I actually really enjoyed this game, so I figured I should leave some feedback about my experience.
Things I didn’t like:
I want the autocrafter to interact with more materials
As soon as I saw the autocrafter my immediate thought was that it’d be a great tool to automate recycling. I could add a job for crafting refined scrap, and then a job for creating metal. I expect the autocrafter to place refined scrap into the recycler and put it back in the inventory. Pretty much the same interaction as farms and smelters.
I also thought it’d be really useful for managing my water supply. It could take water from my rain dishes and place the water bottles in the pump.
As it is, the autocrafter is basically useless except for managing my farm (which it can’t do since I’m constantly refilling water manually anyway). And it’s also can craft lots of roads and metal in bulk, which isn’t really that helpful either.
Once i realized I couldn’t really automate anything, I just turned off the game since I didn’t see anything else worth doing.
Rain dishes and pumps don’t behave how I’d like
I expect the water management to behave like power management. I expect rain dishes to collect water (like nuclear reactors with energy) which gets stored automatically in pumps (like batteries). When it didn’t, I figured I might need some kind of connector like the spigot, but that just pulls water out. So then I thought maybe I’d have to use the auto-crafter, which doesn’t work either, as seen in the feedback above.
Also why does the rain machine just throw a bunch of water bottles on the ground, that’s kinda weird.
The drilling machine never feels worth it to use
The drill machine is so slow and so hard to turn that I’d rather just take some air canisters and the buggy to collect rocks and ore. Idk how it could be improved, since it already has a free air supply, free storage, and unbreakable tools to mine with, but it’s really not fun to use. If the controls could be improved somehow it’d be my favorite thing though.
coming back after writing the rest of this actually I wonder if just making it wider would help? I think my main issue was that I’d always feel like I was on a resource or a rock, and it just wouldn’t get collected, and i had to do a super slow turn to try and get it again. if it was easier for it to just grind through two tiles at once that might help avoid the constant backing up and turning which was why i hated how slow it was.
I want to be able to disconnect certain rooms/objects/switches from their surrounding easier.
For example I want to have lights that turn on/off using the daylight sensor. In order for this to work though, the light can’t be touching any other part of my base since it receives a connection. I can make it work, but it’s not as nice looking as I’d like.
Portable batteries to recharge machines would be useful
I know i know, I should watch my fuel. But pushing back a machine 200 tiles sucks, so being able to somehow carry energy to the car to refuel it would be really nice.
I never used flashlights
I didn’t feel that the flashlight offered me much more visibility that just walking around in the dark. And it drains so fast and breaks your suit entirely when it runs out, so I never turned it on.
Things I liked
The energy system felt balanced
I was never annoyed by energy. When I started running out I was like oh man, better learn how switches work and reorganize my base to take advantage of them. Whoops places all my windmills too close, let’s go find a plot to make a farm. Oh I have all these nuclear reactors with infinite energy but I definitely still feel the loss of my solar energy during the night. I should add some wind power and a bunch of battery storage.
It always felt like the problems weren’t arbitrary and the solutions I wanted to try made sense and actually worked.
Every resource felt useful
I wanted to collect everything for some reason. There wasn’t anything I just wanted to ignore and never pick up
Unlocking recipes is always good
Not much to say here except the recipe progression felt fine.
Checkpoints every day
I know some people like the whole don’t starve or hardcore minecraft experience. But I died once after running out of air, and I was really dreading that all my progress would be lost. Luckily it was only a few minutes because of quicksave. If there was permadeath and I lost 23 days of progress, I would probably have just uninstalled the game because I wouldn’t have the patience to grind through collecting all those resources again.