Hydroneer

this game is very good it runs very well i think others should try it 10/10

This game has some repetitive aspects, and while it's new and sandboxy it's got a really fun framework that's easy to get lost in, and has a perfect level of jank to keep you invested. The Prospecting Guild has fun little crafting tasks, and the farming tasks/cooking while simple as well, are good enough, I just wish I could combine soups. Now that I am having a midgame crisis, I believe solving this, will require the Mini-Nukes I have purchased "Excavate" an area so that I can build how I like in the depths. 10/10

just missing alot of QOL. alot of things seem to much. farm is bull bro, can't automate that. i like it at first. they broke most of the mods. the new area feels off like they tried to take a new dirrection. would have been better to add more. to what was then seperate them...

honestly it handles like getting over it and there is really nothing that picks up after the inital dopamine hit from the first hour good for the memes but not much else

this game should not be struggling to run on my computer that can run games like Alan Wake 2 and cyberpunk at max settings. I can run those games great, meanwhile this game doesn't go above 40 fps on the lowest settings.

Great game I liked that its compatible with mods also you are miner in game

Decent Game with a lot of potential, but ultimately lacks depth and longevity. Since the game is considered finished it remains as something that could've and would've.

It's fun, controls are something to get used to that's for sure. Wish there was a menu when you're in game to see what mods are enabled

Automation Sim Lovers Beware: Tedium Can Spell Disaster

For what it's worth, my nearly-40 hour playtime with Hydroneer was over the span of quite a few years - before the Farming update and DLC - and mostly consisted of picking it up for 2-6 hours, inevitably burning out due to lack of QoL features, then trying again a few months later in the vain hope of an improved experience.

It was hard to compile my thoughts on Hydroneer for a long time, but after my latest attempt and becoming frustrated with how utterly anti-player the simple act of buying items is, I'm both putting this back on the shelf and unfortunately leaving a warning.

Hydroneer starts off as a pretty gruelling grind that sets the tone early. Drills don't come quickly, or easily - requiring quite a lot of starting cash that you need to manually sift and pan dirt (or engage in the "click to acquire" fishing minigame) for 1~2 hours - and once the first is acquired, the game largely becomes a waiting one as you struggle to get enough Iron to make more drills, as you can't directly buy any more.

This highlights the two largest problems I have with the experience as a whole: the tedium and the lack of quality-of-life features.


Tedium

Subjective, but I've clicked with monotonous task-based games before without much gripe. The main point in making the tedious aspects of a game fun can come from a mixed bag of feedback, how you engage with mechanics, and how you're rewarded.
Hydroneer's earliest minutes highlight the main issue behind this: you're going to always be doing the same thing, you will always be at the same tech level once drills are unlocked, no matter what. Waiting for the numbers to climb up, ever so slothfully, so you can make that number climb a minuscule amount faster with yet another drill.

A grand weight of 300 iron is required to get successive drills, which can easily eat up hours of your time while waiting for the first drill to chew out that amount. This tedium is barely broken up by the other ores/gems, as they ultimately fuel supplementary funds to (selectively useful) upgrades, ranging from lifegiving pipes, to the bane of my existence, conveyor belts.


Lacking Quality-of-Life

On the note of conveyors, everything in Hydroneer is handled with physicality as priority, ultimately to the player's detriment after a few hours of play. There is no inventory, there is no HUD, you're expected to finagle items one at a time in your hands.

This isn't such an issue early on, when you only have a few items to work with, but a quick browse of the Discussions thread or Reddit will honestly highlight the bottleneck effect that I and others get once you're at the point of expanding your operations.

For conveyors to be so incredibly bulky, even with the use of pallets, to buy a simple setup just to cut and sort gemstones should not take two full-round trips to accomplish. Why two trips? Because no matter your stacking skills, pallets do have an invisible limit to what they can hold, and you'll find yourself missing several pieces you've just bought from the shop, but couldn't see due to being blinded by their models while holding the pallet itself.

Just let us unlock something to have items shipped directly to the plot. It's a bafflingly easy fix to the biggest frustration of expanding.


Conclusion

If you're into automation sims, or like the idea of an extremely slow grind, and don't mind having large open spaces as the game rewards smaller setups, give it a shot. Two hours, provided you get the 300 iron for your second drill, will give you a taste of what the game's core is going to stay as.

I won't touch on the farming update aspect outside of my annoyance that another arbitrary and lackluster system took priority over making Hydroneer feel better to engage with, despite the tsunami of feedback Foulball have received. This stance is also reflected in the strange, paradoxical design choice of "here's several immensely large play areas given to you, that lags horrifically on great rigs when you try set up operations to extract more than a sixth of it".

I get the point of sticking to visions, but when the vision compromises the gamefeel to the point of people begging you to fix it, to make it feel even moderately better, you're not going the right way.

A forethought: no blueprint mode especially hurts. You can't buy items in bulk, nor can you plan out to avoid successive trips (when the pallet decides to work).

bought a mining game, forced to do farming to continue mainline quest. farming mechanics are just pure tedium to fill time between mining tasks with no option to skip past farming if you arent interested in it, loved the game up until this point but the farming is so forced I cant recommend to someone that wants to play past 40 hours. I'll grind past the farming but thats what it'll be. a grind, not engaging or thought provoking, or creative design inspiring as it was up until this point. it takes 10 mins of sunlight to grow tomato plants that get you a average of 80T. the water sprinklers to automate just a a small fraction of that process cost 2100T, The farming aspect of the game might make me give up on it entirely

this is a very good game the only thing i did not like was i had to use creative mode to play the game

Still in the beginning stages. It's fun, but a little sandboxy and repetitive still. There's a story of sorts to it and an overall goal, but nothing to make you care. I do plan on coming back after a few updates.

good game lots of fun till your game crashes cause your ores get stuck

Alright well i was looking at reviews if im being honest some not all werent helpful just people being lazy in a game that takes time to learn and understand certain concepts or just being completely lazy in the game


But i would personally recommended if you dont like story cutscenes (i hate these) and its all just open world and creative and the only limiter really is the lag and game engine but i havent had many problems with them so that will be all for my review.

I just tried to return to play this. The tutorial doesnt work and when I start a game there is no shovel to be found. This game is worthless now.

Very relaxing, cool explosions, and always something to improve. 10-10. Play it already!

Once you get to automation the game is all about making full on lists and more! the game has all the perks of being a factory game! the game is easy to play if you know what your doing-and even if you don't its still pretty easy though i would say the hardest part for me is logic and wiring-but setting up conveyer belts and automating it,even when i buy too much,its still the best part of the game...also running over NPCs is pretty fun to see them fly lol.

i absolutely love this game. sure, its got its flaws but ive put many hours into this game. but then one time when i saved the game and shut down my computer the next time i joined ad loaded the save it was completely empty, no starter items, the terrain was reseted i dont know what i did wrong but pls fix.

Fun game. The game is a bit tedious in the beginning, hand panning for gold is time consuming! Intentionally designed as a bit of a click fest right off the bat since you have no inventory and can only hold one item at a time, but damn it feels good once you start automating things!! Almost every purchase reduces your work load and streamlines that sweet cash flow which is quite rewarding! The world is fun to explore, could be bigger and have more interaction/story but that's not really what the game is about. At it's core it seems to be all about maximizing automation to gain $$ then spend and build more! Why? Because you can!

This game is very chill. The multiplayer function is a little wonky, but otherwise it's good

It is amazingly fun to play and it tests your skills through the expert designing for pipes miners convyers and alot of other stuff and that is why i leave this reivew because i love this game.

good:its fun Bad:need better graphics card

its not a bad game its good for killing time its a grind to start with but the dlc needs some work as my rig has lag when ever im in the dlc part and i can run most a games no lag

i used to watch some one play this game when i was younger and i wanted it so badly. now im 13 nearly 14 and i found it and i love it i play it with the old glitches and its so fun

This is a great game for people who are unemployed and want a very boring job that doesn't pay. There's nothing to do except mine. It takes about 20 clicks or key presses to get one unit of ore, which sells for very little. You have to pick up and sell everything one by one, meaning it takes like an hour and lots of carpal tunnel to buy even a few basic pieces of equipment. On top of this, the UI is the worst I've ever dealt with in any game. There's no 2D interface, the game relies on dropping things physically in the game world. It's easy to mess that up. For example, you have to drop a hot bar on an anvil in a specific location and have a limited time to do it. It's easy to drop in the wrong place, in fact I did it about 30% of the time. If you do so, it's easy to accidentally pick up the anvil rather than the bar. In either case you have to run back and heat the bar again. Very annoying.

---{ Graphics }---
☐ You forget what reality is
☐ Beautiful
☐ Good
☐ Decent
☑ Bad
☐ Don‘t look too long at it
☐ MS-DOS

---{ Gameplay }---
☐ Very good
☑ Good
☐ It's just gameplay
☐ Mehh
☐ Watch paint dry instead
☐ Just don't

---{ Audio }---
☐ Eargasm
☐ Very good
☐ Good
☑ Not too bad
☐ Bad
☐ I'm now deaf

---{ Audience }---
☐ Kids
☑ Teens
☑ Adults
☐ Boomers

---{ PC Requirements }---
☐ Check if you can run paint
☑ Potato
☐ Decent
☐ Fast
☐ Rich boi
☐ Ask NASA if they have a spare computer

---{ Game Size }---
☑ Floppy Disk
☐ Old Fashioned
☐ Workable
☐ Big
☐ Will eat 10% of your 1TB hard drive
☐ You will want an entire hard drive to hold it
☐ You will need to invest in a black hole to hold all the data

---{ Difficulty }---
☐ Just press 'W'
☐ Easy
☐ Easy to learn / Hard to master
☑ Significant brain usage
☐ Difficult
☐ Dark Souls

---{ Grind }---
☐ Nothing to grind
☐ Only if u care about leaderboards/ranks
☐ Isn't necessary to progress
☐ Average grind level
☑ Too much grind
☐ You'll need a second life for grinding

---{ Story }---
☑ No Story
☐ Some lore
☐ Average
☐ Good
☐ Lovely
☐ It'll replace your life

---{ Game Time }---
☐ Long enough for a cup of coffee
☐ Short
☐ Average
☐ Long
☑ Extremely Long
☐ To infinity and beyond

---{ Price }---
☐ It's free!
☑ Worth the price
☐ If it's on sale
☐ If u have some spare money left
☐ Not recommended
☐ You could also just burn your money

---{ Bugs }---
☐ Never heard of
☑ Minor bugs
☐ Can get annoying
☐ ARK: Survival Evolved
☐ The game itself is a big terrarium for bugs

---{ ? / 10 }---
☐ 1
☐ 2
☐ 3
☐ 4
☐ 5
☐ 6
☐ 7
☑ 8
☐ 9
☐ 10

Feels like factorio but kinda easy. Very fun game to play while alone and w/ friends. Worth buying if u r in this type of game. It's great how stuff works, the grind is kinda boring, but once u get the mechanics, it'll become pleasant. I recommend playing while listening to good music or maybe a podcast, once the music is not the best part of the game.
Worth trying, not worth making your life an "hydroneering". Consider this game as the main entrance to more difficult games as satisfactory or factorio.

Very good and relaxing game, takes tons of time and effort to get rich, but still offers satisfying factory building/maintaining aspects.

The gameplay loop in this game might be OK, but there are too many issues with it for me to recommend it. The game is, to put it bluntly, needlessly obnoxious. The interface is absolutely awful - the target cursor is rarely relevant - when you want to place something down/inside something else, you have to position the small circular *shadow* over where you want it to drop - it is nowhere near your cursor. Of the around 90 minutes spent in the game so far, at least 45 has been spent re-doing tasks because I missed a target.

The expected gameplay loop early on is:
* Get a shovel load of dirt and dump it in the basin.
* Fill a bucket with water and pour it in the basin.
* Use the brush to swish it around and expose ore/gems.
* Place 5-ish pieces of ore in a smelting pot and heat it over the fire.
* Pour the melted ore into a mold.
* Grab the mold while it's still hot, place it in the proper spot on an anvil, and hammer before it cools to craft the selected item.

The *actual* gameplay loop is as follows:
* Put a shovel load of dirt into the basin.
* Grab a bucket of water and pour it on the ground next to the basin.
* Try 2 or 3 more times until water actually lands in the bucket.
* Swish it around to reveal ore.
* Repeat to get enough ore to smelt.
* Drop a couple pieces of ore into the smelting pot with several landing on the ground outside. Search for the ones you dropped and put them back in the pot.
* Pick the pot up and try to place it on the smelting fire. Land it just enough on the edge that it rolls over, dumps the ore out, and falls off the fireplace. Collect the ore back into the pot and finally get it on the fire.
* Once the ore is melted, pour it into a mold, starting about a 10-second timer before the bar is too cold to work.
* Quickly drop the pot and grab the ore, then drop the ore on the opposite side of the anvil because the drop location is *so* far off from your target cursor. Pick it back up and finally after 4-5 tries get it into the spot to work it, at which point it is too cold to work.
* Put the bar back in the smelting pot, re-melt it, re-pour it, and try again to race the clock and get lucky enough to have the bar land where you need it.

Three fourths of your time in this game are spent fighting absolutely asinine controls for no good reason. They *could* make it so the cursor accurately targeted where you set stuff down, but instead chose to use a pointlessly obtuse shadow that you may not even notice, and definitely won't show up at all if you don't have light overhead, making it pointless to even think of working at night.

I absolutely do not recommend this game based on the terrible controls alone.

Hydroneer is effectively a cartoony sim-lite, but lacks the charm or progression of most sims I've played. Your first couple hours will be hand washing dirt in a pan with very poor controls, trying to earn enough to set up simple automation. Once you've done that... you're effectively done. There's "higher tier" versions of the original equipment to buy, but it's literally just reskins with a faster output. There's some simple logic systems, but they're barely needed. There's other plots of land to buy than the starter plot, but they fundamentally gain you nothing other than more space to build the same stuff.

Hydroneer is somehow radically less satisfying than even a standard farming sim, I think because there's very little clear progression (all the plots of land can be bought in the first few hours), and the mechanics barely change over time. Mixed with the lifelessness of the world and the poor visuals it's just not much of a game. I picked up the game and its DLC for $12, and even that feels like I overpaid. Minecraft over a decade ago had a better mining sim experience via mods... if you're itching for something like this, just go pick Minecraft up again.

Definitely give it a chance past the horrible intro/tutorial (lack thereof) What's there is a very good mining game.

There's logic chains so you can automate pretty much everything late game and it can be a lot of fun figuring this out with the physics gameplay. I enjoyed the logic chaining a lot compared to Satisfactory, because everything is physical vs just imaginary on a belt.

This is an amazing game and props to the devs but if you do not have time to grind it will probably take longer to complete but if you do it is still an amazing game to just mess around in.

This game has the quality of a 2015 roblox game while costing me more than some of the most high quality games out there.

My Issue Is on the Multiplayer Aspect

I can respect the grind as a single developer trying to create a game nowadays, especially with the oversaturation of games in the overall market. That being said, it might possibly be an overshadowed mistake; you need to talk about the multiplayer aspect of the game if the user-defined tags, and many people say it's multiplayer, but in fact it isn't. You need to understand "Remote Play" isn't actually multiplayer. That being said, I understand that the developer is actively trying to get multiplayer to work, but if you don't actively say there isn't multiplayer, people will be confused, like me.

I shouldn't need to go to the developer's YouTube channel, looking for this information on multiplayer and finding a video that was recorded 2 years ago.  It should be on the main Steam page illustrating (possibly through a video, picture, or text) that there isn't a true multiplayer, but it's active development. I hate to be that guy when it's a single developer, but you can put in the description or something that there isn't actually multiplayer and that there is only remote play. 

This game has potential, and I'm in no way saying the game is bad. But I bought it specifically to play with someone, only to find out you can't after purchasing, which is never good. It doesn't matter if you're an AAA developer or an Indie developer.

After having invested 90+ hours into this game, one day upon logging in I discover my entire game has been randomly reset. All buildings, vehicles, tools, mining builds, resources, money, etc just gone.
Looking through the help forums it becomes clear this is has been a common and well known issue among devs for years. I’m not sure if they don’t know how to fix it or just don’t care to do anything about it. What is the point of an auto backup save it also becomes corrupted when your main save becomes corrupted? I kept Steam Cloud save disabled because that is what they recommend to prevent this type of corruption. So I have no way of recovering my game. It shouldn’t be necessary to have to manually backup your save files each time I close the game.
What a colossal waste of time. Don’t make the same mistake I did. Back to Satisfactory for me.

It's got charm, but I can't really recommend with all the cons. I like the idea of it, panning for minerals and ore, and automation. Sadly, the jank , optimization and lacking of quality of life hampers it. My cons are:

-The tutorial is not clear enough, it doesn't really explain much at all, I had to learn from guides and youtube videos.
-The lack of inventory system and hotbar really hamper the game. Want to check your map? Go get your map. Want to switch tools? Climb above ground and grab one at a time. Imagine in minecraft if you are digging at the beach and get 200 sand blocks down and need a pickaxe. You need to climb all the way back to the surface to get it. You even have to carry money with you. It's easy to lose things because of this, and makes it hard to store items without the game chugging. I see the dev defending this in the comments, and I respect having a vision, but if everyone complains about the same thing, maybe you should consider having it as an option for those who want it, and keeping your vision as an option for those who don't, as a majority of the reviews, and even gameplay videos from those who love the game complain about this. It's supposed to be immersive, but it makes the game a chore to play, rather than fun.
-Placing things are not accurate, and you often times accidentally grab the thing you're trying to use, like an anvil, rather than the tiny gem on top of it, and have to place the anvil again and then reorganize the things laying on top of it. This happens with controller and KB&M
-The optimization is really poor. In an automation game, this is really bad. The frame rate chugs on my 3060 and 3070 with so many things active, and the way the inventory is laid out, nothing despawns and things accumulate taking up resources really quickly, and even strong machines start to buckle quickly.
-NPCs and quest are useless. They hand you a parchment with a item and number on it, and if you hand them the wrong thing they throw it on the ground and say "That's not right!". Throwing tiny items makes them easy to lose, and it should be improved.
-Things are way to expensive to use for what you get with your money. If you're not cheating, it'll take you hours of tedious panning, and selling to get enough for basic pipes and a conveyor belt pieces, which won't really get you started. You have to either use creative mode, which kills any sense of progression, or go at a slow, tedious pace and have progression move at a snails pace.
-Navigating the roads is confusing without the map, which due to the inventory system you have to carry with you at all times in a truck bed, then get out to check it as everything looks the same texture wise.


This game could be great, but the lack of budging on the vision the dev has I feel is keeping it from that greatness. Once again, I respect having a vision, but if it's a very vocal complaint maybe your vision is not for everyone. Most negative reviews all have the same complaints, and I bought it anyway, but I see what they mean. Any excitement and urge to play the game is killed by the thoughts of how tedious it is. Any valid criticism is met with the dev replying that the game isn't for you and to return it, but that's a sad view in my opinion as it's just deflecting criticism rather than using it to grow and improve.

Don't waste your time on it. Game developers never tried to play game themselves it seems, otherwise they wouldn't want this disappointment to be public.

I played this game quite a while ago, refunded it quite quickly aswell once I found out how abysmal remote play together was. The game might be good but I won't find out until it has proper Online Co-op.

The concept is interesting but everything about the beginning of the game was extremely tedious and unfun to the point that it felt like a complete chore and overall waste of time. Controls are unintuitive with no HUD to assist, and interactions are janky (especially the cart)

I'm updating my review because there is a tutorial and DON'T overlook it.. There is a lot of fun here but it's still clunky in some ways and there's a LOT it doesn't tell you.

There is SO much it doesn't tell you, like you have to search half the map to find conveyors because it won't just tell you which town to find them. Etc.

It doesn't tell you enough, I can't get 1 singular conveyor to work with the water pressure system. I have water pressure. I've TRIED to like this game. It makes it very very difficult. They have an expansion when I feel like this base game still has huge problems with the basic stuff.

6 million in hydrocoin, backed my truck up to the scrapyard to get rid of some old equipment, burned coins. hours lost. so many bugs in game its insane

This game has a horrendously tedious start and I honestly don't want to force myself to get to the part where it gets less tedious. Game would really benefit from an inventory system

Very depressing how the game has turned out. When the game first came out I bought it instantly and was very excited, never was a fan on single player games but this one was different and enjoyable. After a while the game got quite dry and boring so I left it for a while and continued to keep on watching the developers updates on YouTube… HE ANNOUNCES MULTIPLAYER! My cousin and I get super excited and keep waiting for the update to come, months after the expected release of it went by and finally was here. We hopped in a game and…. What? You have to use controller and one person has to do keyboard, and it’s split screen? This wasn’t was promised, we went and watched the devlog and he said he couldn’t figure out how to do it properly. He really should have just not released the version of multiplayer that he came up with and asked for help. I drop the game again as the multiplayer (still) is not functional or fun for whoever uses the controller. Time passes by and the dev makes a major update announcement where tons of more content is coming. This is awesome just what the game needs…. It’s a f***ing DLC at the same cost of the game.

My complete trust and faith in the developer has been lost and this game is no longer ever going to excite me on updates. To build up a dev team and then fire them all and then struggle with getting a functioning multiplayer and then complaining on dev logs that you have no help really ain’t the best move. Save your money and play Minecraft tekkit.

(Dev blocked me on twitter after I tweeted at him saying how it’s a terrible idea to release a full game price DLC with non functioning multiplayer 😂)



[Edit as a response to developer]:

The games released cost was $8.99. I also recall from your previous devlogs that you "Reduced your team." In another devlog you mention how if we the community wanted to wait for 2.0 to have a full multiplayer experience and the majority of the comments wanted that. Also my tweet was exactly: "how are you releasing a dlc that is basically the cost of the game without a functioning multiplayer" to which you blocked me. So I really don't think you take criticism that well.

The game badly needs a story mode or some kind of quest / tutorial to try and get you off of the ground and out of the early game faster. Whatever might seem interesting from an automation standpoint is going to get erased in your first hour of shoveling dirt into a bucket. This aint Factorio or Satsifactory.

The controls and "everything is an individual item" design is the real killer. I can't remember the last time I played a game with controls and an environment this clunky. When combined with no inventory and the fact that EVERYTHING must be interacted with in this extremely clunky manner, it just kills the experience. Imagine trying to play an FPS-based crafting game, but the crosshair alternates between the middle of your screen when you need to pick something up, and somewhere vaguely to the bottom right when you need to drop something. Now also imagine I just took hundreds of rocks and scattered them on the ground for you to pick up and put down If you manage to tediously put all of the rocks in a basket, you get a few more points than if you didn't.

What's the reward? Well more rocks of course. That's the game.

If you were given a magnet / vacuum or any kind of tool in the first 10 minutes of the game that could avoid the tedium of picking up individual nuggets or dirt clods, or perhaps ANY kind of inventory, you might avoid at least some of the time-wasting effort of scraping up pebbles off the ground. I vaguely recall from Youtube vids that such an item exists later in the game, but it's doubtful most people will get there if they can't so much as make it past the hurdle of being directed to a wiki to learn or know exactly how to progress from hand-digging and hand-sorting to even the most basic of automation.

Lol, I still can't fathom who thought it was a good idea (and then kept it in the game at release) to make picking things up use the crosshair, but placing things down use a completely different crosshair instead of just, you know, just dropping it from the middle of your POV. I'm guessing a dev figured that holding the item in the middle of your screen might block your view, but then why not just hold it to the side until it's going to be placed in the middle? It's so awkward and unintuitive that I can't imagine how people didn't complain of this in the years of early access.

The game is just completely and utterly empty, nothing to do but grind in order to grind faster but theres no goal to work towards or story to unearth, theres just nothing...

I really really really wanted to like this game and was happy to see it on sale for 6$, BUT this game makes it so hard to enjoy when every little thing annoys the living shit out of me. I jump into the game without doing the tutorial and figure out what to do at the start, mining is quite tedious but that's fine i just started. After awhile trying to figure out how to sell my ore, I decided to go do the tutorial to see what I'm missing. Finally figured out how to sell stuff, so okay fine my fault. But I eventually got to the part where it wants you to make a ring, okay seems pretty straight forward, after struggling to make the stupid gem stay on the anvil without rolling off i finally go to make the damn ring but when i hit the anvil with the hammer, IT DOES NOTHING, already a bit annoyed I try to add more gold and add different gems, nothing worked. All this being paired with jank ass controls and always PICKING UP THE STUPID FUCKING ANVIL WHENEVER I TRY TO TAKE STUFF OFF OF IT got insanely frustrating.

A lot of other things just made the game a chore and just annoying af to play, things like for some reason the game wants you to pour the dirt in to the small bucket just to pour it into the bigger bucket like wtf I instead just poured the dirt straight into the bigger bucket. Other things like grabbing water is so counter-intuitive, having to drop the bucket in the water then pick it up instead of just holding the bucket and clicking the stream to collect water was just dumb and time wasting, on top of that the action of putting water into the bucket, instead of being able to click on the bucket to pour water in LIKE YOU DO WITH THE DIRT, you instead have to line up the water bucket over the large bucket to dump water into it. Other things like the stupid wagon gets annoying to. I have no clue why when they made it so ANY PART of the wagon can be clicked and and immediately attaches to you, gets very frustrating when trying to take small ore out, and ON TOP of that the wagon will just magically attach to you and face what ever way you are facing which cant be kinda of annoying as well.

I may just refund it because if this is how the first hour of gameplay is gunna go, I really don't want to see what else this game has to over. for me its a pass at this time.

PS: just saw that a QoL update came out recently and I really want to know where that quality is lmao, the placing of objects like anvil and stuff is so jank its a pain doesnt seem like much of a QoL update.

I enjoyed watching Let's Game It Out play this game and picked it up on sale a few months ago and finally got around to trying it out. On first starting up the game I was just dropped in the world with no explanation of what I'm supposed to do, what the controls are, or how to interact with anything. For an indie game in early access this is fine, but for a game that's been out for 4 years now with this much visibility it was shocking to see how poor the actual game presentation is.

The bigger issue though is the controls. One of the clunkiest games I've played (outside of intentionally clunky games like surgeon simulator) where you have to manually pick up each and every item in your hands, set it down so you can pick up the next one, and repeat again and again and again. Extremely tedious and not fun.

Sadly from reading the reviews it sounds like this game doesn't really get better, just remains a clunky mess all the way to the end. Doesn't sound like a lot of fun to me.

Played for 5 hours. Opened the menu, Save and exit to desktop with steam cloud save enabled. CAme back to the game and the safe file is completly empty. So is the "backup".

A quick google search told me that this has been an ongoing issue for 2 whole years. Uninstalled and applied for a refund. The gameplay really doesnt matter when when you can lose your entire progress at any given moment.

Fun, enjoyable, and interesting with a good progression system and lots to do is a great game to play.

Love the game but I hope they fix the Mole so that it actually digs straight and level. As is, down digs down and forward digs down at a more shallow angle.