If I were to review this game today, this is probably what it would look like.

[ValhallasAshes]

Played in sandbox.

I'll start off by saying that it's not bad. It actually has potential and I look forward to seeing how it develops. I don't regret the money I spent. It's just that I can't recommend it yet.

So why can't I recommend it. Quite frankly, the game feels like a mess. Not with stability or anything like that. In fact, it's only crashed on me once. My problem is with the combination of the economy, research, and progression. This game is a micromanagement nightmare sometimes. Here's a tip, First thing you should research before anything else: Auto-repair. Just get it. Dev's, here's an idea, why don't make that enabled by default. Why do I sound annoyed by this one? Because the breakdowns and maintenance in this game are just plain excessive. Things break almost as soon as you build them.

Try this, go in game build some solar cells and click the fast-forward button

(or I should say normal speed because you WILL spend 90% of your time in the fastest mode. That's how slow this game is and I'm almost always the guy who spends all their time at normal speeds because most games are too fast. I love a slow burn. So if I'm saying normal is too slow, then it's beyond slow for most people.)

And just watch as they fall apart within seconds. The amount of times I've built something in this game, only to watch them break down so shortly afterward as to make me say out loud "how is it already broken, I only just built it", is an ever present problem in this game. And as soon as you end up with even a small number (relatively speaking) of machines on the board, you'll quickly find yourself bouncing around constantly fixing things that keep breaking down. Don't waste your time. Just save yourself the headache and get auto-repair as soon as you start your game.

Resource Nodes:
Why are nodes so low on resources. I swear the resource count of nodes are ridiculously small. Oh yeah, I forgot to mention, resource nodes are finite. At first, I was like "ok, fair enough, not of biggest fan of finite resources, but not the first time I played that type of game". So I rolled with it. But seriously, these nodes feel like Command and Conquer small. In this type of game, when you have finite resources, they should at least last a good amount of time. Multiple hours under full extract. That's why games like Factorio and Dyson Sphere Program work so well, because while the resources are finite, you're not spending all your time just looking for more resources. In my game, I went though the effort to build a "proper" factory with inputs and outs. Putting extractors on the nodes and laying track to 4 huge bulk bins. Feeding those into regoliths that then sorted them into 1 bulk bin for each major resource. Then I started building the first tier of productions, starting with bricks, then aluminum and so on. Let's put it this way, I hadn't even finished building the first tier of resource manufacturing chains before the nodes I built extractors on started running dry. I couldn't believe it. I thought the whole premise of this game was to mine the moon because it's supposed to be rich in resources, but I'm constantly running out of... well... everything. So why is humanity wasting it's time mining the moon? I wasn't even building all that excessively and I've carved out a lot of the underground, so finding additional resource nodes is not a trivial affair given how obnoxiously expensive conveyor belts are. Which leads into my next issue.

Economy:
Who the hell balanced this game? All this work to eek out a few thousand of any given resource before running out, requiring really expensive conveyors that can only be paid for by filling contracts, but many of these contracts pay so little as to be insulting and will bleed you out of resources so quickly it's not even funny. One tip, just ignore any contract asking for 1000+ of any base resource. It's never worth the price they're offering and will take you far longer to locate and extract replacement resources . I know there's supposed to be an economy of scale, but these contract prices for base resources are way too low given how barren your "cave" is, relatively speaking. Do yourselves a favor. Balance your production to rely solely on solar and batteries. Then find an ice node (the only node that doesn't seem to disappear in the blink of an eye) and use that to make fuel. Fuel is about the only and most consistent low effort, decent return product to sell through contracts. Then use your money from that to pay for your belts. Anything else is just a waste until you can get to tier two resources, but so many of those rely on rare earth minerals you would have to be crazy to sell because again, you need them. Such as for repairing your machinery that keeps breaking. You know the more I think about this, the more I realize this game really does not seem to want to scale at all.

Here's an example to put the interplay between the weakness of the nodes combined with the ridiculousness of the economy into perspective. You find these resource nodes. But many of them only have resource counts of 10 or 20 thousand units of regolith. That regolith has a whole bunch of one to two percent concentrations of everything (except slag) and one really good concentration of a major resource, like iron, silicon, titanium, or aluminum. But that so-called "high" concentration is only about 40-60% depending on the resource. So out of that (we'll round it to 10k for easy math for demonstration purposes) 10,000 regolith, we only get about (split the difference) 5,000 of said resource in the form of oxide. We then send that resource to the refinery that then turns that oxide into an "ingot" at a 3:1 ratio. That means that 10,000 node that became 5000 of an actual resource, has now become a grand total of only 1,666 units of an actual usable manufactured good. Only to watch that measly amount of hard fought resource disappear in the blink of an eye to a contractor ripping you off for literal pennies on the dollar just so you can afford the literal hundreds of thousands credits to build a few conveyor belts for the next resource you need to advance your site development. We're talking contractors demanding 500 units for a measly 100k when the conveyors you need to pay for cost almost double that, resulting in your resources and money constantly disappearing unbelievably quickly. Are you kidding me?

For comparison, remember when I mentioned ice veins were the only nodes to not disappear in the blink of an eye. That's because ice nodes have resource counts of almost 200k. The ones on my map were sitting at around 183,000 units with a 60% ice concentration. That should put into context why I said to focus on selling fuel to finance your credit needs.

Remember when I said my nodes resource were disappearing in a blink? That's because I was designing my factory around saturating a 150 unit per minute conveyor line. That's only tier 2 on the conveyor tier list. There are 5 tiers. Yet I've exhausted these nodes before they could even justify the conveyor costs that were incurred to build the infrastructure at just tier 2. I know what you're thinking now, why don't you just dig out more. I did. But there's only so many nodes and I've already ploughed through half of them. Oh, and you know that "sandbox" mode the game claimed. There are limits. Seriously, I've already hit the wall. So anyone thinking of quoting dory by saying "just keep digging", you're in for a rude awakening. You are going to run out of resources, fast and totally and your game will grind to a sharp halt.

The eco in this game is just really bad. If you're a new player, you may find it ok. It's actually pretty easy to balance the initial requirements to survive the first year. Just get enough solar and batteries and you're set. But if you're a player who's experienced with these types of games (like Factorio, Dyson Sphere Program, Surviving Mars, Satisfactory, Anno 1800 etc) and habitually builds for scale, instinctively starting by building a strong foundation to build off of, you're going to find this game really limiting and frustrating surprisingly fast. Because it just "stops". That's they only way I can describe it. It grinds to a halt so quickly. It just feels all wrong.

Research:
OK.. I get that research is supposed to evolve your gameplay over time, but do you really need to put every single thing in research as it's own separate research listing. This right here is one of those things that is so pedantically itemized that it feels like a padding mechanism. Where most games would at least give you one research tier that you would have to research but that one research would give you everything you need to at least get you started. But no, not this game. Just to get started, you have to research every single little thing, no matter how obnoxiously mundane. So instead of a basic research that unlocks all starting living accommodations in one research, what you have to do in this game is research beds (that's right, the thing people have already been sleeping in on earth for hundreds of years, has to be specifically researched before you can build one on the moon), a kitchen, a dining table and any of the other innumerable useless time suckers added to this tree. I could've understood having individual research for the ice harvester, melter, oxygen producing machinery, climate control etc, but you want us to research a bed? really? There comes a point where I'm going to call you out for not respecting my time.

Colonists:
You know, I get they're going for the whole Surviving Mars mechanic, but this mechanic is so not fleshed out yet that it just doesn't really feel fair to evaluate it yet. But I do look forward to seeing what you do with it as I was a fan of this mechanic in Surviving Mars. One thing I do find a little funny though, is there is virtually no way to make a "steady" income in this game. What I mean by that, is I have yet to find a way to make money passively. IE, all money is earned by you having to proactively fulfill contracts. Yet colonists all seem to have a wage that has to be paid passively at recurring intervals. So basically, if you have colonists, this is not a game you will be able to walk away from, as many of us who play these types of games sometimes do after building a production chain then walk away to eat or visit loved ones while the production chain populates the economy you're feeding. While I do feel having colonists having a wage makes sense, it also feels very counter intuitive to the way the rest of the gameplay mechanics currently works. And this where I'm going to refer back to that failure to scale remark I made earlier and liken it to the auto repair research. On a small scale, with only a few colonists, that wage will seem reasonable at first. But at scale, with lots of colonists (after all, many of your machines require multiple colonists to operate efficiently or even to hit baseline rated metrics), those wages will quickly spiral out of control requiring the player to constantly find contracts to fill just to keep their head about water because there is no "auto-repair" equivalent to give the player any kind of steady income to cover those costs.

Contracts:
As alluded to earlier. Most of them are crap and while on the whole it's mostly ok, it quickly becomes tiresome to constantly have to stop what your doing to go sift through the lists to find a contract to fill and wait for it to finish to get the money you need to buy more conveyors. Seriously, why can't I just make my own conveyors and drones? I do have one major gripe with the contracts though. If I take a contract, and I fill 90% of it, shipping multiple loads of goods only for the contract to fail simply because of "time" (I had the goods, my drones just couldn't fill the transports in time), I find it wholly unacceptable for the contract to fail, take all the goods I transported with no payment, and then to add insult to injury, charge me a fine for it too. That one royally pissed me off. There is not a business anywhere that would accept a customer taking thousands of product without payment due to a technicality of time. You could've had the contract pay out what was delivered at current or reduced market rates. You could've returned the goods. But taking the goods, not paying for them and then charging me a fee on top it of was infuriating beyond belief. You need to fix that.

I could write more, but these are the main points that really pushed me to not recommend the game. Especially when there are already games that do this kind of gameplay so much better. The Crust does have potential to be a good game, but it doesn't really do anything new, has a bad habit of needlessly disrespecting the players time by dragging things out that really shouldn't be and the eco balance is just plain awful with no scalability. And quite frankly, the game's boundaries are so small and confining that I would consider it a stretch of the truth to say this game has a "sandbox" mode. Sandbox modes are supposed to be boundless. You're game isn't. And if it's not boundless, it's supposed to be endlessly sustainable. Which again, your game clearly isn't. Finite resource nodes along with finite boundaries make that notion all but impossible.

Look, I love these types of games and I still have a lot of hope for this one. But in it's current state (even acknowledging it's early access state), I can't recommend it, yet. It just doesn't do enough to stand on it's own as a worthwhile option.

The following sentence I would not have put in the review as I generally try to avoid highlighting competing products in reviews. I only mention it here to give context to the kinds of games The Crust will be compared to. Especially when compared to something like say Dyson Sphere Program, which is also in early access, is a much better game, actually is a sandbox even though it also has finite resource, but it's also considerably cheaper than The Crust. That's your competition. That's who you're going to be compared against. I don't say that to drive people away. I say that to put your game, what it offers and it's price into it's appropriate context.

________________________
Additional Feedback added 7/28/24:

After playing around with some more mechanics I didn't get a chance to work with before I posted the above feedback, I have more feedback to add.

Conveyor Belts:
I stand by what I said about the frustrations of how expensive belts are, but I realized that my initial feedback could come across as a little too negative despite my claim the game is good and has a lot of potential. So I want to start this post with a couple positives.

Disregarding the costs, whoever programmed the conveyor belts in this game did a fantastic job. In some ways it's better than Factorio's belts and even gives Dyson Sphere Program a run for its money when it comes to flexibility. I was especially impressed that you could actually run two down pipes overlapping parallel in-line and have them come out the ground with the correct resource. Most games I've tried to do this with including Factorio (It's been years since I played Factorio, so things might have changed) couldn't do that. Usually conflicting out. And Dyson Sphere Program (last time I played) didn't even bother trying undergound belts at all, opting instead to using stackable conveyor belts (Satisfactory does the same thing). So to see overlapping in-line underground belts/pipes working as the player intends really surprised and impressed me. To be honest, I found this on accident, because I was well trained by other games not overlap underground belts in parallel, I didn't realize I had accidentally done it until I was looking over one of my sections, noticed I had done it, and was shocked to see it working the way I had intended. Making me go, wow, I can do that in this game? Nice!

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ValhallasAshes/screenshot/2461864384097441237/

I also really liked the pass-through ports on things like refineries that allowed you to place machines right next to each other, that would in other games, completely block an output, but in this game, you can run a conveyor out a slag port and directly into the another machine sitting right up against it with no gap and have the slag "pass through" that machine or even multiple machines after until you hit the end of a row and have one outlet for all the machines slag outputs. I really like how this was implemented. The whole time playing I was wondering what that input was for. Now I know it's a slag pass-through port and it came in really handy.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ValhallasAshes/screenshot/2461864384097441006/

I really am impressed by the conveyor belt implementation in this game. It actually ranks up there among the best implementations I've seen. Well done!

Music:
I just wanted to say, I really like the music in this game.

Expeditions:
I have to say, I'm really liking these. The discoveries. The pieces of story. Brings a lot of life to the moon (oddly enough).

Ok, now that I've said that, time to continue on with additional less glowing feedback.

Mobile Drilling Rig:
I finally managed to find and use the MDR and after having experimented with it, I am a little less concerned about running out resources. The MDR brings in a lot more resources than the starting nodes do, which is reassuring to an extent, but I do find it a bit limiting at the same time. I know this sounds weird so bare with me. The problem is there is no real flexibility in the system. How do I say this. It's like instead of using a scalpel, you're using a shotgun. Let me elaborate.

Take a look at the above image of the refinery stage of my factory. Notice how there's 5 multi-regoliths. This is what I was meaning about building a strong foundation. The way this was originally designed to be used, was to have one input of each resource rich regolith. In other words, Aluminum heavy regolith went in one input, silicon in another, iron got it's own and so did titanium. The fifth one in the middle was for misc input. Basically all the slag heavy rock wall crap was put in there by the drones. This basically ensured that the factory, even though it was always getting "mixed" regolith with widely varied concentrations, the output would always be a fairly even spread of the needed resources. The MDR breaks this. Totally. Now the nice thing about this setup was even though the MDR can't really be used in a way the ensures a full even spread of all needed resources, the factory doesn't really care what input comes from where, it will still refine and distribute correctly. The problem comes in the form of too much of one resource and not enough of another and if not watched, can cause the whole factory to stop when one input fills up too much.

So I scanned a lot of the area (really like this mechanic by the way) and picked a spot that gave a little bit of everything. I was basically getting about 16-20% of each resource and only about 33% slag. Not bad. First couple loads bringing in tons of regolith. I'm feeling pretty good and a lot of my concerns about resources were starting to ease. Then I saw it. After only a couple loads I'm already seeing the spot I'm mining losing color and going grey. My truck isn't even upgraded and is only on it's second load and already the resources are drying up.

Now here's my conundrum with this. It's bad enough that the MDR is a shotgun approach to resource gathering given the spread of resources. But now the same complaint I had about resources drying up in the cave is being repeated on the surface? So what's the next thing that goes through my head. Oh just build another 3 garages and 3 MDRs and have each one work in a different mineral rich area, responsible for a different resource. Solved right? No. Why? Because you CAN'T build another garage. Which means you only have one input and everything is only processed in the order it is received. So if your machinery breaks down because belts are clogged with iron, you can't just bring in a load of silicon down a different track because there is no alternative input. And because iron was fed first, your factory has to work through that regolith first before it can get to the other resources unless you start tearing down bins, rebuilding them and telling your drones not to fill it with the crap that's all over the ground. This is a terrible design choice. We need to have more control over our inputs. The way regolith is implemented right now, is a cool idea and does make sense from a mining point of view, but the factory simply doesn't have enough input control to make this system work long term. Eventually, it will clog up unless the player is always on ball watching the inputs at all times. You think slag is the only thing your factory can choke on? No, it can choke on anything given long enough with your attention focused elsewhere. I literally just had my factory shut down due to too much iron intake while I was focused elsewhere building an array of rare earth mineral refineries.

The bulk regolith input system needs further development to give more control to the player as to what, where and when regolith gets processed.

Money and Motivation:
Ok, this where I have to ask the big bad question. This the same question I always ask of every game of this type I play. What's my goal? What am I striving for? What's my motivation to continue with all this busy work? Because I can tell you, if it's just the contracts, that's not enough. If it's to just accumulate as much money as possible, that's not enough. And I sure as hell don't want this game's sandbox premise to simply be sitting in contracts all day sifting through offers to fill, just to increase a gold count. And honestly, I find it pretty immersion breaking that I can build my own factory equipment, storage containers, power generators, batteries and whole bunch of complicated crap, but for some reason, making a belt is beyond my capabilities requiring purchase with money. Like starting the game with the ability to build solar panels and batteries, but a bed is too complex a task without research. Or how a dining table (literally just a work surface on legs) is somehow too complicated for my poor wee brain to manage without going to school.

I get that you have a story campaign, and I do intend to play that and enjoy it. But the mode that's going to keep me coming back is the sandbox mode. The free form mode many of us play to chill and have fun. But we still have to have something "interesting" to aspire and work towards. In Factorio, that goal was to build a space ship to escape the planet. In Dyson Sphere Program it was to build a Dyson Sphere and now they have an additional layer of friction coming from an AI enemy. Anno 1800 managed to avoid needing a specific end goal, but that was because of the sheer breadth and variety of content on offer between multiple stories, quests, and always ever higher heights, challenges and complexities to explore. So I have to ask, when I'm done with the main story, what is going to be my driving force to play this game. It can be anything, but it needs to be compelling. Why am I here? Why am I on the moon? Why am I mining this rock and for what grander purpose? It can be anything, such as acquiring the resources needed to build an arcology on Earth or something. But if it's simply to get resources to fill contracts to fill your bank balance, it's not enough. That can be done at the very beginning of the game while having built nothing. And trawling through the contracts gets really boring, really fast. There needs to be something more. Something grand. And it needs to be something you have to advance through the manufacturing tiers to achieve. You've got the core concepts and gameplay. What you're missing is that driving force to keep people coming back.

___________________________________________________
Some additional quality of life features I would like to see added to the game:

1: Blueprints. This one is a big one.

2: When "filling" contracts, can I please get a button that just puts as much as will fit of the resource I've currently selected into the ship I've currently selected. Constantly fighting that fiddly slider has become really annoying and makes process of filling contracts take far longer than it feels like it needs to be.

3: Why do we even have different shuttle sizes? The only one worth using is the base one. The bigger ones don't offer anything to justify they'er obnoxiously higher price tag over the base 1000 credit one. Especially once you realize that it's far more efficient to just build more landing pads. With just a couple extra pads you can move the same amount just as fast for far less money than the bigger pods offer. I'm guessing this is just placeholder, but there needs to be at least some "impression" of the concept of "bang for buck". Right now, their prices are so over the top expensive compared to what they offer, they make them pointless and a literal punishment for any player who uses them with no upside. Meaning they don't justify their existence.

[Alukat]

90% times 3 speed and complaining it's a micromanagement nightmare sometimes... at some point there's simply so much to do that you no longer want to run times 3 speed....

[ValhallasAshes]

Yeah, it does seem to go from one extreme to another with micromanagement.. I'm probably missing something here so I'm gong to try a few more things.

[ValhallasAshes]

Ok, after playing around more with the expedition system, I literally just found the MDR. This is going to require time for me to experiment with to figure out how this is meant to be used and looks like it might go a ways to solving my resource issues. I still think the starting nodes are way too small, and I really don't like the current economy, but give me some time to experiment with this.

[motorbit]

i think a lot of the op is spot on, though i do not agree with everything.

some of my own thoughts:
-resource richness should scale with distance to the entrance
-underground map could be larger
-ore collection from the outside could be better: allow me to build outposts and set up automated transport routes with haulers
-reoccurring contracts: make contracts that require me to deliver certain wares periodically

generally, a game about automation should allow more automation and less meaningless busy work. things i do should matter more then just get me the next brief injection of money, juggling a hand full or resources or prevent science waste for a few minutes.
and yes: the game is to slow. pause and 3x, thats all i ever use.

[Lothos]

my biggest problem is the lack of building area given that your limiting factor will eventually be the speed of a belt. i have so much regolith coming in from my single MDR i cant process it fast enough even though i split the output to 2 belts coming out the elevator below. add to that the stoppages due to too much slag, silicon, or iron in the regolith and its frustrating.

A second issue that has greatly risen up is my power demands on my solar system. i was doing fine for a long long time and now i need like 5x what i have already built. again real estate is an issue.

Contracts need to be searchable by item you wish to trade too. same with the market for buy/sell

[Razguul]

Agree with OP. Well said. Hope devs read it.

[Morvoldo]

I agree with all you said and Personally i think this needed to be in Beta stage before it was released to buy as their are so many game breaking bugs, Like research, Money making, resource gathering, Keeping Colonists alive when they just suddenly die for no reason or a room will run out of Oxygen even though you have enough, ofc the Alarm don't tell you which Room. So many things and The Story don't give you enough time to even bloody fart let alone micromanage everything that is going on, you want to research to you can rescue colonists, Tough we wont give you enough points and We wont tell you that you need to make Components and computer bits to install them, No we wont give you enough money from contracts to buy Points to research LMAO this game is good OR would be good if it was just worked out better. AND LETS NOT FORGET THE CONSTANT CRASHING TO DESKTOP and if lucky having all your saves and autosaves get corrupted so its a new game start for you. Oh and having the ability to Tell a drone what you want it to do would be awesome, as the do this job first command don't do jack.

Forgot to mention the most Important thing in this game....POWER WTF please fix it so we know what and how much to use as whats the point in all these batteries, they do absolutely Jack. you are always under powered no matter how many NRG or batteries you have and only get power in the day time from the only source... Solar LMAO its a Joke.

[Tekcruzer]

OP was spot on +10

This game has so much potential but the overlooked basics are dragging it down.

[ValhallasAshes]

After playing around with some more mechanics I didn't get a chance to work with before I posted the above feedback, I have more feedback to add.

Conveyor Belts:
I stand by what I said about the frustrations of how expensive belts are, but I realized that my initial feedback could come across as a little too negative despite my claim the game is good and has a lot of potential. So I want to start this post with a couple positives.

Disregarding the costs, whoever programmed the conveyor belts in this game did a fantastic job. In some ways it's better than Factorio's belts and even gives Dyson Sphere Program a run for its money when it comes to flexibility. I was especially impressed that you could actually run two down pipes overlapping parallel in-line and have them come out the ground with the correct resource. Most games I've tried to do this with including Factorio (It's been years since I played Factorio, so things might have changed) couldn't do that. Usually conflicting out. And Dyson Sphere Program (last time I played) didn't even bother trying undergound belts at all, opting instead to using stackable conveyor belts (Satisfactory does the same thing). So to see overlapping in-line underground belts/pipes working as the player intends really surprised and impressed me. To be honest, I found this on accident, because I was well trained by other games not overlap underground belts in parallel, I didn't realize I had accidentally done it until I was looking over one of my sections, noticed I had done it, and was shocked to see it working the way I had intended. Making me go, wow, I can do that in this game? Nice!

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ValhallasAshes/screenshot/2461864384097441237/

I also really liked the pass-through ports on things like refineries that allowed you to place machines right next to each other, that would in other games, completely block an output, but in this game, you can run a conveyor out a slag port and directly into the another machine sitting right up against it with no gap and have the slag "pass through" that machine or even multiple machines after until you hit the end of a row and have one outlet for all the machines slag outputs. I really like how this was implemented. The whole time playing I was wondering what that input was for. Now I know it's a slag pass-through port and it came in really handy.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ValhallasAshes/screenshot/2461864384097441006/

I really am impressed by the conveyor belt implementation in this game. It actually ranks up there among the best implementations I've seen. Well done!

Music:
I just wanted to say, I really like the music in this game.

Expeditions:
I have to say, I'm really liking these. The discoveries. The pieces of story. Brings a lot of life to the moon (oddly enough).

Ok, now that I've said that, time to continue on with additional less glowing feedback.

Mobile Drilling Rig:
I finally managed to find and use the MDR and after having experimented with it, I am a little less concerned about running out resources. The MDR brings in a lot more resources than the starting nodes do, which is reassuring to an extent, but I do find it a bit limiting at the same time. I know this sounds weird so bare with me. The problem is there is no real flexibility in the system. How do I say this. It's like instead of using a scalpel, you're using a shotgun. Let me elaborate.

Take a look at the above image of the refinery stage of my factory. Notice how there's 5 multi-regoliths. This is what I was meaning about building a strong foundation. The way this was originally designed to be used, was to have one input of each resource rich regolith. In other words, Aluminum heavy regolith went in one input, silicon in another, iron got it's own and so did titanium. The fifth one in the middle was for misc input. Basically all the slag heavy rock wall crap was put in there by the drones. This basically ensured that the factory, even though it was always getting "mixed" regolith with widely varied concentrations, the output would always be a fairly even spread of the needed resources. The MDR breaks this. Totally. Now the nice thing about this setup was even though the MDR can't really be used in a way the ensures a full even spread of all needed resources, the factory doesn't really care what input comes from where, it will still refine and distribute correctly. The problem comes in the form of too much of one resource and not enough of another and if not watched, can cause the whole factory to stop when one input fills up too much.

So I scanned a lot of the area (really like this mechanic by the way) and picked a spot that gave a little bit of everything. I was basically getting about 16-20% of each resource and only about 33% slag. Not bad. First couple loads bringing in tons of regolith. I'm feeling pretty good and a lot of my concerns about resources were starting to ease. Then I saw it. After only a couple loads I'm already seeing the spot I'm mining losing color and going grey. My truck isn't even upgraded and is only on it's second load and already the resources are drying up.

Now here's my conundrum with this. It's bad enough that the MDR is a shotgun approach to resource gathering given the spread of resources. But now the same complaint I had about resources drying up in the cave is being repeated on the surface? So what's the next thing that goes through my head. Oh just build another 3 garages and 3 MDRs and have each one work in a different mineral rich area, responsible for a different resource. Solved right? No. Why? Because you CAN'T build another garage. Which means you only have one input and everything is only processed in the order it is received. So if your machinery breaks down because belts are clogged with iron, you can't just bring in a load of silicon down a different track because there is no alternative input. And because iron was fed first, your factory has to work through that regolith first before it can get to the other resources unless you start tearing down bins, rebuilding them and telling your drones not to fill it with the crap that's all over the ground. This is a terrible design choice. We need to have more control over our inputs. The way regolith is implemented right now, is a cool idea and does make sense from a mining point of view, but the factory simply doesn't have enough input control to make this system work long term. Eventually, it will clog up unless the player is always on ball watching the inputs at all times. You think slag is the only thing your factory can choke on? No, it can choke on anything given long enough with your attention focused elsewhere. I literally just had my factory shut down due to too much iron intake while I was focused elsewhere building an array of rare earth mineral refineries.

The bulk regolith input system needs further development to give more control to the player as to what, where and when regolith gets processed.

Money and Motivation:
Ok, this where I have to ask the big bad question. This the same question I always ask of every game of this type I play. What's my goal? What am I striving for? What's my motivation to continue with all this busy work? Because I can tell you, if it's just the contracts, that's not enough. If it's to just accumulate as much money as possible, that's not enough. And I sure as hell don't want this game's sandbox premise to simply be sitting in contracts all day sifting through offers to fill, just to increase a gold count. And honestly, I find it pretty immersion breaking that I can build my own factory equipment, storage containers, power generators, batteries and whole bunch of complicated crap, but for some reason, making a belt is beyond my capabilities requiring purchase with money. Like starting the game with the ability to build solar panels and batteries, but a bed is too complex a task without research. Or how a dining table (literally just a work surface on legs) is somehow too complicated for my poor wee brain to manage without going to school.

I get that you have a story campaign, and I do intend to play that and enjoy it. But the mode that's going to keep me coming back is the sandbox mode. The free form mode many of us play to chill and have fun. But we still have to have something "interesting" to aspire and work towards. In Factorio, that goal was to build a space ship to escape the planet. In Dyson Sphere Program it was to build a Dyson Sphere and now they have an additional layer of friction coming from an AI enemy. Anno 1800 managed to avoid needing a specific end goal, but that was because of the sheer breadth and variety of content on offer between multiple stories, quests, and always ever higher heights, challenges and complexities to explore. So I have to ask, when I'm done with the main story, what is going to be my driving force to play this game. It can be anything, but it needs to be compelling. Why am I here? Why am I on the moon? Why am I mining this rock and for what grander purpose? It can be anything, such as acquiring the resources needed to build an arcology on Earth or something. But if it's simply to get resources to fill contracts to fill your bank balance, it's not enough. That can be done at the very beginning of the game while having built nothing. And trawling through the contracts gets really boring, really fast. There needs to be something more. Something grand. And it needs to be something you have to advance through the manufacturing tiers to achieve. You've got the core concepts and gameplay. What you're missing is that driving force to keep people coming back.

[ValhallasAshes]

Цитата допису Morvoldo:

Forgot to mention the most Important thing in this game....POWER WTF please fix it so we know what and how much to use as whats the point in all these batteries, they do absolutely Jack. you are always under powered no matter how many NRG or batteries you have and only get power in the day time from the only source... Solar LMAO its a Joke.

I've really not been having any issues with power not working. Here's a screenshot of the power grid I have in my game. Looks overkill, but it works.

https://steamcommunity.com/id/ValhallasAshes/screenshot/2461864384097440802/

[ValhallasAshes]

Цитата допису motorbit:

pause and 3x, thats all i ever use.

I do the same.