Stationeers

You need a Degree in Space ™ to play this game... or you can spend several hundred hours figuring it out... or pestering people on reddit and discord for help. You'll enjoy it because if you're reading this you're already the demographic this game targets. Manufacturing, Automation, Tinkering and making numerous ~~explosions~~ mistakes, but without the consequences of being Mark Watney. Runs great but the art style is more practical than visually appealing, call it stylised, that and you'll also be blind 50% of the time if you're outdoors purely because of the day/night cycles.

Stumbled onto this game thanks to the YouTube algorithm tossing a random gameplay video my way, and honestly? I don’t regret a single second. Stationeers is pretty much what you’d expect from a hardcore survival experience. The learning curve hits hard at first, but the progression feels incredibly rewarding. Building up to a fully self-sustaining setup scratches that perfect engineering itch. If I had to point out a downside, it’d be the construction system for devices and structures. It can feel clunky at the start, but with a bit of practice or the right mod, it becomes way more manageable. Honestly, it even adds to the immersion once you're used to it.

This game is great! It is a complicated game but that the fun part about it! This game taught me that starting over and making mistakes is okay. You just need to try again with the new information you learn from last time, and a lot of Youtube video's. The game also has a lot of way to explode, and from personal experience DO NOT OVER PRESSURIZE YOUR JET PACK TANK AND THEN THROW IT IN THE AIRLOCK OUT OF FEAR. Lets just say that its a good thing there are quick saves. Overall great game and I can't wait to end up blowing myself up again 10/10 would recommend.

definitely a top ten favorite of mine, this game has so much complexity and depth to it while not being entirely confusing and overwhelming

nice boom

If you're a fan of factorio, but like FPS perspectives, you'll love this. Got the right mix of intriguing and complex in all of the game's mechanics and systems. There's always more than one way to solve a problem, and having to learn a basic bit of thermodynamics never hurt anyone. Multiplayer is seamless and adds to the experience without taking away!

This is a fun engineering in space game, with solid updates and progress over the years. I like to compare it to the base-building of Space Engineers (particularly the voxel-like building) and Oxygen Not Included (particularly in detailed atmospheric simulation). It's a fun game if you want to tinker with some assembly programming to automate parts of your base to handle the drastically different day-night temps on some planets. I just recently upgraded my Martian greenhouse with shutters (to hold in heat at night) but opening for sunlight during the day (so it can function as a green house), with some extras features for adjusting a grow light and thermostat for a heater. It's full of interconnected systems that can fail in exciting ways. I've accidently frozen my waste-water line by letting my utility room drop too close to freezing, and the latent heat of evaporating dirty water dropped it the rest of the way to freezing. It's very worrying to hear something go "Bang!" in your base, when you're up to your elbows in a different system, then having to rush to diagnose and fix the plumbing, while vacuuming up the dirty water, and trying to fine-tine your system to not get that cold again! It's a fun peaceful game where the threats isn't big scary monsters eating your face, but rather from a jury-rig that you put into place days ago to get a system barely working, forgot about it (because it was working), and then needing to upgrade to deal with increased demands that you foolishly added to your system!. It also have a drastic range of challenges in the different planets. Mars too easy to challenge you? Cool, try surviving on a harder planet or adjust your survival consumption rates.

I think I have enough time in this game to give it a review... This game provides an amazing simulation of fluid dynamics coupled with various starting conditions that challenge the player to build systems in order to survive. Adapting to the celestial body that the player is on and leveraging aspects of the environment to survive has been a thought provoking and fun experience. The game allows the player to also reduce or increase the difficulty based on your starting materials and resource consumption rates which allows the player to either learn by fire or take their time to understand the systems and how they work. There are many systems in this game from Atmospheric Management (Filteration, Cooling/Heating, etc), Hydroponic Farming, Energy Production, Fluid Management (Water Creation, Cryogenic Liquids, etc), Ore Processing, Foundry Processes, Rocketry and Trade. Each having their own challenges for you to navigate while also trying to keep your character happy with hunger, thirst, comfort and cleanliness! And no systems based game is complete without ways to automate your systems whether you choose to the IC10 or logic boards to control your systems the feeling you get when the system you automate works flawlessly (possibly after some debugging attempts) is just awesome. RocketWerkz has really shown their passion in this game with the amazing updates to terrain, weather, content additions and in general player quality of life improvements. The community in this game is amazing and I have to shout out the stationeers-wiki for being there as a valuable resource for guides on how to automate systems as well as the youtube community (CowsAreEvil, Splitsie, blackshadow5738, w4stedspace and many others) I hope you give this game a try!