CONTAINS SPOILERS
This is my first time playing, and I've only experienced the game prior through watching twitch streams on day ~30ish prior to this update. I played until day 50. I mention a few times about looking up secrets. The secrets I looked up were how to enter the dark hole in the cave, how to enter the bunker, and places to dig up items like the EMF detector. I do feel like I cheated with the EMF reader, since it's right next to a POI, which I could have found without a guide had I more patience, and I probably would have found the keycard had I put more effort into investigating the bunker.
I enjoyed the game a lot. Discovering secrets was really fun and satisfying when there was some indication that a spot HAD a secret. It felt like putting a puzzle together. You have really good game design intuition and it shows through how addicted I was to the game. There was a few moments where I just stared at my screen in disbelief because of how well some events just flowed into the game.
Observations and feedback and incoherent brain dump about the game:
- The rep system is very powerful when you're at "Loyal", and I'd do my best to max it out asap if I was using the food decay and tolerance system. Would like to see some advantages and events that aren't just getting free food. Maybe make the rep scale non-linearly so it's easier to increase at low rep and harder to increase at high rep, since if you know what you're doing, you can max it out in a day.
- I bought the wall fixer thinking that I could use it to remove the cracks on the walls and floors of the base, which wasn't actually the case. Hopefully I can remove them in the future. There's also some non-removable grime on the base that I hope to be able to remove too.
- I built a gpu miner with 3 fans and many GPUs and it eventually overheated. I heard the explosions but didn't think anything of them since I've never heard it explode before and the puffballs make the same sound. Definitely my own fault for letting 8+ consecutive explosions go uninvestigated. I don't really understand why the fans exploded too though, it seems a bit punishing to lose everything but the rack when you overheat, since they both have large costs to obtain.
- It seems like the secrets and hidden items of the game are 30% discoverable naturally through regular play and hints, and the rest are completely hidden and only findable through spending a ton of time testing obscure things. Is that intended to be how the game will eventually release? Or will more secrets have some sort of hint/indication for how to find them? I'm not saying to make all the giga obscure super secrets have hints, I'd just rather not have to use a wiki to find half of what the game has to offer.
- Omega Kerfur trivializes half the gameplay prior to obtaining it, absolutely massive and vital upgrade that really enables the player to explore more. Maybe there should be some amount of maintenance or upkeep cost to having it? It's easy to get once you know the steps to do so, but I dont know if you're wanting to balance the game towards players having prior knowledge of stuff. Also the petting animation being so slow and drawn out feels weird and not as fun as stock kerfur. I look forward to replaying on a later update and trying to get like 10 of them.
- Kerfer pathfinding will get stuck on stuff I place in the hallways. If go to sleep and kerfur is set to patrol or return to me, it will smash into them and knock them over, which sucked when I had a hallway shelf holding all my tools.
- It's hard to tell how damaged I am. 100%-50% HP have the same look to me, but maybe this isn't how health works and I misunderstand. HP in general is hard to gauge, but I never really had a problem with dying unless it was explicitly my fault.
- I put like 10 cameras around my base, I finally caught an entity on one of them and was ecstatic. Would love to see more features involving cameras or other surveillance systems. Maybe an upgrade for a monitor dedicated to showing a cam-feed?
- I played without the funny setting nearly the entire time. Having watched streamers, I knew about maxwell and argemwell, so I'd type it in the console and look for them. I didn't realize that it was a funny setting only thing, so because it didn't respond with an error message, I just assumed that the 'go find maxwell' text had been removed. I dont really understand the purpose of the funny setting, since even with it off, a lot of the events I got were pretty goofy in their own right. Maybe you should indicate what the funny setting does so people who come in expecting the streamer's experience arent missing events and features they want to see. The only reason I didnt turn on the funny setting was that I thought it'd ruin/replace the scary events, which isn't the case.
- Going to the cave entrance and getting "I dont want to go in there" when I have my flashlight on, is sort of obtuse when the solution is just to be holding a light source. The only difference is that the flashlight is glued to Kel's head or whatever. I could just be unimaginative though, maybe add a baby idiot mode for people like me without a twitch chat to tell me everything.
- The day length setting got me confused and I played a bit on 50% thinking that it'd be 50% the normal day's length, but it was actually double.
- There is an entity on the southeast corner of the radar that moves in and out of radar range. If you have the noise alert and upgrade the radar speed too much, it will beep constantly when this entity is active because it's constantly detecting them go in and out of range rapidly. It still beeps constantly from this on slower radar speeds, but it's more tolerable.
- I lost the night vision goggles in the middle of the forest and never found them. A feature that helped you find or replace lost items, especially the one-per-file items would be nice.
- The metal detector is really weird to use, feels super inconsistent in a way that I dont know how to describe. I point it in a direction, get a white/green beep, go to that exact point on the ground, and it will be red and nothing buried.