Finished prologue and pulled the trigger to EA
Wow, someone put in some work! For sure! I acknowledged that the prologue was buggy but the concept of crafting and terraforming with the addition of conveyors drew me in. The EA is miles ahead of the prologue in content and balanced playability. That's not to say it is bug free (though some of those I've come to recognize and enjoy as the game's unique 'personality'). I think there is something here for everyone to discover and enjoy. I had my doubts, then I bought the EA... 11 hours later I still didn't want to stop playing because of the new discoveries and anticipation of what may be. Clearly, I am content with the purchase and look forward to where the game may evolve. Hope and excited to see the full release soon!!!

I played the Ocean world demo 6-8 months ago and recently tried the Eden world in Early Access. It's a mix of Satisfactory and Planet Crafter (more along the lines of the latter). Where it differs from Planet Crafter is that rather than terraforming the whole planet at once, you're doing small areas of it via buildings. But it's satisfying. The game shows great promise, with roughly 50% more content compared to the demo.

The current build ends at the final terraforming stage with a "work in progress" message. Trying to progress further reveals some incomplete features (like miners operating at 360+/sec while conveyors are limited to 240/sec). Despite these limitations, the game's development direction is exciting.

Suggestions for improvement:
* Warehouse automation needs work - currently impossible to fully automate some items since raw materials spawn on opposite sides of the map with no way to transfer goods directly between warehouses or via drones like other factory games.
* Graphene detection needs enhancement. As a critical crafting material, having to manually search for it before planning factories is cumbersome. An alternative could be allowing coal production from tree harvesting.
* Add visible radius indicators for climate/radiation control towers to prevent uncontrolled gaps from misplaced towers.

I'll say this first: This game has real potential, but it is clearly very early days and is a bit of a mess, both in design and gameplay balancing. With a LOT of polish, this could be a great game, but as of now, I don't feel like playing it again after "completing" it, due to the tedium.

The "automation" is not fluid at all, and I spent the first three quarters of the game simply making mass dumps of materials and picking them up when I need them, as there was very little logical throughput from lower to higher tier materials. The tech tree and progression unlocking based on constructing buildings or finding resources is a poor choice, as I often found myself missing key development buildings because I hadn't constructed something an hour ago that was now redundant.

There are a LOT of balancing issues with certain materials being way too easy to amass, and others being tedious, or their crafting components being completely arbitary and otherwise unused. It was very difficult at any point to get a "flow" of low tier resources into a meaningful amount of higher tier, as you would either end up vastly overstocked on some items, or needing way too much of only one specific one.

The premise is actually quite good. A mashup between planetcrafters and satisfactory. The balancing issues aside, there is a nice sense of progression in the game and those equipment upgrade feel especially good, such as when you first unlock power cells to fly your ship around, or batteries to better balance your energy grid. The concept of scattering resources around the map and in variour biome hazards is done adequately, but resource scarcity and balancing needs some work. I don't know why there are a hundred billion copper nodes as I only ever used one the entire game.

The factory building and terraforming is a mixed bag. Belts do not snap to a grid or machines, and it's very easy to get a tangled mess of belts and pipes if you aren't careful. I'm sure this is a feature of early access, but something really needs to be done about the snapping in this game and making interfaces easier to use.

The "drone" was an excellent idea, allowing you to sit in the base and remotely control a hovercraft to collect resources for you (within a small area). Vehicles are good, but really should be combined into one.

The game kept me playing for 17 hours, so there's definitely something there, but it's a long way off from being as enjoyable as satisfactory, the main gripes being the resource balancing and recipe progression. Come back in 6 months/a year and it might be good, if if you're like me and just want to experience a slightly different take on terraforming and automation, go for it.