Thanks for playing! Ironically I've never played Factorio, but the game is still inspired by what I've seen of it.
The grems in the shoebox were a very last-minute addition. The placeholder sprite, just an orange square, almost ended up in the final game, but I'm very glad I changed it in time because I think it adds a lot to the games visuals. Having time to animate them would've been nice though.
Yeah, the only thing disincentivizing super long conveyors is the lag it can bring lol. I was planning on having there be limits on how far things can be upgraded and stuff like that to add more strategy, but I ran out of time for that. I also would've made a tutorial, but that was pretty low priority.
As for the other Holomem, they are just better droppers. I had thought about doing some other things with them, like having some be upgraders instead of droppers, but once again didn't have enough time. I was also planning on making hats you could buy, such as the EnReco hats, and if you wore certain hats certain members would also wear them (such as Biboo wearing the Cerulean hat or the Stain hat). That's the mechanic I most wish I had time to implement. Finally, I was originally going to make the corruption minigame actually look like a discord chat with Gigi trying to convince the Holomem to play Roblox, but I ended up having to stick with the placeholder (actually all the art was meant to be placeholder, I wanted to do an entirely different art style. I think it turned out good enough though).