I really wanted to like it after seeing peoples' comments but if I'm being honest, it does feel a bit like watching progress bars with interaction. Maybe the game just isn't my style of playing, so don't really take this too harshly, many other people enjoyed it. Regardless here's a bit of feedback I'd like to give:
- Search is oddly manual before auto-search and I would have preferred if it were continuous as other people have pointed out, however I do recognise that this makes autosearch much less useful.
- Some of the items have way too long waiting times and you kind of just do nothing, but this also makes the game somewhat idle-able so it has its own benefits.
- The sense of unfolding seems lacking and all I really felt like I was doing was watching progress bars. Progression-wise, this is a game jam game so it could probably be attributable to lack of time. However another thing in my opinion is the lack of indication of progress. You never know when searching matters or it doesn't or when you unlock new items or recipes until they simply randomly show up in your face which is disorienting. I do get this is probably more representative of what would happen in the real world, but even a small "Area searched: x / 1123330" or something would be nice.
- UI is somewhat odd on both collapsed and fullscreen: Obvious reasons for collapsed, but for fullscreen I feel like things are also a bit too spaced out which makes things hard to see.
- The ability to dismantle crafted items if needed, and show what boosts those constituent items provide. Often crafting things is almost a downgrade which I feel is counterintuitive, this could make for a nicer way to plan things.
Theme-wise, it feels like not much was really done and this could be easily applicable to any other game without having been inspired by the theme, maybe some sort of limit to what items you could carry with you to help you with tasks would be interesting?