I get a kick out of making mistakes. I find them to be the best way to learn. The consequences of mistakes tend to be the largest driver for change.

In the video game world, the only true consequence is time. In Everquest, you died, lost XP, and needed to get it back – time. In a permadeath/hardcore mode, you lose a character and have to rebuild – time. In Valheim, you get taken out by a deathsquito – holy moley the time.

In Return to Moria, when you die, the cost is generally a mild amount of time to return to the place of death from your bed. The cost to create a new bed is relatively small, sort of like a mini-save point. For some encounters, this is absolutely required. For the more complex areas, the game tends to provide a fast-travel point. Now, have I died in really bad spots that caused horrible corpse runs? Heck yeah! The Deep runs in particular (holes in the ground that require 4x rope ladders to get down to, and have a permanent DoT) are perfect examples of risk/reward, because they provide access to some rare materials. I’ve died more than a few times by pushing my luck to harvest a couple more Black Diamonds.

The dungeon tile exploration aspect also highlights this, very similar to a D&D campaign. You know there’s a door, will you open it if you are low on HP and lacking spells? Same thing here, do you want to open the new room when you’re tired, hungry, and your armor is gone? For the first half of the game, you are generally at a disadvantage to address those issues. Eventually you will acquire the material to build temporary (and useful) camps that address all that (medium hearth, table, bedroll, repair station, and mushroom/sun onions to cook). This temporary camp model is required, as the later parts of the game can go for very long stretches of combat/exploration. Orc camps or hordes will absolutely wreck your shield/health.

Which highlights a larger challenge with fast travel, where the game considers you having walked the distance. Meaning any buffs you may have acquired before travelling are mostly worn off by the destination (buffs that are stupidly short duration). This generally means that the home base model is more about a place to store stuff rather than prepare for the next run. It takes a long time to get a bag big enough for that to be practical.

I will flag that the game difficulty does increase over time, more so in the space of significant vertical travelling, more enemy density, and more environmental hazards. Vertical movement starts off rather simple, maybe a single floor up. Later though, you’re going to be going through 4 floors at a time in a single dungeon tile. Enemies move from patrols of 3 orcs to a dozen + wargs. And the environment is just chock full of poison/despair which eats away at your health if you don’t go above it. This costs time. Add into that the move from fairly linear exploration to multiple paths, there’s a crazy amount of time spent just trying to figure out where to go and getting there alive.

There’s a rather long list of QoL gripes I have with the game, and already patches are coming along to address them. You get stairs very early now!! Slag and Scales drop more frequently and less are needed!! It reduces the grind and RNG aspects. QoL things are often hard to balance out, so hats off here.

Now having opened the Dimrill Gate and effectively completed the main quest, there are some exploration and completionist portions that remain. Which I can say without hesitation is a much different game altogether. Having access to Tier 6 armor & weapon (after the final quest), plus continued access to Miruvor (a quite strong HoT) reduces the overall risk tremendously. And if you’re so inclined, you can lay down a special lamp to clear piles of purple mist. Sure, you may still encounter a large troll or fell beast, but you’re more than prepared for it after that final run. Of note, once you do have a particular item, you can restart a new world (or join another) and very quickly unlock a shortcut to the near-end of the game.

Hindsight is a heck of a thing however, and it is next to impossible to avoid comparison to Valheim, which is an all-around better game. Return to Moria is built upon, and suffers for, the need for claustrophobia and lack of freedom. Freedom is the reason survival games exist. I am not against the concept of dungeon tiles as an exploration mechanism, but the inability to make mistakes and explore too deeply is wildly confusing. “The dwarves were greedy and dug too deep” is not possible here. Every player will start in the West Halls, head to the Elven Quarter, the Crystal Depths, Lower Deeps, and so on, in that order. The concept of procedural generated worlds off seeds is almost pointless.

I will say that this disappointment is offset by potential. The game a week later is much better. Improved maps, improved food/buffs, clearer direction about digging in deep cracks, better building tools, and better combat are all things that would put this much in much higher regards.

The game does an admirable job of making you dig through a mountain, and once you’re done, you can look back and better appreciate that journey. And certainly the journey is better in a group. Return to Moria may not be a GotY candidate, but it certainly fits in the top shelf of of LotR games.

Lord of the Rings + Base Building + Survival? Count me in.

In reality, none of those things actually turn out to be what you may expect.

Lore

Lord of the Rings is just oozing lore at every corner, and Moria certainly is ripe for the picking. Since this game takes place at the end of the 3rd age (Rings is gone, Gimli still lives), you won’t ever cross paths with the Fellowship, but Moria is a tomb and should be full of history. Sure there are orcs in every corner, but you’re borderline Indiana Jones in terms of potential here.

In practical terms, there isn’t much here that comes from the official lore. You have target quests to complete along the path, which guide your exploration to a degree. It’s mostly window dressing, with some minor exceptions (Elven Quarter and the final bit). I will say that the art style is where things make a bolder statement. This feels like Peter Jackson’s vision.

Base Building

For some reason, the entire game is built on a cardinal grid. North-east does not exist. The net effect is that the base building portions are locked into this grid, and if you happen to a generated corner, you may be stuck with things locked into 45 degree angles. You don’t have the ability to fast travel, build roofs, or ramps until QUITE a ways into the game.

If you’re going into this wanting to build a new Kazad-dum, this is not the game. If you’re going into this for the pragmatic base building – in particular where fast travel stations are located, then yeah, this will work out just fine. Due to the general lack of continual harvest, you will never backtrack to a prior base once you have a new fast-travel point/base. Always you are heading east.

Survival

This is the most confusing part to me. Survival games are not new, there’s an entire genre of amazing ones out there. You need food/sleep/shelter to survive, tools to acquire material to progress, equipment to attack/defend, and exploring the world.

The food/sleep/shelter portion sort of works here. You won’t have the ability to create portable food until you’re well into the Deeps (what appears to be the half point). Light sources are weird, where even with a torch you’re considered in the dark, which drains stamina. Food variety is generally meaningless, as the stat boosts are identical, and “feeling full” is whatever item you can cook. That farming is present with food seems strange… perhaps I am missing something or this is simply a QoL thing.

Tool progress is a mixed bag. You need to keep moving forward to find new things to do. Take on some tougher foes to barely collect some material to make a better sword, so the next time is easier. The tiers of progress are ultra confusing mind you, as you’ll enter the proper Mines of Moria and not be able to collect half the stuff around you, and no indication what to upgrade in order to do so. I do like the exploration aspect, that discovery is predicated on trying to mine something, or repairing random statues for recipes. But if I’m given the option of a gold vein, I should be a few minutes away from unlocking the ability to mine it. Note to all: collect as much coal, stone, granite and adamant as you can.

Equipment has tiers, which you unlock well after you actually need them, which again is a nice risk/reward function. The downside is that Moria has way to many frigging enemies with absolutely stupid AI. You’re fighting constantly through swarms of enemies, stuck repairing gear after nearly every attack, and the combat is simply mind-numbingly boring. I triggered a horde attack of orcs in Moria, which lasted nearly 15 minutes. Orcs drop zero loot of use, except to repair your gear. I’m sure there will be a mod (or an update) that controls enemy spawn rates, or increases the damage you do so that this is a bump rather than a wall of dumb. The bosses (and trolls) are interesting for multiple reasons, but I’ve had my share of orcs. Learn to love the dodge-roll.

Exploration

This is the broken expectation part. The game is fundamentally a dungeon tile explorer. You are in pre-generated “rooms” that have a dirt path connecting to another pre-generated “room”. You can explore any of the rooms, but progress is entirely and absolutely gated behind the dirt paths. The walls of these rooms are also unbreakable, same with the floors. I was absolutely not ready for this. In hindsight I can’t see how this game could have functions with pure freedom given the lore limitations. Not like you should be able to dig down as deep as you want and find a Balrog in minute 15.

The net effect is that plays much more like a dungeon run, with survival elements. Explore the tiles to find the entrance to the next zone. Explore that zone for the “McGuffin” that allows access to the next, at so on.

Subvert Expectations

This is not Valheim. This is not Ark or Rust. You are in Moria not to rebuild it but to traverse it. It took way too long for me to come to that realization, but once I did my enjoyment of the game drastically changed. Each room become a puzzle to solve. Every zone one to conquer and leave behind. I needed to buff up before the next spelunking.

This is a very slow burn game, and if you’re going into this expecting a free-craft survival game (as it’s promoted), you’re going to be in for a bad time. If you look at this instead as a dungeon crawler with survival elements, then yeah, this game is actually pretty solid.

I am so extremely hopeful that Ubisoft takes some lessons from what Mirage has delivered, which is about 20 hours of quality content, and a relatively successful call back to its roots.

Context first. I’ve played nearly every AC over the years, including the Origins/Odyssey/Valhalla phase. AC2 and Black Flag still rank highest for me, though for different reasons. AC2 due to the depth of the story, the characters, and the setting. Black Flag due to risks it took by adding the water elements. The O/O/V phase is remarkable for other reasons, mostly the full RPG/stats behemoth, the general lack of any assassins, as well as the sheer size of the games, clocking in at over 50 hours each. The phase also exemplified the Ubisoft mini-map icon curse, where there are hundreds of absolutely meaningless collectibles where it was simply easier to barge in with weapons than put any thought.

Mirage instead applies focus.

• There are no levels.
• You have a much refined skill tree, with impactful effects
• Combat is challenging due to the parry/lock mechanic, which reinforces the need for stealth
• There are puzzles that require some thought and attention
• There are only 5 types of collectibles
  • Dervis’ junk. Provides material for upgrades that you can get through regular gameplay.
  • Shards. 10 total, unlocks some gear that I found no use for.
  • Books. 7 total. Unlocks a cosmetic. Can’t complete this until the penultimate quest.
  • Enigmas. Puzzle indicators that lead to cosmetic talismans. Some are very obtuse.
  • Chests. Unlocks gear/schematics that allow upgrades. More on this.
• The main storyline has multiple branches that are about a half dozen steps each, and all come back together near the end.
• You can assassinate anyone except the final staged battled. It is ridiculously rewarding to stealth your way to a head of the order and fly in from above.
• The story is contained, the city is small, and the opportunity to explore is limited.
• There are optional side quests that add story as well as a bonus reward if certain conditions are met. e.g. don’t get detected.

The gear upgrade part needs some expansion. Where O/O/V was primarily focused on numbers, Mirage is focused on effects. You’re extremely unlikely to use any armor or sword aside from the starting ones, as they provide incredible effects – less detection on assassinations and increased damage on parries. It makes this function seem important, but in reality it’s as optional as everything else.

The Ubisoft question often goes back to “why collect things” and the answer was often “because it’s there”. Getting that icon off the map was often more a reward than the actual item, and the developers can apply so much creativity when there are 400 icons. Mirage cuts those icons down to a very small amount, and in almost all cases (junk/shards aside), applies a meaningful challenge to them, like having to collect a key a few blocks down in order to unlock a door. It’s far from perfect, but it’s a marked improvement on the pace of the game.

Where Mirage stumbles is in the main storyline. Basim is not an interesting character. The Order is the same as in the past games. And because this is a prequel of sorts, the ending is already known. Baghdad as a city is more interesting (and the historical codex entries too). Mirage also has the traditional “jank” of parkour where you want it to do something, but it does something else.

Finally, and I think this is the true merit of note, is that this entire game was built by a smaller Ubisoft team with existing assets, and a decent level of quality as a result. Ubisoft does NOT need to throw the kitchen sink and pad every aspect of the game, which is frankly money/time wasted.

AC Mirage as a result is a refined experience, a throwback to the more classical AC games, and frankly respects YOUR time as a gamer as a result.

After spending nearly 20 hours finangling with a nuclear power plant setup and then missing a critical step that would require hours of re-work, I’ve put Satisfactory on the backburner. It boils down to three simple facts:

1. The inability to-prefabricate buildings combined with stupidly small stack sizes means continuous back and forth for material when trying to build anything larger than a shoebox.
2. The transport logistics for belts are the only thing that makes a lick of sense, given the above mentioned stack size issues.
3. The z axis is core to the experience, and built to be a hurdle to surmount.

Dyson Sphere Program (DPS) addresses both of these points, and more

1. You can pre-fabricate everything. Belts, smelters, drones, space stations, rockets, everything. And those items stack, so I can have 50 smelters, 200 inserters, and 600 belts to connect it all take up 4 (!) inventory slots.
2. Transport logistics have multiple options. Belts are drag-and-drop and go for as long as you have inventory. Small-range drones show up early and cover what you can see. Planetary drones are mid-game. Interplanetary drones are end-game. All drones require infrastructure at start and end points, nothing in between.
3. The z axis (vertical) is an option, and not a requirement. You use the z axis to get around roadblocks on the x/y plane, and then return to said plane.

I would chalk this up to quality of life bits, but this is actually the foundational part of any logistical puzzle. The speed of building something has little to do with your factory machines, but more to do with the ability to get material in and out of said factory. I am super cool with the concept of ‘mathing the crap out of something’, and that requires experimentation and the ability to modify things as you learn.

The z axis point in particular is important. Super Mario was 2D, most people played that. Super Mario 64 added a z axis, and exponentially added complexity to the game. Subnautica has a Z axis, but the entire game is predicated on simple movement. No Man’s Sky also has a Z axis, but there are no significant logistical hurdles… it’s primarily base building/architecture which is ‘snap based’, which makes it mostly decorative. Voxel games (think Minecraft) do a lot of work on the Z axis, but the pieces are snap & not finicky. The simplicity of the logistics (only minecarts) is amazing. Factorio, the grandfather and gold-standard, has a virtual z axis by applying tunnel and bridges.

I’ll share a picture from DSP.

While there is belt ‘magic’, I didn’t really do anything special here aside from click the start location and the end location. The larger concept here is that there is a “bus” of production, which itself is a really interesting concept I’ll get to in another post. The long and short of it is that DSP has a broad material chain (more options), rather than a deep material chain (more crafting steps). The net effect is a different type of toolbelt.

I’ll only briefly touch on the research tree, where you have a tree of growth, clearly defined from your first 30 seconds in the game. Alternate recipes are automatically unlocked, and should be exploited when you can find the extra material – they are always more efficient. You unlock crafting options, and you unlock character perks that improve performance (e.g. mine more efficiently, move faster, stack more things). The latter upgrades often have “infinite” upgrade options for those that want to expand their production chains across multiple star systems.

I’ve tweaked a few more bits in Satisfactory of late and used the Smart! mod to try and help in some parts. I’ve further moved forward and unlocked every milestone in tiers 7 & 8, which effectively means all the core bits are unlocked. I’ll get to that point in a bit.

At last point, I had automated everything but sulfur and uranium, that case remains. I did add Nitrogen gas to the mix, and ran a very long pipe to my main hub as a result. This was required to get some extra milestone bits done through Blenders (hard material + liquid/gas). I’ve reached a point where time and scale are the main issues. A Manufacturer may only create 1 item per minute and that takes a damn long time to build enough to do much of anything. I’ve resorted to just letting the game run for a couple hours while I do something meaningful IRL. That builds stock levels, which allows for more construction.

Which itself is a problem because every end state item requires hundreds of items prior and dozens of sub-steps. Even the “simple stuff” is hard. More rubber? Need an oil extractor, a half dozen refineries, water, and transport. A late game item is crazy, just look at Cooling Sytems.

The recipes above are base items. Across the world are Hard Drives, which are used on a 10minute timer to unlock alternate recipes, that use different materials to create an item. For example, you can smelt 1 iron ore to make 1 iron ingot. Or, you can use 7 iron ore, 4 water to make 13 ingots – which is 2x as efficient for ore, but 9x more expensive in terms of power. Almost every recipe has 1 or more alternate options, and your choices on usage will depend on the materials you have at hand. “Best” alternates are therefore relative, though I would say that anything that simplifies Aluminum production, removes screws, or copper is going to be a good idea, if only due to the simplicity offered.

These Hard Drives are placed in containers which are 90% of the time in some sort of deadly place – poison, toxic, or on a sheer cliff. Plus they require some material and/or power to open. There are a dozen or so “simple” ones, while the rest require late-game materials and major power requirements. The next effect is that these recipes are unlocked very late AND you are placing power poles everywhere, in case you need 300MW of power to open a container. I get the idea here, rewarding exploration. The randomness of the alternate recipe just plain sucks. There are 85 alternate recipes, and many of them you won’t care about. For the math folks out there, that’s ~15hrs of RNG research timegating. Or, savescum at the start of the 10 minute counter and reset if you don’t get what you want. YMMV.

In the fun space of this, is that I needed to build a new mini-factory to output 20 Reinforced Iron Plates. I had an optimization issue in the middle of my production line and needed to supplement. To get there, I needed 240 iron ore and 15 machines. It was a good test of the Smart! mod, which aided with the foundation + the layout of the machines with a couple keystrokes. Took me about 10 minutes to figure out all the ins/outs of the mod, but the larger construction effort was cut in half. “Simple” belt management was a breeze. Stacked belts (dual+ inputs) don’t work, think I’ll need blueprints for that.

Plan A

The next milestone is building nuclear plants to generate sufficient power. I am currently consuming about 60% of my power, so if I want to build a new factory that scales, I need much more power. That breaks into steps:

1. Collect and transport the uranium. It is incredibly toxic, and I need to ship a fair amount (~200/min) to a brand new plant.
2. I need to build said plant. That’s over 60 buildings, which is substantial.
3. Collect and transport the base material needed. Limestone, Iron Ore, Coal, Copper Ore, Sulfur, Water, Caterium Ore. At least there’s no aluminum required!
4. Process the waste into Plutonium Fuel Rods so I don’t have a nuclear wasteland. That’s a dozen more buildings.

That will build 5 nuclear plants at a sustainable level of production. Yet, also build it in a way that allows for future growth. 5 plants = 12,500MW of power. The final space elevator requires 4000 Nuclear Pasta. Generating ~10 of that per minute (so ~7hrs to fill) is about 80,000MW of power needed. So yeah. Scaling.

Plan B

To start Plan A, I need material. TONS of material. Fine enough, that will take time to generate. While that is happening, I want to do 3 more things:

1. Collect as many hard drives as possible
2. Collect Slugs / Power Shards for overclocking
3. Lay out power cables across the map.

Thankfully, all 3 of those are done in the same pass. There are 97 crash sites to explore, and I really only need 85. More than half have power requirements, so the power lines will be needed (and for the hover pack). Slugs are often near the crash sites, so that’s point 2 in the loop as well.

I’ve actually completed this step, which also means that for practical purposes the map is FULL of power lines. Hover Pack + Power Lines = easy vertical. All-told, this was about 4 hours of work to get through, with an external map to guide, and 3 runs for extra materials. Radar Towers tell you how many crash sites, but don’t tell you where. Now to continually research all these hard drives…

Plan C

Blueprints. I need many of them. They are small, but I can work with that. I cannot delete them, which is less fun (will work in Update 8 I hear). But to save the layout headaches I need:

• Refinery options (there are 4)
• Assembler
• Foundry
• Blender (3 input variants, 3 output variants – 9 total)
• Smelter
• Constructor
• Factory floor (to run belts below)
• Raised belt poles w/ power

These will be mostly lego blocks, and I’ll have to find a way to connect them together long term. I’ve got most created, but I need to actually test them to validate I can connect them.

The outlier is the Machinery, which has 4 belt inputs and I can only fit 1 per blueprint. I may just avoid blueprints here, but then again, I may create a below-ground belt fed one, and and an above ground version. Hmm.

So first things first, I’m on a hell of a bender for games with logistics. There’s a ridiculous dopamine hit when you solve a complex mathematical puzzle and I can use some of that due to IRL works stuff. Solving a 5 step chain of production to “perfect” balance is a crazy feeling.

I gave Satisfactory a shot about a year ago. It’s what you’d get if you put Factorio into first person. Or conceptually it is. What Factorio does extremely well is scale the logistical challenge. The first logistics chain is complicated and rewarding, and the next one needs that first plus another. It compounds the logistics and by the end you’re running hundreds of machines to make thousands (if not millions) of things. Dyson Sphere Program is as close as you’re going to get to Factorio in that regard, with a 3D 3rd person view.

Satisfactory takes that logistical challenge but does not handle scale well. And this is for multiple reasons, which can be seen as a boon or bane.

• The world is custom built, with every node places by developer. This means that you can’t do everything in one spot and will be forced to move. Which creates the next challenge.
• The world is designed to be explored and vertical. Logistics work best horizontally, and the tools to explore vertically are limited to ramps. A hover pack is unlocked very late, and has limitations in terms of high you can actually go. A ramp made of 40+ sections is quite normal.
• Transportation is very limited. Belts require no power and are lightning quick, but can quickly develop a “spaghetti” look to the world. Vehicles really don’t work well without roads, and also require fuel, a giant pain in the butt to coordinate (you won’t bother until you unlock oil). Trains are the ultimate transportation but are finicky to build and network. Plus, their vertical climbs are only 2:1, so that 40+ ramp becomes 80+ if you want a train on it.
• The blueprint function is limited to a 4x4x4 cube. With very few exceptions, that won’t work for any production chain.
• Merging and splitting is life. The tools to lay that out here only work 1 at a time. If I have 16 smelters trying to collect from a belt, I’d like to split to each one. Well, that’s at least 16 clicks, but more like 25 because the splitter function “bugs out” frequently.
• The field of view is limited in 1st person, meaning you can’t really build large. Maybe 4 buildings at a time.
• The largest change is that you cannot pre-fab buildings. If you want 16 assemblers, you need to carry the materials on you. In other games you can automate everything. DSP I had machines building hundreds of smelters for me (I needed thousands). In practical terms, this means that building a new factory requires a crap ton of planning and great inventory management. It’s math-ier.

The image above is a factory that uses 480 iron ore per minute to create 20 modular frames. There are 16 smelters, 25 constructors, and 16 assemblers required. It took about 2 hours to build and a few trips to fill my inventory of material.

In this image, I’m in my train station (2 cars long) and in the distance you can see the path I needed to create to get the train all the way up that mountain. Heck, you can just see the train too, if you squint a bit. Laying 2 stations, the path, and the track, took about an hour. A 1 way trip is 30 seconds by train, almost 5 minutes on foot. Trains rock.

Finally, this image is a “basic” aluminum factory of 240 bauxite, 120 coal, 240 water, 120 quartz, and 20 copper – that results in 60 sheets and 120 casings. There are 2 water extractors, 3 refiners, 1 smelter, 8 constructors, 4 foundries, and 2 assemblers. This factory is at the other end of the train path, and took close to 3 hours to build. The coal is close by. The quartz is halfway up the train path. The copper is at the other end of the train and I have to use belts to get it up there… close to 1500 pieces in length. This is an incredibly painful build. And next, is finding a way to get the quartz BACK to the starting point too.

The “good news” in all this is that I effectively only have 2 more types of material to collect – sulphur and uranium. The less good news is that those materials are rare, to the point where there are only 4 uranium nodes total on the map (I have ~20% of the map discovered now).

Scale

I am picking on the game here because the main issue with all logistics games is the transition from micro to macro. Satisfactory does a superb, insane, amazingly great job at the micro. You are quite literally dwarfed by these awesome machines. It’s a right maze to navigate and the scale of it all, and there’s a clear sense of joy when you click pieces together and the things whir into action.

Where the game struggles to transition, as most do, is the macro level where you need to juggle more things. You’re given transportation tools that allow some macro transportation, but to get that to work, or anything else, you’re stuck with the tools from the start. It’s like building a deck and then transitioning to building an apartment complex with the same toolbelt… sure, you can get it done, but damn it’s going to take a while.

This is a tooling thing. Let me craft 15 smelters with a drag of the mouse instead of 15 clicks. Let me configure them ALL the same with 2 clicks, not 30. Let me manage the Z axis with much better tools, like a scroll wheel or other key. Give me a global production screen!!!

These are quibbles about balance and optimization that are part of early access. I figure another 18 months or so of stuff before it launches… unless they want to add an entirely new set of tiers after nuclear. Worth a play if you’re into excel sheets that move.

This one is also on sale, and as a Canadian, I am obligated by law to play any game with beavers.

Take your standard city logistics planning game and throw in cyclical catastrophes and you have a decent pitch. I’ve followed this game for a while now as the genre has always been of interest. What’s here, in Early Access I should point, it a tough nut to crack.

First, the curve ball is simply that everything depends on water flow, and said water flow (which is an impressive mechanic I must say) goes through periods of drought. You are given tools to conserve and restrict water flows to maintain the life-juices. The tools are basic, and you will likely lose arable land upon each drought until you are well into the game. That effectively means that you know what you need to do, but for most of the game lack to the material to do so, which is quite frustrating. Aside from the first few minutes, the majority of the game will be spent played on max speed mode, as you’re always waiting for things to complete.

Your population of beavers is predicated on housing. They will breed and give birth, and beavers will die of old age. Compared to logistic games with limited populations, you will simply see them as metrics rather than investments. Population control will primarily come through thirst/starvation, which is a rather cold touch.

Production chains are only 2-3 deep (e.g farm, then cook, or log-board-resin) which helps with organizing work areas. There’s very little flat space, and everything needs a path to work, so it’s a bit of Tetris to get it all going. Power is generated either through water current, shame wheels, or wind, and everything outside of farming seems to need it. Logistically, two buildings that need power and that touch each other automatically transfer power, which makes for very interesting daisy chains of production.

Trees are of course the core resource of the game. Cutting and processing them is the foundation for everything, and you are given ample tools to manage this. Renewable oak forests a-plenty. Everything in the game is renewable, making it a quite ecologically driven game.

Progress is gated through a form of research, which operates in 2 phases. First is a very small increment that scales linearly until you unlock an Observatory which exponentially increases research points. The net effect is feeling starved until you reach a point where there’s simply too much. And interestingly, unlocking an item has very little bearing on being able to use it, as the material costs are massive for some later items. For example, the Mechanical Water Pump costs 5,000 research points (which is absurd as basic items cost 150) but even when you do have it, the material costs are so advanced it work take hours to produce, AND it takes 700w to power it, which is likely 100% more than you have at any given point.

In the interesting innovation space, your beavers get performance bonuses based on a plethora of quality of life features. Variety of food, lodging, and amenities have a compound increase in many aspects of the game. As the game is predicated on being efficient, this is a great incentive to diversify. This is directly weighted against your population numbers too. Plus, the mechanical beaver faction in unlocked when you reach a specific point threshold with the basic faction. That secondary faction has many micro-management options, plus trains.

On that point, logistics are a the true-end game component, and you will quickly learn that vertical stacking of storage is needed to save headaches and that anything you can do to save in “sprawl” will pay large dividends. The game does give tools to create self-sufficient divisions of the map, so you can have an industrial district, a farming one and so on. I found myself pausing the game and trying to build something innovative with platforms, stacks, stairs and so on.

Where this game is still trying to find a footing is specifically in the transportation department. You will continually fight sprawl because of the time lost moving things from one place to the other, which can only be done with beavers. Anytime someone is moving something is time when they are frankly not being productive. If there was a way to improve the amount of items a beaver can carry (notwithstanding trains in the second faction), then we’d be talking!

Realizing that this is a rather critical review of the game, I should point that this is a genre that is predicated on balance of specifics and the ant-farm mentality that ensues. There’s as much joy in setting up as there is in watching it actually work. Timberborn does a LOT really well, more than most games in this genre. It struggles, as many games do, with managing scaling of productivity. It’s certainly worth the price of admission, and your mileage will vary as to how long you stick with it.

Turtles all the way down!

Ok. Not even close. But The Wandering Village(Early Access and on sale) is clearly inspired by the concepts of the world being on the back of a giant turtle, an item explored in fantasy settings for quite a while.

In this game, you travel on the back of Onbu, a large creature whose back is flat enough to live upon. The size is standard, but there’s randomness to all the components left on the back. Trees and rocks grow, berry bushes, there’s grass and dirt, and finally 1-time structures that allow harvesting material but cost “trust” from Onbu. Aside from that limited space, this is straightforward city simulator where you need people to do things, to build things, to find more people and so on. Progress therefore is limited to a) the number of people you have and b) the list of things you can build, which gets me to…

Onbu is always moving, and you have some influence on the direction at given intersections. Each path takes you through a different biome, which affects the heat/humidity/poison of the air, requiring you to pivot to different manufacturing modes. Don’t enter a desert if you can’t grow cactus to create water, for example. Onbu gets hungry, tired, and sick… and your job is to manage that aspect through either the directing him to safe places, or feeding/curing him. Also, in each biome, you can see objects of interest that provide you basic resources, special resources (iron/sand), more people, or possibly research points. You need all of this, meaning you are always incentivized to take challenges.

The game adds complexity through layers of difficulty. More people increases their types of needs to keep them happy. More biomes means more types of food and water generation. Poison means lot of doctors and eradicators to prevent massive outbreaks. Aside from basic items, most research requires research points, which are extremely limited. Generally, the pace of increased difficulty is well balanced. Is is possible to make a choice that kills you?

Sadly the answer is yes, and it’s entirely predicated on research. There are items you NEED and items you WANT. You simply cannot survive a water biome is you don’t have the ability to collect and clean sea water, which itself required the ability to make glass from sand, which comes from a desert biome. The Glassblower is deep in the research tree and it really isn’t clear why you need it until it’s clear you do. No water = no crops, so you try fishing to make food… well it so happens that also requires research points. And that’s not discussing the items that are double gated – such as a wheat windmill and bakery, where you can entirely unlock one and be a couple hours from unlocking the next, making it useless. This can be addressed through a re-balancing of research to be biome specific and tiered. Instead of paying 3 +5 +5 points to unlock 3 different things, you pay 13 total to unlock access to all of them (still requiring time to research them).

The only other gripe I have is towards population needs for housing + decorations. There are 3 types of housing, with different population benefits (#): tents (2), huts(6), and cottages(4). The resource requirements for cottages are VERY high and non-renewable, making them a poor decision in every respect. It is cheaper, and provides more benefits in all respects, to build 2 huts than to build 1 cottage. Which ok, is easily fixed by swapping the population benefits. The decorations part though, it takes 15 research points to unlock the “good” ones. These points are extra rare and worth much more for survival. The net effect is that you will never place decorations, guess it’s a system to be developed further down the road.

Total time for a given playthrough is about 8 hours, which I think is quite reasonable, and I never found that I was “waiting” for something to happen, which is a very tough balance to achieve. Replayability is primarily through additional difficulty modifiers, or I guess trying for an optimized run where you are able to better plan from the start (e.g. people never need to walk home, but walk all the time for food). The ideas here are impressive, and it’s pretty clear that there are only 2 major patches left to go, which should mean “official launch” in late fall 2023. If you don’t get it now, it certainly will be worth it then.

I thought a bit more after my last post on the game, and came to the conclusion that further exploration was needed.

The largest driving factor here is that the dev team is 2 people, and what is here is frankly absurd given the resources at hand. I generally love small dev teams as the games are a direct representation of their passion, and Planet Crafter certainly hits that mark.

While I certainly highlighted it, I want to strongly state that the ‘issues’ with the game in it’s current state relate to balanced progress. The easy comparisons are games that have been polished to a high degree, putting the bar somewhat out of reach. And that risks are taken here means that some things will work, and others not.

Planet Crafter has effectively 3 phases, and the game dramatically shifts between them.

Survival

This phase is the smack dab start of the game, where you have no sources of food, water, or air, except for what you find. Every system is new, inventory is a massive pain in the butt, and you frankly are lacking all the tools necessary to move forward. This mode is the one that’s most familiar to players given the genre explosion. You have a very small base (for air), explore for seeds (for food), and need to collect the most basic of material to progress towards new tools.

This phase ends when you have the ability to generate water, which is near the 3 hour mark.

Exploration

This phase is the rough one. You now have the ability to stay alive, but progression is now limited through scale of operations. You absolutely need to explore the map to find iridium and uranium in order to build rockets (massive production increases) and to build power generation for machines. The balance in this part is really challenging, primarily because the things you need are so spread out. An ore extractor will get you some materials – but not uranium (or osmium).

The balance issue here is that you know what you need to do, but lack the material to do so. It’s also the phase where you learn that building a simple & door is the only way to effectively explore the map. I had a dozen+ little camp spots throughout the map. Progress slows down dramatically, and the RNG of blueprint/microchips shows its head.

The phase isn’t broken, it’s just jagged and has what feels like too many steps. This phase takes about 8 hours to get through.

Optimization

This phase is more weird than anything else. You’ve found a way to generate every resource reliably, you’ve been to every area in the map, and you’ve crafted at least one of everything. Given that progress is a math formula based on multiple aspects, you’ll focus on one and then another and then another. Progress is very slow, where you are the hiccup in the supply chain.

Now, in most logistic games, you end up with a hub of sorts that does all the things. That is true here, but getting there is another story. There’s an auto-crafter that automatically collects things from range to build another thing. What you end up with is a very large room with storage that stays within range of the crafter. You then hit a wall where you can’t craft something because the box is empty, then go out to collect said thing to fill said box.

Automation of that collection comes much later in this phase with Drones. The setup is very manual, and slower than you might think, but it does work.

From this point forward, the issue is a combination of time and scale. Time in that you are waiting to unlock more things, and scale in that you want at least 5 of every machine possible, including rockets. But I don’t need 5 beehives you may ask. You may not need the honey, but you need the insect generation.

Future

Functionally, the game stops providing “new things to do” at the breathable atmosphere stage – which takes ~20 hours or so to reach. You’ve explored every bit, crafted every item, and the world is green. The systems that remain past that point deal with complex organics, fish now, frogs soon.

Back to the original post on this, the game has a ton of rough edges, but the concepts here are pure passion. The majority of the quibbles deal with balancing in the exploration phase, and just plainly a lack of data to help make decisions. Once you get to the optimization phase and understand all the systems and have access to all the tools, the game turns into something much different. On the whole, it’s frankly amazing what’s here.

Came up on my list and I’m giving is a shot, Planet Crafter is a hybrid game in the survival/exploration/crafting genre. The “definitive game” of this genre is Subnautica, a rather impressive mish-mash of ambience and story, with crafting elements. Planet Crafter emulates this to a degree, but with the polish expected of an Early Access game.

Now, I generally avoid Early Access games unless it fits a certain set of criteria, typically focused on a small development team trying to iron out an idea. I really like Subnautica, and I like crafting games, so this hits the right marks. That said, if I am paying for Early Access, I will review it to a degree.

The concept here is that you are stranded on a deserted planet to serve out a prison sentence. You have some very basic tasks to complete in order to get a “foothold”, and the larger goal then turns to terraforming the planet. Now, planet in the general sense, as you’re really only given a single map to explore, which undergoes various points of transform over time. That map is quite large, even when you’ve got a ton of movement abilities available. It takes a long time to reach a point where you won’t starve/asphyxiate/dehydrate to death while crossing it.

There’s a very basic shelter that allows you to restore oxygen (which insanely always requires a door to be constructed), so that’s one part easy enough. Creating extra water requires a decent amount of progress, and frankly knowledge that it’s possible. Starvation requires growing food, which is simple enough. So with those pieces in hand, you can explore the world, collect minerals, build stuff to unlock more stuff to build and so on.

Progress is gated through a terraforming index, which is calculated through other milestones (heat, pressure, biomass, etc..), as well as random blueprints. The net effect is that it’s entirely possible to unlock the ability to craft items long before you have the material to do so. Further, these milestones are weighted so that progress is not linear, but more logarithmic. The game progresses quickly to begin, then there are wide swaths of frankly waiting for a number to go up. The balance of this progress is not necessarily broken, as much as it needs optimization.

The act of crafting requires things. Material does NOT stack, and there’s so much out there that you will end up with 2 dozen chests of things just to stay sane. This creates a back & forth process of collecting things, bringing them back to storage, and collecting more things. Movement and inventory improvements quickly become essential to your sanity. The lack of “world diversity” here also means that it feels, and is, time padding.

And creating things is what you will spend 90% of your time doing, in particular one mid-tier element that is used everywhere (super alloy). You’ll end up creating 5 or so of every item at any given tier (e.g. there are 5 tiers of heaters) in order to make those numbers move. There lacks some balance with regards to materials needed to construct, and energy requirements for said things to run. This becomes glaringly obvious as you enter the nuclear age and there simply isn’t any obvious renewable source of uranium. Again, balancing.

The thing I have not talked about is story, which frankly there simply isn’t much to discuss. There’s no discovery carrot, and exploration is driven by the need to find a specific material rather than the desire to see more. The risk of exploration remains relatively the same from start to finish, which diminishes any real reward as you’re always walking around with what feels like a sword over your head.

One piece I think that is important to mention is friction. These are design choices that impact systems and interfaces that are counter-intuitive. The flow between interfaces and menus is an example. The ability to easily understand information. The expectation here is that you start with a lot of friction and that you gradually reduce that over time. In that being proficient with the systems is based on player skill as much as the actual systems. The largest point of friction here is the system complexity/dependency and lack of tools to address. You need a scale of material to move forward, but inventory sizes are so small, and the near complete lack of logistics (drones come at end game, essentially after game completion) mean that you are stuck in minutiae rather than progress. Super Alloy Rods are important, and you need 9 ingredients to make it, and needs 49 base materials. Collecting that material takes about 20 minutes, no matter what point of the game you are in. Now, I realize that Planet Crafter is not a logistics simulator, but friction points such as these are not fun.

In the current state of the game, there are some rather interesting ideas, ideas that are not found in their totality in other games. However, split across multiple games, those ideas are significantly more refined elsewhere. It’s a bit like how a buffet is cool to try things, but if you want good Italian food, you go to an Italian restaurant. Increased content is certainly a big piece of this puzzle, but at the same time, there’s a balance/refinement pass required as well, in particular for the mid-game. It’s an interesting sandbox to play.