2 people found this review helpful
Recommended
0.0 hrs last two weeks / 2,074.3 hrs on record (1,811.7 hrs at review time)
Posted: 7 Aug, 2022 @ 3:42pm

Early Access Review
A sandbox space survival game with strong emphasis on atmospherics physics simulation. Has a distinctive, somewhat cartoony visual style, but the realism runs deep beneath the surface. For example: gases expand when heated, which increases pressure in closed environments. The Wall Cooler unit is actually a heat pump, moving heat energy from an environment into the gas in the pipe it's connected to, and in turn you must deal with that heat in some way, such as by storing it for later use, or radiating it to the environment once it's hotter than that environment. And if that environment is a planet like Vulcan (which gets over 666 °C at high noon), that's a tall order indeed.

It's very much a wide-open sandbox, a software toy. There aren't any specific goals (yet?), so you can take your time and simply survive, tinker with systems, try to automate them with logic control (which includes an assembly-like programming language). Terrain is procedurally generated and fully manipulable, and teeming with ores for mining. The ores must then become ingots to be useful; the early-game Arc Furnace is straightforward to use but only deals with simple metals, but you must master the Furnace to make alloys, requiring you to achieve specific pressure and temperature conditions in the chamber, which can be done with any level of sophistication from manually feeding volatile/oxite ices into the chamber to make ignitable fuel, to fully automated systems that you design.

The game has been in continuous, active development since it was publicly released in late 2017. The devs remain in contact with the community, and the community helps each other out as we ride through various updates. I've been playing since early 2018 and the game has matured a lot since then, and shows no signs of slowing down.
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