decide where a line can go. Works I is laid out so the straight line fails and the detour wins.
I, Saltpans: the monorail. II, Terraces: the cableway, where height and wind matter. III, Cliffworks: the gantry crane, which lifts over buildings. IV, Crest Instruments: the pneumatic tube, for small valuable parts. V, The Long Span: the drone lane, and a bridge of rope across the Cleft that only a main cable can cross.
After the campaign comes Open Cleft, a sandbox on a map you can reseed.
Each Works has four Seals. Delivered means the contract is filled. Lean means you spent no more scrip than the par for that Works. Quick means you finished inside the par time. Clear means no jam and no wind stop longer than a minute.
Seals buy Patents, permanent upgrades such as a faster carriage or a longer span. Scrip does not carry over between Works; Seals and Patents do.
Press Play. A short coach walks you through Works I one step at a time, and each step is done when you do the thing, not when you click Next. The ? button brings any step back.
The game keeps your commands and a checkpoint on the server as you play, so closing the tab loses nothing. You can download a Works as a file and load it back. Failure here costs time, never progress: a jammed line waits for you to lift a carriage off it.
Press Play together on Works V or Open Cleft and share the invite link. Up to four players build one factory at once, two on each rim of the Cleft. The host's clock sets the pace; if the host goes quiet, the room pauses.