Timing is an interesting thing, innit? Outworld Station launched in EA the other day, and it’s very much in the logistics gameplay vein. It is quite rare for a game of this genre to leave EA, for a multitude of reasons. I tend to support these games as the concepts are often interesting, if the execution tends to lack.

Outworld Station has ideas. You start in a relatively small area map with a simple space ship. You bring various asteroids to your base, break them down, and then build automation tools. That seems somewhat straightforward. As with many of these games, it takes a while to automate the mining process, but it does force exploration. Power generation and base layouts have limits, so you need to build efficient designs. I’ll get to that in a bit.

In the exploration phase, your ship moves around the map finding the odd thing to bring back to base. Sometimes there are NPC enemies. Sometimes you defend a meteor storm, or a solar storm that turns off all power. You can unlock chests, which give artifacts that give talent points. Eventually you discover mining nodes you can build, and then automate shipping to the main base. It’s responsive, and relatively interesting content. It is NOT biters or dark fog that attacks your base… at least not in the first zone.

Production Chains

First power generation. This is all automated and inherently connected. No need to run wires or poles. Get solar panels of fusion generators and you’re good. You can even remotely power mining stations. It generally works.

Logistics are extremely simplistic, which actually adds a ton of complexity. The ‘floor’ of the factory is a cross construct and automatically connects to other floor pieces. To move things between factory objects, you need to bind them together and routing is automatic. Things then just naturally flow and I have not seen any rate limitations as of yet – the output of a building appears to be the limiting factor. Not being able to see these connections adds a ton of complexity – which means that planning is 10,000% more important here than other games.

Space limitation is a challenge. You could technically build a massive factory that takes the entire map. It will take time for stuff to move through and it will take a while to detect throughput problems. If you build small, then you are likely to run out of space. You can (and should) build a top floor to help here, as it allows some expansion of the factory. When I started my build I just wanted to get something basic done. I quickly realized that I was making bad design calls and rejigged the factory.

There are building limitations that need to be considered. Ctrl+C allows you to copy not only a building, but its settings and logistics path, making it the perfect tool for expanding a factory. Saves a lot of design headaches. To have that truly work requires buffer chests at any inflection point, which abstracts the complexity into simple layouts. What does that mean?

Miner -> Chest -> Smelter -> Chest -> Factory #1 -> Chest -> Factory #2 -> Chest

This is extremely similar to Satisfactory’s central storage hub concept (pre 1.0), and allows for a very flexible factory build. The concept is there for fluids/gas, but you need to pipe things around and that is a very high-friction process. Generally, if a chest is empty, you work back 1 step and build another factory. As an EA game that just launched, productivity screens are not yet implemented.

A few interesting bits to add:

• Inventory management for chests works well enough. Your personal inventory is less fun as similar to Satisfactory, you need material on hand to build something and you have limited slots.
• I like the mechanics of the talent tree, you need to explore to get the points. The actual talent tree isn’t very good (invest entirely in productivity/speed, ignore the rest).
• The ship building process is more like a resource sink to progress the story. There’s potential here. Curiously complicated.
• Defensive structures are currently just to avoid pressing a key to repair a structure.
• You eventually unlock another map and can shift things between them. The resource costs to get all this established are not fully balanced, nor are the links as you can only link 1:1. Which means daisy-chain connections.
• Fluid/Gas logistics are unpleasant, or perhaps just a right pain to manage unless you’ve done some serious factory planning work. Or rather, it’s jarring game design when the rest of it has zero belts to worry about.
• Pacing needs some balance work. There’s no ability to have functional ratios between buildings, so buffer chests being empty are the only red flag. More accurately, you can’t optimize, only brute force. This is absolutely normal for any EA game.
• For a very long time, upgrading buildings isn’t worth it. The main point you want to pay attention to is ‘max output’, that will limit a lot of gameplay.
• The building mechanics generally prevent scalability. You can’t move buildings, only destroy and rebuild. No blueprints. Again, all expected in EA titles.
• The game looks great and plays smoothly. Way, way better than expected.

If you like productivity games, this one is surprisingly robust. Way better than I had expected. The foundational pieces are very solid, and for the most part small tweaks are what’s required rather than massive changes (inventory aside). Awesome find!