How is it?
I’ll start with this: It’s not a game you can expect to finish in 3-5 or so days with a friend like other standard survival games. This game is an incredibly slow burn. Of course, you can sleep to pass time for crafts, which is an incredible tool when playing with 1-4 players. The premise of the game is that there is a meteor heading towards your planet in 30 days. This can be adjusted, we made it 60 days since there’s only two of us.
The world you are on is totally simulated, and can run out of resources like fish or animals. Overharvesting trees can lead to a forest that might not regrow, especially if you are dumping harmful chemicals nearby. Some of those earliest forms of pollution are things like slag from iron production. This adds a layer of potential instability to your world if you are too lackadaisical with your pollution storage. We didn’t care and we threw it all in the ocean, who needs fish anyway.
A tip for beginners is to not just settle anywhere on the map, you should be pretty certain where you need to be as to prevent base-moving. Typically, if you want the most cost-effective up front start, be near a desert/grassland/jungle. Jungle gives access to easily foraged food, grassland/desert gives access to iron & farmable food.
You have a certain number of specializations, and those are gotten with stars. Those stars are gained 1 per 24 real hours. However, this is off-set by food you eat and quality of housing. The more balanced of a diet you have and the higher quality house & fixtures in that house you have directly contribute to the speed at which you gather the stars. At a relatively balanced diet in a hewn-wood home with hewn-wood furniture, its around 30x so the math is about 1.25 per hour. This can also be off-set in the settings allowing 1% or more specialist experience to contribute to the stars. Be careful, this can make you gain stars at an unfathomable rate and should be used with caution to try to keep the game balanced. We as a duo are using the 1%, as a solo you may be inclined to use a higher number and after 3-4 people maybe not at all.
Don’t expect to jump in like you do in Minecraft and within a day have iron tools, it is a monumental task to get all the required skills and material to actually get to the point where you are comfortably producing anything besides dirt huts & stone tools. This is all said with 4-player in mind, however, so if you play in a group larger than that you might have more success than we did.
The steps taken after that are to industrialize everything. Remember, you do have a deadline. Crafting takes time, and the more advanced the craft the more time it takes. Skipping to complete these crafts is great, but make sure you are aware of how much you are skipping, as it progresses the countdown as well.
This game is for people that have the ability to stick to the game as it requires a level of dedication. Trust me though, once you get started hours fly by as you are taking incremental steps towards the next big thing. The payoff for some of these things like your first motorized vehicle is immense and feels great.
I love this game, and I am loving every minute of it. Be prepared to be overwhelmed at first, and be ready to dump hours into it. This game is amazing and I highly recommend it.