TLDR/Overview: Crafting and Building is not fun and needs serious work.
Extended: I've played it for 12 hours before deciding to refund because I wanted to give the game a chance. 10 of these hours were playing the early game in survival restarting a couple times after making mistakes.
First a few smaller issues
Inventory is a mess, no easy sorting and not easy to find items. Constant bugs that hid items from my inventory and required me to exit and enter the game
Items need descriptions, I can only assume that you already knew this and are working on it
Item pickup seems fine at first until you start to deforest the place, I find myself running around like mad spamming right click at the floor
First Person isn't finished yet and found myself using it quite a bit. What needs to be fixed is quite obvious and I can only assume the devs are working on that.
Not going to go into the in-game store, but will say that It hasn't seemed intrusive to me and all purchases are clear on what you are getting and completely cosmetic, I think some people are still just riled up from EA's Battlefront 2 controversy.
Now into the meat of it
Crafting is tedious and is more of a mess than the inventory, I think the crafting needs a massive rework or complete overhaul as it is clear that it is part of the core gameplay.
Problems with crafting:
Can only make one item at a time (requiring spam clicking when mass crafting)
Mass making building materials with something like a saw would mean it would constantly break (this is so annoying and only see it as a hassle)
The above issue also adds to the frustration when not being able to craft something because you need one more pole to craft (and idea for a solution is to it to auto craft these items and consume the raw resources, maybe add a crafting time as well, so it takes longer to craft in one go if you don't have components than it would if you had all components already (see factorio's crafting system for ideas))
It isn't inherently clear that a repair kit consumes the hammer as smithing only requires it to use (initially I thought my hammer disappearing was a bug and found it very annoying after finding out why)
Navigating the crafting menu was annoying, always having to search for things, wasn't clear at the beginning that recently crafted items are on top and thought it wasn't sorted in any manner (the crafting menu's look needs to change to make it fun and efficient for the player)
Wanting to craft things that haven't shown in your recipe list is annoying, I had to go to the wiki in my first hour just to find out what things are and how to craft them (no game should require you to search online for relevant info) it can also lead to not knowing what is required to craft an item cause you don't know what sub-components you need
As said crafting is part of the moment-to-moment gameplay, therefore, it needs to be fun, streamline and easy. Having categories and search bar is a start but certainly isn't enough, it's a little better with spawning blocks in creative mode menu where there are categories for types of blocks such as logs and stone block, etc.
Building is also tedious, frustratingly time consuming and punishing, this also needs rework as it is another part of the core gameplay. I get the impression that the building system is trying to be realistic to a sense (kind of like ECO's block for block building system, but it works better there because blocks are inherently larger)
Building is a slow process (even in creative mode), between collecting resources and building it feels as though it can take 30-60 min to build a shell of a relatively small and simple structure
Placing blocks can be very annoying, where I misplace blocks a lot and have a hard time to get the block to go where I want it too, especially with the different sizes of blocks, I almost always used first person while building
Once you place a block you have 2 minutes to undo it otherwise you have to spend what feels like way too long to destroy it and get nothing back for it, this comes off as very punishing as personally and sure many others like to experiment with buildings and it feels really bad after a structure is built and it looks bad and you have to either start new somewhere else or break a lot of it and get nothing back but scraps
I'm not suggesting to have the time limit extended, but maybe a tool that could recover the block
Having large blocks such as the massive log, it only has the one length and it's very hard to change or adapt. I suggest a carving axe or tool of some kind that could remove a voxel from a larger block, this also reduces the amount of different types of blocks and increases the amount of potential looks a structure could have that doesn't require placing small blocks several times over
Crafting different styles and sizes of blocks is annoying cause you may craft many blocks that you no longer want cause you don't like the look of them or they turn out to be the wrong size and there isn't a way of reverting this. The creative building system is better than the survival but could still be improved, let's use logs for an example, instead of craft a bunch of different size logs you could have just the one log that you can place when placing it the player had the option of the size and length there (sort of like the variations in creative mode) and it consumes the amount of resources according to the size of the block
Building also needs to be fun and rewarding (no matter how realistic you want your building system to seem) and should definitely take as long as it currently does to build something like a small cabin (sidenote: I may be cause I'm supposed to start out in a hut first, but I shouldn't be limited by that or anything, you should encourage players to build however they like)
Looking at the dev roadmap, I see a lot of adding content to the game rather than refining what they have, may I suggest an equal focus on these because as I have pointed out the core gameplay is very flawed and no matter how many cool new things you add they all are going to involve the building and crafting system, which to me isn’t fun or rewarding as it should be.
Whether my game gets refunded or not I hope for the best of this game and will repurchase at a later state if these are improved
TLDR/Overview: Crafting and Building is not fun and needs serious work.
Extended: I've played it for 12 hours before deciding to refund because I wanted to give the game a chance. 10 of these hours were playing the early game in survival restarting a couple times after making mistakes.
First a few smaller issues
Inventory is a mess, no easy sorting and not easy to find items. Constant bugs that hid items from my inventory and required me to exit and enter the game
Items need descriptions, I can only assume that you already knew this and are working on it
Item pickup seems fine at first until you start to deforest the place, I find myself running around like mad spamming right click at the floor
First Person isn't finished yet and found myself using it quite a bit. What needs to be fixed is quite obvious and I can only assume the devs are working on that.
Not going to go into the in-game store, but will say that It hasn't seemed intrusive to me and all purchases are clear on what you are getting and completely cosmetic, I think some people are still just riled up from EA's Battlefront 2 controversy.
Now into the meat of it
Crafting is tedious and is more of a mess than the inventory, I think the crafting needs a massive rework or complete overhaul as it is clear that it is part of the core gameplay.
Problems with crafting:
As said crafting is part of the moment-to-moment gameplay, therefore, it needs to be fun, streamline and easy. Having categories and search bar is a start but certainly isn't enough, it's a little better with spawning blocks in creative mode menu where there are categories for types of blocks such as logs and stone block, etc.
Building is also tedious, frustratingly time consuming and punishing, this also needs rework as it is another part of the core gameplay. I get the impression that the building system is trying to be realistic to a sense (kind of like ECO's block for block building system, but it works better there because blocks are inherently larger)
I'm not suggesting to have the time limit extended, but maybe a tool that could recover the block
Building also needs to be fun and rewarding (no matter how realistic you want your building system to seem) and should definitely take as long as it currently does to build something like a small cabin (sidenote: I may be cause I'm supposed to start out in a hut first, but I shouldn't be limited by that or anything, you should encourage players to build however they like)
Looking at the dev roadmap, I see a lot of adding content to the game rather than refining what they have, may I suggest an equal focus on these because as I have pointed out the core gameplay is very flawed and no matter how many cool new things you add they all are going to involve the building and crafting system, which to me isn’t fun or rewarding as it should be.
Whether my game gets refunded or not I hope for the best of this game and will repurchase at a later state if these are improved
Any questions feel free to ask.
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