Forage Wizard

Saddens me to write this review cause I love games like this. It's all fun and games, really addicting, that is until you unlock pylons and try to make 'em work as you want. It's too much of a convoluted system, the game doesn't teach you how to use it properly. I've been searching online and even using AI to try and help me understand, but after 2 hours crafting, researching, experimenting and trying to figure it out, I got the feeling that I wasn't having fun nor progressing because I was still trying to figure everything out. I saw the dev tried to improve the system before 1.0, it seems it got better but still, it's unnecessarily complicated, bad explained, expensive/time consuming to craft for such an important feature, so I ended giving up. Happy to come back and give it a thumbs up if the dev improves that, otherwise pretty fun and addicting game.

I loved this... for an hour. It gets extremely grindy, there's a ton of manual crafting, a ton of things you have to remember all at once and a ton of camera panning. At first you just need a few things, chop wood, mine stone, stab slimes, but then you need materials for materials for materials for materials for.... It goes on like that. But you also need other things, and the automation isn't very good, and you need to keep topping up the fuel, oh but you've run out of an item again, it's easier to build another building, but your organisation isn't going to look very good because you had things too spread apart, so smush them all together, you still don't have enough space, build more buildings, build more, MORE, MOOORE, MOOOOOORRRRERRERER! AAAAAGH! If you like organisation, don't play this. At first, it was nice an relaxing, but then after a while it was stressing me out. I don't play games to be stressed. It takes an incredible amount of work to get all the automation set up, and you're going to need a lot of it just to deal with the inevitable headache. But you also need to organise the space to place everything. I will finish this, at a later date, I really need a break from this, it took me 3 hours to get burned out. For emphasis on that, it took me over 300 hours to get burned out with satisfactory, and 10 years to get burned out with World of Warcraft. I'm exhausted, my jaw is killing me from clenching it, I feel rough, I have a headache and I feel miserable... And that's from 3 hours of this game. I've barely done any of the achievements yet. I need a drink... unfortunately, I quit drinking a while ago. So I'm going to have to watch some tv, eat some food, and play something fun... I hope I can find something fun. If you play this... I hope you have better mental constitution than I do. Whether or not you agree with me, please have a good day. Thank you for reading, or skipping to the end. <3

在增量游戏分类里完全没有增量成长的爽感，在自动化游戏分类里完全不能算是自动化，后面一大堆恶心人的素材都得手动点，花了几个小时搭起来的产线结果科技树一解锁发现用处极小，仅仅是让前期一点资源可以不再费心点击，玩的太恶心了，最后是硬生生逼自己通关的，这个公司的所谓自动化和增量游戏千万别碰，完全是赛博监狱

Starts off great but becomes infuriating to play the more you progress. Gave up on it after unlocking the final zone and didn't bother finishing the game. Automation exists but it's a horrid implementation of it to the point where it's just frustrating to try to make 1 production line work. I have played plenty of other dedicated automation games like Satisfactory, Factorio, DSP and so on thus it's not an issue of not understanding the systems. There are too many machines, their roles aren't explained properly, some of them are even quite costly to produce and are quite large, trying to interact with them is frustrating, you can't zoom out far enough, there is not enough space, doing simple operations like moving a building requires too many clicks. The build UI is also a mess btw, since all the building are just jumbled in there together with no categories and tiny icons that mostly look the same. Picking up items with the mouse is too sensitive, like I can't take just 10 wood from this chest, I keep getting 11. I want to put 1 back down, now I have 9. I want to take 1 more, I have 11. It really likes to test your patience. These are all mid to small issues but all of them combined makes it into a bad experience. The automation itself, how you have to connect buildings between them, how some machines pop their produce on the ground -> you need a collector; some machines just generate the items and stores them inside -> you need an extractor. The collectors will just pick anything from the ground, so it can easily clog with a different item. Apparently there's a filter machine but that's another cog in the already complicated frankenstein of a production line and remember when I said there's not enough space? You have like 10 different automation machines that look very similar but you need each one for very specific use cases. Here's a simple example: woodcutting machine (generates wood) -> extractor (to collect the wood) -> furnace (create coal) -> collector (since coal is dropped on the ground by furnace) -> fueling machine -> connect to furnace. 5 machines just to generate coal so you can supply your other stations with fuel (most of them require wood or coal as fuel). God forbid you put something else close to that collector since it will start collecting other products than coal then it clogs the entire production line. And if the machines are full of fuel, the furnace just keeps producing coal and throws it on the ground. Put down a chest as a buffer? Sure, but it can store only 1 single item and only a stack which is 99. Also, where the hell do I even fit this chest? Right, I have to rearrange everything now since if I move this furnace then it's out of range of that thingy and so on. Oh and you can't even automate everything. There are still things like slimes and wisps that you have to manually collect. And the end game materials are so overly complicated to create it's not even worth the headache to try and automate them. Honestly, it feels like the developer(s) wanted to implement automation properly in a game that didn't require such complexity and they struggled so much with it that they ended up overengineering it. Keep It Simple Stupid, it's a principle they completely forgot about. A lot of these machines could have been merged into 1. A lot of these machines could have been just a simple settings menu for the other ones. Not recommended, unless you plan on skipping most of the automation and doing things manually. In which case I wish you good luck. It's def doable but it will take a long time and a lot of frustration. The entire automation process would need a revamp in order for me to recommend this game.

Heyo, I would like to say that even though I am not recommending this game, it is not because the game isn't fun or engaging, I am not recommending it because it lacks features and basically makes you do a lot of back and forth. It is the lack of features, quality of life and the like that makes me say no no no. These are all things that could in theory be improved in future updates but as things stand, I can't in good conscience recommend it. So yeah, the game concept itself is pretty decent, just grab things, craft things and repeat. It is just a bit of a slog to do it. It feels like the logic of base building lacks well, the logic. The transfer of resources is a bit of a resource drain. Like it takes minutes to farm the resources to build a simple resource chain and then it really doesn't need much of it in the end. So it feels like automation means taking more time than it would without it. Everything just feels like it is a bit pointless. I would really love to play the game again if the tech tree is updated, the graphics make things a bit clearer and you don't feel like the gopher for your own base rather than its master. Anyway, that is just me, I would say it is a game with potential and it can be fun but the building side of the game is a slog and that needs changing.

Loved this game! Was it frustrating at times? Absolutely. Did I have zero idea what I was doing in the beginning? Yes. Did I want to quit numerous times? Also yes. However, I stuck it out and learned the automation and really enjoyed the progression through the game. I 100%'ed SunCraft as well (different game but similar concept) and while I enjoyed that game more from a story, quests, diversity, etc. perspective, this game scratched a productivity and progression itch more than SunCraft did. If you like games like Factorio or Dyson Sphere Program, you'll like this one. Give it a go!

Automation starts way too late, in my opinion. The game also requires a lot of manual clicking, and by the time you unlock the automation tools, you already have a lot of structures built, meaning you have to rebuild quite a lot. It feels like the developer decided to add automation later in development, and the whole automation system doesn't feel well integrated into the game. If you don't mind the issues mentioned above, I think you can still have fun playing this game. However, I personally prefer other games in this genre.

needs a pass for balancing imo, lots of manual gathering and camera panning that don't do it for me. Lots to like, especially if you need something extremely slow

I played this game to completion. It was pretty fun game. It's short, but quite interesting, with some very cool automation ideas and a good progression curve.