Pumpkin is better than corn because it is more expensive to sell, but corn is better because 20 can fit in a stack. You either eat corn soup made in the microwave or you eat corn which might require one more plant to grow - no actual difference, not in time, not in complexity, not in resource requirements. Corn soup might be better than corn in itself but there is no actual difference. It basically doesn’t matter what you eat currently. I think the game has everything already to solve this problem because it only needs tiers above the acceptable, for example better food stuff. It is challenging for new players to provide everything that allows farming but with experience these challenges will disappear and not only partially but completely. There are probably some new players here who don’t see the problem yet, so in other words: you need to juggle a few systems to allow you to farm, you have to avoid x gas in your farm room, you need a good temperature and pressure, you need some water. However we don’t need to take care of any systems after we reach a point in our knowledge and there is no such thing as better, the system instead completely disappears from our gameplay loop.Ī game system like farming in Stationeers is so simple and binary that even though you may need a few hours to solve it as a general problem, it will be a completely irrelevant problem after it becomes solvable for you. In short, there are lots of systems we need to take care of and taking care of them is the game. Automating it is fun but everything above acceptable is actually pointless because a solution for something like food with a basic automation can make this whole need completely irrelevant which is a problem for advanced players. So it has three states and only one state should be avoided. You can farm automatically too in case your problem will not be hunger but that the vending machine doesn't have any more space for your pumpkins. If you farm manually, everything will be fine, one plant will be enough to survive and you just need to spend a few seconds on farming when your avatar complains about food. If you don’t farm, you will probably die and begin a new game. In my opinion, the biggest problem is that most of the systems have three states: not acceptable acceptable acceptable and even automated.įor example: you don’t farm, farm manually, farm automatically. I just think that there are small and relatively easy changes the developers could make to improve this game even more. I am completely happy with my purchase, I was happy shortly after I bought it and lots of improvement happened since then. No player should have any reason to complain about the game, 100-200 hours is very good for any game and Stationeers is still an early access indie game. Using these things the player can extend the enjoyment greatly, maybe even with an additional 100 hours. Some players will go a few steps further and learn about MIPS and some of the other advanced stuff. The player played ~100 hours at this point and every hour of it was very enjoyable. This is very fun, probably the best part of the game! The actual problem is not that the player can do this, but that the player can basically solve the game with automation easily and almost completely. The player will learn about the logic kits and slowly and with lots of suffering (good kind of suffering) will automate basically everything. The problem with the gameplay loop begins when the player notices that there are always things to do, things to pay attention to but there are ways to decrease the number of these things or their frequency at least. This part of the game is still very fun because the player needs to pay attention to most things and it is easy to make significant progress. Some canisters may explode because the player forgets to turn off a machine, there will be blackouts, some plants will die due to overheating. The player will slowly but surely get to know about everything important but whatever the player does, there are still challenges. The player will overcome these challenges by learning about the tracker, farming, atmospherics, etc… The player will explode, get lost, die from starvation. I have some problems with the gameplay loop after the player learns most of the things however.įor a few hours this game is a blast, whatever the player plans to do there are challenges. I don’t think I ever enjoyed a game more than the first ~50 hours of Stationeers. Tldr: there is only deadly and acceptable, there should be good and better and perfect too because it would drive us to make better stuff and would exponentially increase the enjoyable gametime because of the interconnection between the systems.

Stationeers game change log