Bug mechanic, not Scrap mechanic
At the time of release 1.0, the physics were worse than they had been originally. Object collision works so poorly that solid two-meter-tall objects teleport right through solid walls. You have to transport cargo by car, so after a few hours it starts to get really annoying.
It's also frustrating that the game doesn't let you build just any kind of mechanism, because due to bugs, almost nothing works the way you'd expect. You won't be able to build a car's suspension like in real life: the car parts will start to bend, break off, and teleport however they want. A standard suspension block glitches so often that the car could fly off to the moon.
The graphics are terrible. The game looks great in screenshots, but during actual gameplay, it simulates myopia (nearsightedness), blurring nearby objects even on ultra graphics settings. It hurts my eyes and is uncomfortable to constantly look at blurry objects.
There are also a lot of fake trees on the map that don’t have collision detection; you can’t cut them down. But they block the player’s view with opaque textures. This is unbearable because the player is forced to build their base far from the roads due to a new bot that is invincible and attacks all players (and cows) near the road. And driving through these phantom trees every time is incredibly frustrating.
Previously, progression in the game was based on collecting different types of vegetables to buy something valuable with them. Now, you discard vegetables from the previous tier to move on to the next one. The recipes for cooking meals remain in the game. But the developers removed the hunger and thirst meters. Plus, recipes restore less HP than the sum of their ingredients, so they’re completely pointless.
The game now offers side quests. The idea is that you have to build structures and houses according to a given blueprint, which usually requires blocks that you haven't unlocked yet. You have to search the entire map for these blocks and scan them to get the crafting recipe. But these blocks don't appear anywhere on the map, so you can't scan them.
Bot raids on the farm have become too dangerous because the developers added a special type of jumping bot. They jump higher than the trees and deal massive damage to any structures, so building defenses against them is impossible. The game has turned from a TD-sandbox into a bad shooter.
Now imagine the horror of your car getting stuck in the middle of the desert (a biome where jumping bots spawn). It’s easy for car to stuck there, because the desert is full of hills and rocks, and the tires have terrible traction on the sand. Just one of these bots can pierce right through any car, leaving nothing behind. And these bots move extremely fast. They move so fast that they dodge the player's bullets, which have a delay. So you’ll have to fight for your life like never before. And I'd like to remind you that the game is still full of bugs that can easily break your vehicle every few minutes and also frequently cause cargo to fall out of the vehicle.
There have long been rumors that the developers released version 1.0 just to abandon the game's development. Looking at the game's current state, it's easy to believe that.
6 bugs per second out of 10 years of early access.
