A great game in many ways, but the current multiplayer connection & hosting functionality is not sufficient, and is the primary reason for a negative review.

I understand this game is currently in early access. I have sent every item below as a bug report.

However, the following issues are present during every current play session:
- This game is a memory hog. Our co-op hosting "server" game uses over 20GB of RAM, every time it runs, and there is a significant memory leak on any asset within which a player moves their character within the environment. This memory leak leads to crashes of the game after 1-2 hours. All participants and the hosting "server" have 32+ GB of RAM.

- there is NO DEDICATED SERVER via steamcmd, a shell/cmd/CLI .exe, or similar. As a consequence, if you want to have the game actually run well, you need to burn a concurrency slot (1/4)
- you must purchase an entirely separate full license of the game AND burn a concurrency slot to have anything remotely resembling a "server". This is 100% unlike all the other games that have FREE dedicated hosting servers such as Enshrouded, Valheim, Icarus, Soulmask, Moria, Ark, Palworld and many many many others. ( https:// steamdb.info/search/?a=app&q=server&type=5&category=0 )
- time runs continuously, as a consequence of the above, rather than optionally halting time if no human players are connected. You can skip nighttime (which turns out to be a very bad idea, generally) by everyone (including the "host") sleeping. Very awkward and klunky in 2025.
- If the game is paused by the host when other players try to connect, the connecting players are stuck at the Loading... screen indefinitely, as long as the host is paused. When does this happen? When you press escape (auto-pauses) to invite your friends, then they can't join. every time.
-every time you want to have your friends join you, you must send out a new invite, because the only method of having your friends join is the steam friends list. If you close the hosting game, you must send out a new invite. Every time.
-there should be a minimum of 5 (FIVE) multi-players permitted, as a consequence of the above, when you're required to burn a concurrency slot and full purchased license just to keep a "server" host online.

-the only thing that makes the game fun are the community-created mods, notably those by Void Kittens and a few others. Without them, we would not be playing and will not continue to play. The hosting server needs vastly more options (length of day/night, drop rates, difficulty for ~everything, costs, run speed, fast travel, renown gain, faction gain, death penalty, loot quality, storage capacity, inventory capacity, growth rates, respawn rates, spawn multipliers, ~everything the mods currently offer)

-there is a bug with the hitbox and/or model parenting/anchor point with BOARS making them the most lethal opponent in the game. It's legit easier to face and defeat 10 armored bandits than 2 boars. You can almost never hit boars, not with ranged, not with melee, because of this bug. Been like that for many weeks, possibly many months, with no patch/update. You can see this every time a boar dies, whereby the interaction (white dot) is many meters away from the actual dead corpse, causing skinning/picking-up bugs, too.

-character customization is EXTREMELY poor. There are a variety of faces (which you never see) and exactly three hairstyles, (which you never see) and very few facial hair choices (which you rarely see) and NO color customization of anything. It's quite bad, and the only way we can tell one player from another is by the name above their head, most of the time.

-when initially equipping, switching to or wielding a 2 handed tool or weapon, it is initially held (at the time of switching) in a permanent blocking mode. You cannot change this or stop blocking, and must switch away from the item and back to it, AGAIN, after equipping it. When do you need this? When switching from ranged to shield, for example, which happens, hey, yeah, almost EVERY FIGHT. Horrible bug that has led to many deaths. Out of combat, you cannot use a tool (like a shovel, hoe, or similar) on the first equip, as a consequence. You must, AGAIN, swap it with another active tool before it can be used. Hard to believe that bug passed by QA and made it to Prod. 100% happens every time.

-there are only 3 save slots that are manual. Three? in 2025? Why? No other game has such a silly limitation. And in a game with a multiplayer "server"? absolutely inexcusable.

-the captcha for submitting bugs is buggy. Yep. :( It also requires a minimum of 3-4 full responses before marking you as human, and MUST be completed when submitting EACH bug. Absolutely horrible end-user experience and makes me NOT want to submit bugs.
-further; submitting bugs via their bug reporting site sometimes just "goes away" after you click send and never returns a completed status page. One I let run for 30 minutes, then had to cancel and resubmit from scratch, also enduring yet another horrendous CAPTCHA experience. Again. :(

-multiplayer state becomes glitchy buggy, in general, after ~1 hour of play. This is typically manifested in food buffs not expiring when they should, and then task stations stop updating, and storage inventories also stop updating. a relog fixes it, but it's pretty consistent now, so should be fixed given it's happening to everyone on our team, and is not an issue with our rigs or installs.

Positives:
- rendering load on the GPU is much improved since last year. It actually doesn't run the GPU at max power/fans like it used to, and graphics settings changes are reflected in the game (they used to not be, and would reset on every game start). So on that front? super awesome progress.

- community mods are propping up this game. A great example is storage/stacking and farming. Storage/stacking would be an un-endurable nightmare without mods, and farming doesn't even.. I mean it's so BAD in the default game that it's hard to imagine how they could have made it worse. So, big props to the modding community on this one, they're the real heroes. :) They're allowing the game to be mostly fun while the developers get their sticks in a pile.

Dear Creators,
For the past 3–4 weeks I’ve been wanting to write to you, but for some reason I couldn’t manage to put my thoughts into the right words. So I’ll just begin, hoping I can express what I truly feel — and hoping that one day you will read this.

First of all, thank you for this masterpiece, because Bellwright fulfills a dream I’ve had for a very long time!
In the past 3–4 weeks I’ve played more than 360 hours, some of that in cooperative mode. The fact that the game is moddable is something that deserves special thanks as well.

One of the most important things I want to tell you is this: even though the game includes all the elements that matter to me, we wouldn’t have bought it because the camera is third-person. We only started playing because there is a first-person mod — even if it’s not perfect, it works.

I don’t know what will happen to us after tomorrow’s major update; it’s possible we won’t be able to play anymore if the first-person camera setting stops working. We are very worried, because third-person view simply isn’t exciting for us — combat becomes much easier and you can see everything around you. We will never play in third-person mode, because we come from a tactical combat environment where third-person view is not allowed.

Several of my friends also bought the game after we found the first-person camera mod that allowed us to set everything up properly, so we are very anxious about what will happen after the major update.

Whatever happens, I want to thank you for the wonderful experience we’ve had so far, and we can only hope that you will also consider those players who play exclusively in first-person view.

If you don't like being king of a mob of obedient peasants this game is not for you

No but actually, great game.

Pros:
- Modest but in-depth city building and villager simulation
- Above-average combat system for the genre
- Amazing graphics if your system can handle it
- Good replayability, and setting make it so you can play any way you like, as a lone wolf sniper or commander of a mob of peasants
- Extremely active dev group that is constantly pushing out updates you can test for yourself on an open beta

Cons:
- Pretty taxing on GPU and RAM (I sometimes RAM crash on 16GB)
- A bit slower than titles like Valheim (but the endgame is to die for)