I picked this up on Steam a while back when it was still in beta. Had problems getting it to run, and the storyline and quests were incomplete. But a couple months ago I saw it had been released Nov last year and decided to give it another go. I am glad I did, the game is a blast.
There is a multiplayer aspect which I haven’t tried yet, and I think I still have quite a bit of the single player game to go through, however I am really enjoying this game and now have 170 hours in it.
Storyline is set in the future where earth and mars has sent people on a ship to populate a distant planet. The ship apparently hits something, a lot of people get into the escape pods before it crashes, and land all over the place.
You start by trying to find people from the other escape pods, each pod has at least a couple people that give you quests. Eventually there winds up being separate Earth and Mars main camps (your in the Earth one) because of tension between the two groups. You eventually wind up building your own Earth camp and trying to repair the relationships between the two groups. That’s about where I’m at right now.
Cool aspects of the game:
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You can farm about 10 different minerals/metals (bronze, iron, aluminum, petroleum, etc.). You don’t spend the majority of your time digging, but you do have to dig up enough material to build stuff with.
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You have to build your own base camp, and can enlarge it twice. There’s power supplies, different medical buildings, etc. You can assign the colonists to different tasks like guarding, farming, repairs, etc.
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Eventually you’ll have to build a monorail system between the Earth and Mars camps. So don’t build your earth camp halfway across the map or you’ll need a TON of track bits. Of course if your willing you can do it…
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You can put down some soil and fertilizer and grow your own plants. There’s a lot of recipes for different foods that can be made. I’m not sure on the aspect of making colonists work on your farm yet, if it has to be in range of your camp, etc. I am thinking about making a top floor of my camp out of dirt and setting up a farm up there and see what happens.
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There’s hang gliders and a few other transportation type things, but the really fun bit is, you can make your own motorized vehicles like motorcycles, cars, planes, and boats. Somewhat spoiled by the fact that its very hard to drive through heavily forested areas without hitting trees, and the desert type areas are very hilly and its hard to drive up hills in them. Still cool though, you have certain parts you need to create to put in your vehicle (engine, seats, wheels, etc), but other than that, you get a three dimensional grid and can build your vehicles pixel by pixel out of any material you have. Not sure if the weight/durability affects it (is a wooden car lighter/less durable than a steel one?). There’s some pre-designed vehicles if you don’t want to go through that. I’m thinking about making a car shaped like a giant toilet bowl…
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Base building is a lot of fun. You have a basic oval shape to build in, but it’s pretty big and you can build floors, walls, etc, by the pixel like you can with vehicles. I started mine with wood walls before I noticed creatures attacking it and destroying bits of the walls, so I went with Steel for the bottom wall and copper for the top wall. Not sure what to use for the 3rd floor (going to make it a farm), but the 2nd floor I am making out of glass. Since it takes 20 units of sand to make 1 unit of glass, I had to dig all the sand off a couple miles of beach to make enough. The second floor is going to be the living quarters, I’m going to put the beds up there, chairs, wardrobes, etc.
The game’s not perfect, the devs have said they’ve stopped work on it to make another game to get some money coming in. They do want to come back to this game and build It up some more, but it’s basically finished and completely playable from what I’ve experienced in my 170 hours. I’d also like to explore the multiplayer mode at some point and see what that’s like, so hopefully some dopers will pick it up and we can explore the world together (or fight/compete with each other, not sure how multiplayer works).