Stationeers

Despite already having a good amount of hours in this game I can't recommend it at this time without some big changes to a couple areas. The first is the UI, which if you read any other negative reviews you will find plenty of people talking about how much it's a nightmare of unusability. They are all correct, and the worst part is that RocketWerkz has stated that they prefer the UI in its current form, that it's supposed to be hard to use because that's somehow "realistic". It's not, it's unnecessarily complicated to do simple tasks and makes the game just painfully tedious to interact with. Even better, it's inconsistent with its supposed "realism" in several areas, one of which makes the process of building things an unnecessary guessing game of "which tool do I need now?". I like the idea of a realistic interface, I like diegetic interfaces, but this is not that. Luckily there are mods in the workshop to fix this and other problems the game has, but not entirely. Minus that though, the game overall is an amazing simulation, and it's exciting to eventually understand how things work and create a system that functions like you expect without it blowing up. Blowing things up is also fun though. It's not without plenty of bugs, but I can somewhat forgive that with it being under active development. Unfortunately the roughness of the state of the game combined with a horrid UI turns a lot of new players off before they can find the fun, and there is a ton of fun to be found under all the problems. The second part is the community. RocketWerkz has allowed a certain strand of toxic intolerance for feedback and criticism to develop in their communities that both turns away new players and prevents the developer from understanding how much more popular this game would be with, and how much support there is for, changes that wouldn't compromise the core design and experience of the game but would greatly improve the player experience. They've taken the loudest and most intolerant of change voices to be popular opinion on the direction of the game despite overwhelming evidence otherwise. Worse, I've seen content creators, people who unofficially represent the game to the world, engage in this behavior without consequence. It's hilarious and maddening to see this alongside the devs and community members going on essentially pledge drives asking people to buy the DLC to "support the devs!". Perhaps that wouldn't be necessary if the devs listened to player feedback that the community disagrees with, clamped down on the toxicity, and implemented some of the more obvious improvements. As the Early Access disclaimer says, don't buy this game if you're not excited to play it in its current state, and take that warning very seriously. That's a tough one for me, because I do really enjoy this game when it lets me enjoy it, but the negatives pile up and make me wonder if I'm spending my time wisely. Just understand what you're getting into, provide constructive feedback, and ignore the hate you'll get for criticizing what appears to be a religion for some people.

Game has phase changes of gases in it, half dozen gases and all three states, the cooling/heating from phase changes, the struggle of keeping water out of the lines mid game, learning a ton about this i could be HVAC easy i bet! You'll want to code a little in this game, it's easy though, uses a small script called IC10. you can use basic logic and HASH is a game changer - can set names on devices and call them right from the script with that. If you can't code at all, chatgpt can probably help a bit but yuck it's sloppy lol. 300 hours in and i'm still watching youtube tutorials on how to set things up - i just setup a trader even... ... rockets might be coming next. Final note though, this game is unforgiving! you'll die alot, blow your base up in many different ways, and reload the game sometimes. :D worth.

Cannot describe this in any other way than this really, but Booting the game up for the first time is like booting up Dark Souls for the first time, but in this game, the antagonist is the planet. Similarly, the only thing that will get you further is your own perseverance, and your drive to learn from your mistakes and get better as a survivor on the planet you've chosen to spawn on. There is a massive learning curve, but if you're the persistent type that likes a challenge, optimizing processes, and learning intricate systems, this is absolutely the game for you. Truly a game worth buying, you can tell how much effort, love, and passion went into creating every facet of this game, and it's regularly improved. Purchasing this genuinely feels like you're helping contributing to the future of this game, and fully recommend everybody give it a try if you're interested.

programing IC chips just track solar is not fun

Stationeers is a great systems driven sandbox survival game. I appreciate how it has so many ways to tackle a problem, and each of those cause you new problems. I never run out of problems. I have 99 problems and a gas leak is one. I have 108 problems.

complicated to start, tutorial does not help

There is a period in the early game where you are just fighting the interface (and probably dying a lot), but once you push through that it becomes a highly detailed, involved and complex experience - and a lot of fun.

Port forwarding needed in 2026 to play with friends... We went to space and we still need to log into a network like a modem in the 80s to have jolly cooperation. Oh and your character starves when you don't play like a neo pet.

After well over 1000 hours I suppose I can recommend this. If you love building systems, this is the game for you. Even if it's entirely different, factorio lovers will love this. You can make things as simple or as complex as you like and you'll learn MIPS Assembler on the way, if you want to do it well.