devtrackers.gg
Hey! New player, about 14 hours into the game. I've made it midway through my second spring, playing humans on easy.
Just wanted to give my impressions; I know this game is in early access, so I'm hoping the devs keep the things I like and change the things I don't.
For some context, I'm a fan of the genre, with about 400 hours of RimWorld and no idea how much in Dwarf Fortress (probably similar or a little more).
I really liked how easy it was in general to handle stockpiles, especially that I could establish a stockpile and then build bins into it as it got full. I didn't like when it snowed out and I had to redefine all of my stockpiles because the snow wall tiles erased my zone designations. It also seems to be impossible to set 'custom' stockpiles with items from multiple categories -- it seems like I can do 'everything' stockpiles, or stockpiles with subsets of specific categories, but not, for example, a stockpile of garbage and also remains. If it is possible to do this, the interface is confusing for me. I'm not sure how bins and cabinets are different, as they both seem to hold 50 units of solid (it's also not clear to me how doors are different from gates, or trapdoors are different from hatches).
I LOVE how easy it is to quicksearch in the build menu. I also love how clear it is what the requirements are for each type of room. I also really love how easy it is to manage production from the production menu.
I appreciate how easy it is to check season length.
I enjoyed the way that spikes did (often very large amounts of) damage to my enemies but allowed my own settlers to pass through unharmed; it did kind of confuse me that hostiles can climb up walls of arbitrary height (question: if I put an overhanging roof on the outside side of my wall, would that make it unclimbable? I just thought of this and haven't tested it).
Interface-wise, it would be nice if there was a way to mass-uncheck the 'defend yourself' behavior, or if it started off by default for children; I had a lot of very young children run headlong at bandits and get rapidly dispatched. I do love the combat notification page; was extremely helpful for me to see what was actually happening in a fight and catch when some random non-combatant wandered into the fray.
The fact that clothing and armor seem to be good indefinitely make it so that I end up with a very large amount of linen, plant fiber, leather, stoneleaf husk, etc. by the end of the first year. There isn't much of anything interesting to buy except for novel seeds, so commerce with merchants stopped being meaningful pretty quickly. I think there's a fundamental imbalance there of stuff in --> stuff out; it works okay with metal gear because of the finite supply on the map, but it gets to absurd levels with the renewable plant- and animal-based stuff.
On the topic of animals -- I ran into some problems with my remains stockpile vs my butcher orders. I'd order my combat units to kill an animal, then immediately set a high-priority butcher job on all of the corpses. Usually, like 1/3 of the corpses get dragged off toward the (medium-priority) remains stockpile before they can get butchered, and I have to play whack-a-mole grabbing settlers, forcing them to drop the corpse, and move-ordering them away. Should I be setting separate remains stockpiles for butcherable animals vs human remains? Is there a way to do that? I also noticed that tamed animals don't seem to need to eat or drink. It took a lot of monkeying around with stockpile settings to get my settlers to fill the animal troughs with water and fodder; despite this, the animals did just fine for days or months with empty troughs, even when kept underground
With plants, it would be really helpful if it was clear from the merchant interface which seeds were for crops and which were for weeds. I also think it would add some more variety to the game if different crops had some season or climate requirements -- I don't know why I'm able to grow coconuts outdoors in the taiga. It also makes all of the crops feel kind of unspecial, since so many of them behave the exact same way. You made all these different plant varieties and graphics; give me a reason to grow more than one or two types of crop. As a feature-request, it would be really cool to see some food preservation methods, like pickling, jam-making, brining, lactofermentation, etc. It's not strictly necessary, as it's currently possible to survive winter on underground mushroom farming and/or making bread from massive wheat flour stockpiles.
In general, I feel like the game has a lot of tiny glyphs (evasion, forestry, efficiency, fishing, temperature resistance, etc.) and I usually can't tell what they mean. There are a handful of screens with tooltips when I hover over a symbol; I would like these tooltips everywhere so that I don't have to dig through other parts of the interface to figure out what all the little symbols mean.
I never really got the hang of how to bury my dead into tombs. I built some tombs, and I had some people die, but I think they all just got dragged to my remains stockpile? Do I need to designate tombs as remains stockpiles? I eventually just let all the corpses rot and/or sold them to merchants. Also, are bones used for anything?
I also don't really get how fishing works. I think I managed to catch like 5 fish. Do settlers only try to do the task if a fish is in the one tile closest to land? Don't the fish usually leave that tile by the time the settler gets there?
There were some things that seemed glitchy:
- underground temperature -- in winter, temperature underground is very extremely cold -- even if I have all of the entrances sealed with multiple doors and am a dozen layers below the surface; I'm hoping the temperature physics gets updated at some point, because near-surface underground is generally close to the average temperature of a region, making it relatively warm in winter and cool in summer
- plant maturity in winter -- some of my crops, after being covered in snow and braving temperatures well below their listed lower limit, became mature midway through winter; this was helpful but confusing
- hold position order -- I tried to set up something of a funnel for fighting a high-level ancient; to do this, I ordered them to hold specific positions near the end of a corridor. As soon as they spotted the hostile, though, they all started running down the corridor. This is not what I'd expect from an order called "hold position."
- move order -- before the 'hold position' situation, I had a similar moment where I was trying to get my combat group down to a dungeon entrance before the hostiles tunneled through to my base. I selected the group and ordered them to move to the relevant location. One of them came down; the rest seem like they started moving and then gave up and went to do something else. I don't understand why this happened.
There were a handful of things that aren't broken but didn't make sense to me, so they kinda broke my immersion:
- the biome names -- a taiga is a borreal forest with mostly conifers; the taiga in-game had oak and apple trees, making it a temperature forest; I know this is a nitpick but it was really confusing to me when I first loaded in
- merchants -- they seem to have infinite money, seem to be able to carry infinite weight, and do all of this while traveling alone and unguarded (you can see my RimWorld and Dwarf Fortress experience in this one)
- boletus mushrooms -- this is a nitpick. seriously. it's super petty. i'm a hobbyist mushroom hunter in real life. fungi in that genus (Boletus) are all mycorrhizal, meaning that they're symbiotic with plant roots. as a mushroom nerd, it would be cool if fungi weren't treated as another plant -- i.e., saprophytic fungi need wood to grow on, mycorrhizal fungi need trees or other plants nearby. it's cool if you entirely ignore this point because just about every game developer does.
On the whole, it's a cute game -- I see it as a (somewhat) more accessible, lighter version of Dwarf Fortress. It did get a little boring by the start of the second year, but I assume that'll change as more features get added.
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