You know how a buffet has something for everyone but none of it is really great? That’s pretty much The Crust (Early Access).

Billed as an ‘immersive economic management sim’, The Crust has some interesting ideas. You’re on the moon, with access to the surface and below ground. With automation, you can set up what is sort of like a factory, and spend time exploring the larger surface for ‘quests’. The pieces sound good, and in most cases it works out.

The exploration part is bare bones. Send a vehicle to a location, trigger a step, send another vehicle to do stuff on that step, repeat. You’ll start with 1 of each vehicle, eventually able to buy/build more. You’ll eventually be able to mine the surface and build supply routes as a result.

The surface construction is basically power generation + logistics support with very large buildings. Eventually you can the ability to put elevators between surface and below, so placing items will eventually have some bearing. More than ample room and straightforward.

The below portion is the meat of the game. Two main parts, mining regolith (moon rocks) which generate one of 1 outputs, with varying %. You process the results into various products, use those products for more and so on. The first 3 tiers are simple enough. Tiers 4 and 5 are clearly WIP, as they require 4 or 5 materials, things you often don’t want to pull across a base, and often replace previous recipes with marginally more efficient recipes. A main bus is all but required given the scaling item requirements. Belts only cost $, which is nice, but also prohibitively expensive early on. Storage is too limited to my tastes (256 or 512 per container, and some steps need 5,000+ items). You also need to build livable quarters, and hire staff to run buildings (such as research). Getting water/air to these places is simple, building them takes ages due as it takes about 60s per 1×1 square. I’d expect this to be changed at some point.

Quests (which move the story along and are highlighted in yellow) have varying requirements to complete. One particular step gives you a countdown to provide a substantial amount of an item, one that you are very unlikely to have on hand. My recommendation is that you create 4 or 5 saves and use them incrementally per stage of the quest.

Oh, forgot to mention you are limited by CPU power, which is a sort of building limit. You can increase this through construction of a building in a living quarter that requires a tier 3 material. I really dislike this mechanic, as it’s a huge punishment for the early game (when you can’t actually build tier 3). I haven’t mentioned the challenges with setting building priorities (never user low priority, it causes everything else to break).

All those words and nothing about economic simulator! Well, you get access to contracts which have reputation requirements and allow you to ship items for money/reputation/research. The game is currently ‘broken’ where mandatory quests take up all contract space unless you research a key piece. You can also just plain ol’ sell items on the market, which is where 90% of the $ in this game are acquired. This is how you address the ‘too much slag’ problem that pops up mid-way. Use slag to make bricks (sell those on the market) or sell the slag through contracts. Ahh forgot to mention that you are limited in shipping size based on the weight of the item, and the size of the ship… and you need to pay for transport. This means that for all the early game it makes zero sense to sell on the market, and later on, only certain items are worth the effort.

I have played many games in genres that The Crust borrows from. Automation, RPGs, economic simulators all have their own complexities. Building just one of those is hard, building something across all 3 is really hard. At no point is any of it truly totally broken. There are systems that add un-needed complexity (CPU), time sinks everywhere (only play on fast forward), and some rather decent balancing pieces to sort out (research requirements, crafting ratios, shipping, quest requirements).

Back to the buffet comparison. The Crust has something for pretty much everyone, and it’s all interconnected. There may not be any particular item that is a show stopper, but all of it is decent enough. I will say that it’s nice to have a more ‘mainstream’ take on the genres with a much lower barrier of entry.