Ostranauts

The best space junker sim I think I'll see in my lifetime. Until, of course, my brainscan crammed in a robot body is sent to scrap hulks in lunar orbit 100 years from now

Ostranauts is definitely not easy to recommend in its current state as of 1.0. It's got jank and a lot of half-baked features, but the hard sci-fi elements of salvaging, building and piloting ships around the solar system is fun enough. Traveling long distances feels equally rewarding and risky, as lack of preparation, improper planning or a piloting mistake will leave you stranded. That said, you'll probably get a more complete experience if you wait a while for more patches to be added and mods to be developed. Here a few things that I dislike about the current state of the game: -NPC interactions. I like the idea, but interacting with NPCs is just bland at the surface level once you understand the minigame. There is hardly any unique dialogue outside of the rather few story missions. -Speaking of missions, NPCs will randomly ask you, a seemingly complete stranger, to do a task for them that involves finding someone, talking to them (beating them up first being optional sometimes), and then traveling back. The "someone to find" is random and sometimes on a completely different planetary body, or in my case, driving a police patrol craft in deep space 1.2 AU from Ganymede, where they should have been stationed. Oh, and there is no reward for these, so I'm not really sure what the point is. (The actual story missions are neat, but few and far between.) -Lack of ship VFX. We're under thrust using a torch drive burning at 4gs spinward, yet ships have no visible drive plumes. -Stats of ship components are not visible anywhere. For example, the mass and durability of walls and floors vary based on the manufacturer, but this isn't listed anywhere in-game and cannot be viewed outside of obtaining a mass scanner plugin for your PDA, which you probably won't find until you've already added on to your ship. This applies to basically every electronic item in the game too. -NPC crew member controls. During scheduled work time, NPCs will often ignore orders and just do whatever the hell they want. The only way I could get them to stop "studying" on the computer I installed in the break room was to unplug it during working hours. Also there needs to be global orders you can quickly give that override other activities, such as "emergency repairs" and "secure for maneuvering" (to you know, get in a crash couch before they are crushed to death.) -Lack of advanced hauling/bartering zone controls to let you specify exactly where items should be stored, and for NPCs to actually haul items to be stored there. Currently, if I purchase scrap, it ends up in my fridge, even though the fridge is set as a "food only" zone. The opposite happens too. -Physics simulation is a little too simple. It doesn't matter where you put your thrusters or where your center of mass is, the ship behaves the same regardless. Aerodynamics is determined entirely by mass and how many heavy lift rotors and aerodynamic hull parts you have, not necessarily the shape of the ship. There is no explosive decompression, and atmospheric flight using heavy lift rotors needs a pass. (Specifically, you have to have an even number of clockwise and counter-clockwise spinning heavy lift rotors, otherwise you get stuck in a death spin. There is no way to change direction other than unpowering and repowering them.) -Inventory is just weird. You have a space suit, but no specially designed bag to carry stuff around in while in a space suit, so your character has to occupy a hand by dragging around a backpack permanently. -No way to automate putting on/taking off a suit. Until a person spends enough time in a space suit (upwards of a month from what I can tell), they suffer a severe work speed penalty. -Lack of proper airlocks. You're always briefly leaking atmos when crew enter/leave the ship because airlocks are effectively two doors put a few feet apart, with no way to "cycle" airlocks. -Lack of crew retention and benefits. Crew are paid a pathetic amount daily. You could be bringing in millions in a trade run, but they're only getting $250. Micromanage them too hard or don't meet one of their needs (which are somewhat obfuscated), and they'll just up and quit on you, and there is no way to give them a higher salary until they decide to quit. A way to reward hard work (because crew do slack off)/match their pay to the skills they've developed since joining, and maybe even a healthcare plan to automate the treating those nasty blisters they got when your ship suddenly lost pressure and their skin boiled would be a really nice addition. These are just to name a few, and thankfully, there are a few mods that can cover some half-baked features and IMO should be included in the full game: "Ship's Water" - A mod that adds water tanks, showers, waste water storage/processing and the ability to bulk purchase water. Otherwise, you're filling up bottles in slowly recharging sinks on stations, or tediously buying containers of it. Crew need to drink and bathe with water with or without this mod, but this makes managing water much less tedious. This is seriously a "must have" mod. "Uninstall and Haul" - In Vanilla, when you first dock with a wreck, you can run through and mark anything you want to salvage in-tact with an "uninstall" order. Unfortunately, you will then have to order it to be "hauled" back to your ship after the component was uninstalled. This mod adds a combined order that will save you a ton of time and needless tedium.