Automate a Baby’s First Year

CRADLE PLANT: First Year Operations is a factory automation simulation about caring for babies from birth to age one.

In a near future where dual-income households have become the norm, families can no longer easily manage the most demanding first year of childcare on their own.
The answer is the Cradle Plant—a facility that automates feeding, sleep, hygiene, and health care while parents continue working.

Your job is not to care for each baby by hand.
It is to design a system that keeps providing the right care even when you are no longer directly involved.

React After They Cry—or Route Them Before They Do

At first, you must check each crying baby yourself, identify whether they are hungry, tired, or need changing, and send them to the appropriate facility.

But as more babies arrive, manual care quickly becomes impossible.

Introduce sensors, routing gates, and care arms to gradually transfer the entire process—

observe → decide → transport

—from yourself to the production line.

Hungry? Send them to feeding.
Tired? Route them to a bed.
Sick? Direct them to treatment.

Turn the decisions you once made manually into part of the factory itself.

Your Factory Must Grow with the Babies

Babies grow inside the facility, and their needs change with age.

Newborns require frequent feeding and long periods of sleep. As they grow, they spend more time awake and begin to need play, stimulation, weaning, and protection from illness.

And no matter how efficient your factory becomes, you cannot make a baby turn one any faster.

What matters is not production speed, but:

How many babies can you care for reliably at the same time?

Expand yesterday’s stable line, add new routes without tearing everything down, and continuously reshape the same facility as the babies grow.

The Same Care Does Not Work the Same Way for Everyone

Some babies sleep better in quiet surroundings.
Some relax around others.
Others respond differently to rocking, movement, music, or physical contact.

Standardized facilities can care for many babies efficiently. Personalized care, however, costs more, takes more space, and handles fewer babies at once.

How much individuality can you accommodate without sacrificing efficiency?

The answer is built into the lines you design.