The Crust

I own a fair number of colony builder games as well as automation games, this one is a good mix of both, although right now it has a few issues it needs to sort out in development. Mostly involving balancing, but also with merging the two halves together. I'll explain in reverse order. Having people working on your moon base means having an entire section of your base and resources devoted to a separate part of gameplay. Ice and slag goes in, people, science, and food go out. Occasionally workers will sit in on some of your production machines and speed things up dramatically, but the only important contribution they provide is science points, which is handled in a very novel way. There are three research categories, and points for each category are gained separately and rather slowly over time as delivery rewards or barely-worth-it worker research. Some research items require points in two or three categories, usually in different amounts. This means you could be researching three different items at once, one in each category. A neat take, but it suffers from old habits; you can only see how long the first (of five) queued research items is going to take. The five-item queue also means that you can't have two of each category lined up... which in late game means you'll be wasting research points. You can't bank them. Very realistic, as is the research tree itself, but it does mean some need-them-early items are FAR down the research tree. Which brings us to another big current-build problem: resource lock. Mining resources produces random results. A pile of iron mined by a drone might have a 60% chance of producing iron, and a 1% chance of silicon, titanium, and aluminum. The rest is regolith or slag. You can refine regolith into other resources at a low percentage, but you'll always be producing waste products. Compared to factorio where one iron ore gives you one iron plate, one iron node with an extractor will produce a bunch of regolith which you can turn into SOME iron ore and mostly a bunch of useless slag (which can be turned into food after a couple steps, into or bricks when mixed with refined silicon, which makes the resource management even worse). You never get a one-to-one resource production, there is always a TON of waste. Which piles up. There's no way to just dump slag somewhere besides building a storage unit, letting drones fill it up, and then dismantling it or building a line of interconnected storage boxes, with nowhere to go. Except... Problem number three. Resource delivery. The basic drones can carry 1 unit of anything at a time. There are some deliveries for shipments that require 4,000 units. Oof. Do the math. There are modified drones for cargo hauling to solve this. They can carry 10 units. Do the math. Still oof. With research that can be brought up to 20, but we're still talking over 200 trips... because every drone will try to chip in, and the 1-unit carriers will interrupt conveyor-automated loading or cargo hauler trips. This will require balancing, but it leads to another problem: Repairs. Nearly every structure constantly needs repair. There's no maintenance, just work-until-break-then-use-resource-to-fix. An iron smelter might need a brick to get fixed, so you're constantly draining a few resources, but this just creates endless jobs for repair drones to do. They're bad at prioritizing, so the drones might be trying to deliver those 4,000 bricks one at a time while your entire base falls into disrepair, and the bigger it gets, the more repair you need to do one at a time. The more time it takes. The less anything else gets done. Which requires more drones... which eat up into the build limit (CPU), and drones cost more and more CPU. Which require more buildings to get more CPU, which require more power, which require more repair... All that to say there's a serious problem with workload balancing. It's not insurmountable though. There just needs to be some careful re-evaluation of how they've decided to do some things. Like building a big enough living space (the tutorial missions ask for 15x15, which is 225 squares... each square of which requiers at least two work orders, FOUR each on the walls. I was planning on making a giant food-factory-into-plant-burners slag deleting power plant, but even with 15 cargo drones and 5 builders it would take me a couple weeks of real time to see it finish. One delivery to each square could be solved by a 'deliver to worksite' change. At least then a cargo drone would alleviate things. But these are teething problems. Some rebalancing, some quality of life changes, some more work-priority options than 'do it right now/do it if you feel like it/don't do it ever' would help, some 'bring resources here' and 'empty this container' options would be good too. But don't let this list discourage you. There is potential here. If they figure out the 'automation' part of the game and connect it better to the colony builder part, this will be one of the best in the genre. Assume anything I didn't mention works fine or is obviously unfinished in a way that will work well in the final product. And as I said, the research is done in an interesting way. Net positive right there.

They added Mac support

Very god storry and alot of transportbelts.

bis jetzt ein sehr gutes durchdachtes Game das Spaß macht

Хорошая музыка

Игра перспективная, но пока еще есть над чем работать

There is a superb factory/exploraton/colony game in here trying to get out. But at the moment the update 2 release has some issues. However I think the good outweighs the bad on this currently, but the developer would do well to spend a couple of months bug fixing before moving towards release. Easily the best soundtrack to any A or AA game I have played; 100 odd tracks so repetition isnt an issue (EU V I am looking at you) and just high quality both vocal and instrumentals.

I'm really impressed. The Crust has everything that was missing from *Satisfactory* and *Surviving Mars*—a vibrant economy and a realistic business simulator for a lunar billionaire. Awesome!‍