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Hacasaurus

Building/Crafting needs serious work

Question

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

 

Any questions feel free to ask.

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5 replies to this bug / suggestion

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Hi,

first, let me thank you for your feedback - it's obvious you put a lot of thought into it and even though we, unfortunately, don't have enough time to address this one by one at this moment  because we're extremely busy fixing critical issues that appeared after tens of thousands of players started playing the game (which was to be expected - hence the Early Access). That being said, I read what you wrote and there are definitely some very valid and important points. Also, please note that while our roadmap doesn't mention focusing on fixing and improving what doesn't work as it should, in many dev diaries and discussions with players we said that we will always focus more on the fixing. Both building and crafting will receive a lot of love in the upcoming months (e.g. the whole crafting UI will be redone to be more intuitive and user-friendly).

Unfortunately, after 12 hours spent playing the game, you are not eligible for refund anymore. Although it is possible under some circumstances (major technical issues or a major change to something that players bought the game with - like moving to Steam for those who bought the game when it was possible to run it outside Steam ) your isn't one of those.

We hope that in near future you will find most of your concerns addressed.

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2 hours ago, Aleš Ulm said:

We hope that in near future you will find most of your concerns addressed.

 

if I don't get a refund from Steam that's okay, I might just check in with the game each couple of updates because I see a lot of potential with this game and hope to see it become a huge success and that I get to play hours on end with this game.
I understand now why you wouldn't have fixes and minor reworks on the roadmap.
Good luck and happy developing :)

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You're mentioning a lot of the same things I feel needs more love when it comes to crafting, I agree with everything you say, and I absolutely agree with the crafting, it should be possible to craft stacks. And the saw. It breaks constantly, ended up making 6 saws just so I could get on with what I needed to make, it fatigues way too much. 

I personally don't have a problem to look up a wiki, and I did notice more and more recipies showed up when I tried crafting new different components. Something I'm probably used to with minecraft and other games. 

When it comes to building I really like the freedom, and the pieces already there, however the recipies are tedious to gather and takes a lot of time. I also wish there was more pieces than there is now, for instance being able to do some wall pieces and not have to place one log at the time, the plank blocks are nice too. But I'm sure there definitely could be some more thought put into it. What bugs me with it is when I find other structures I want to add to but the grid doesn't line up so I keep getting the message that there's something obstructing the item. Some information about how big a block is would be nice i.e 2x2, 1x5 and 2x10 etc. 

I also really miss statistics for armor and weapons. I have no idea which weapon does more damage, if there are different ammo that has different stats etc. As well as much trouble in MP with friends, map resetting, blocks placed not showing etc. Stuff I'm sure they are aware of already. Also the fact you can't look directly down in first person, it's constrained. 

Melee combat is also pretty bad atm, can be very punishing. 

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Hi guys, Hacasaurus mentioned the hammer being used for the repair kit. The major problem I've been seeing with the hammers being consumed, is that it will always consume an iron hammer before a stone one. This is very annoying as I then have to go back to the blacksmithing station to create a new one. A simple flag check added to the repair kit creation script that uses the stone hammers first would be great.

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Thanks for bringing this up! :) We're aware of the issues related to hammers being consumed when crafting - actually, we plan to get rid of that completely in update 0.7 (repairing things will become more realistic and intuitive).  If there's another update between the incoming 0.6.2 (late next week) and 0.7 this might get fixed there. We are planning to tell you more about our plans for crafting improvements sometime in early January 2018.

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