This game could be the greatest colony sim for years, please fix it: An open letter to the Devs.

[magic rune]

Before I say anything, I would like to mention that this is an alt account, I am also a game developer and am a couple of years into a game of a similar genre. I understand how difficult development is, especially for a game like this with such little media attention and support, and can sense that you are likely in or near the brink of "development hell" where many things need foundationally rewritten. Best of luck to you guys, and I hope you guys see success in the future. Please read the full thing, it can be a hard read but it is all important.

I want to start by saying this game is foundationally amazing, and combines many aspects not seen before in automation/colony sim games before fantastically. It currently has many dozens of hours of playtime and is a very unique title with huge potential. I hope this game continues to grow and thrive and I anticipate it's 1.0 release a lot. If the devs are reading this, please take it with great importance as these are issues that eat away at the game and make in unfun to play, and will lead to it's staggering failure if left unsolved. These are not just issues that I have seen, but others see and eventually Streamers, Youtubers, and Game Critics will see and report on to the detriment of this great game. The top reviews on steam for your game right now are FLAMING you guys for issues such as these, and it is no doubt hitting your sales hugely and driving customers away. If these are not addressed it will absolutely hit you in the money, and since you guys have earned a ton of money from the game already with EA, I would argue it is imperative that you remedy these before the game dies. A "1.0 release" means nothing if the fanbase is driven away from the game already.

For starters, the QOL changes

The game can be annoying and downright frustrating in many aspects, and it is unbelievable easy to soft-lock yourself in this game, more so than any other title I have ever seen or played. A number of things that should be added IMO is a small set of passive research to prevent research soft-lock, bulk research or specific research rewards to give you researches you will absolutely need, as you do not know what you will and won't need in terms of research an hour or two into the future, and what you need may be two or three researches down. If I had known about this the game would be an instant refund, but it takes more than two hours to see the problems with this game. I had asked many of my development friends to play the game and try it out, and they stated it "wasn't even worth pirating" and pointed out the same issues I have pointed out

Research tree

Another issue is research itself, this is without a doubt the worst research tree I have seen in any game. There is absolutely no reason someone should have to unlock speed upgrades as a prerequisite for a machine that is needed to complete a time-sensitive task. It bogs down the game and artificially slows it down, making it annoying to play. Furthermore, there is no way for one to know what path to take to get a given building. I suggest that research be seperated more, with a wider tree and more options to avoid this nonsensical tree placement. I should not have to research POWER POLES to be able to speed up regolith sorting, nor should I have to research rovers to unlock salvaging, which is a tech very much needed in the early game. It took me several restarts to figure out which tech salvaging was behind.

Obviously, things like rare earth metal processing should be before circuit production, but there is absolutely no reason I should not know that by researching rare earth metal production I will unlock microchip factories. There is no reason to obscure the research tree, and it only hurts the player and serves as a detriment to their gameplay and enjoyment.

The research tree NEEDS to separate speed upgrades into speed upgrades, with a separate tree. I should not have to research speed upgrades (which are far too expensive to be reasonable to use in-gameplay regardless and most will never use except for a handful of times) to unlock techs that are necessary for production. I have attached a screenshot of a proper way to set up the tree.

As a side-node, some of the paths just make no sense at all. Why do I have to research microchip production to unlock bulk storage? Or the RTG for solar upgrades? Or the fuel factory for the large battery? If I have large batteries, it makes solar energy more viable, and fuel less needed. It would make far more sense for storage to be its own tree, and solar in it's own tree, and batteries in its own, ect, also attached as a picture here. Once again, WHY ARE SPEED UPGRADES PREREQUESITES FOR THINGS?

The Bugs

It is well-known that the game is a buggy mess for a lot of people, and being in early acess is not an excuse for this, as much as people champion it. You have been paid to make this game with kickstarter, and are now charging people money for the game. It should not be possible to soft-lock yourseslf at the grand release of EA, where you have likely made hundreds of thousands of dollars from. You can soft-lock yourself with quests, by building the wrong things or researching the wrong things, People don't eat and drink enough and die, there are NO indicators of how to remedy these issues either and just about everyone that has played this has restarted SEVERAL TIMES because of it.

These issues have largely been ignored and swept under the rug, and when they are fixed new untested ones appear and bother many people. It is very irresponsible to have people pay for a product that has such little care put into it for bug testing, and issues persist longer than they should.

The Story

The story and voice acting are meh, I've seen better but it is good overall. The issue right now is that you are expected to produce resources in huge quantities before you have anywhere near production lines for them set up or have all lines researched. The laser is timed horribly right now. Oh? You produced 100 iron bars and shipped them? You must be able to make 3K of them and several thousand of other resources aswell!

This is a poor progression path. Progression should be gradual, not all of the sudden. Even though the time limit is high, the time pressure makes the game unfun, and does not let you relax. Imagine if satisfactory, a game that take dozens if not hundreds of hours to complete, had a time limit? It makes people want to play the game less, and forces them to speedrun the game rather than taking their time and enjoying the hard work you've put into it.

Apathy

You KNEW the game was in this state when you went EA, you KNEW about the bugs, you KNEW about the complaints of the story, you KNEW about the complaints with the tech tree, you KNEW all of this, and still very irresponsibly decided to go EA and make it paid too early, delivering not a EA product that needs time, but more of an alpha that is bug-ridden and doesn't even have a ironed-out foundation or a gameplay loop. A lot of people are starting to believe this is cash-grab, rather than a game that someone actually cares about. I care about this game, and thousands of people do too. Please don't let this game fall to these simple things. Please fix this game. It may be easy to write this off as "Oh, they just don't like the game", or "Haters wanna hate" but these aren't haters, these are people that have bought and enjoyed your game, only to come to hate it for these things which you've ignored. I hope that in a couple of months or a year that these are all bygones, and the game grows and thrives because of it rather than in spite of it.

[magic rune]

This was written some time ago even though it was posted yesterday, and I would like to say that the recent updates have been very nice and I am very glad to see that the things I and so many others have mentioned have been fixed. While there are a lot of core problems left, this is a wonderful step in the right direction! Good job!

[crude imp]

Thanks for your feedback and caring!

Some of your suggestions do seem helpful, others we find controversial. But let's elaborate a bit more:

[crude imp]

The research map really needs to be finalized and we plan to make a completely new map with a circular design, in which you can develop in all directions. There will be main branches, with key technologies and secondary branches, with accelerations and scenery. You're absolutely right that accelerations shouldn't be in line with key technologies and block them. Unfortunately, right now we're squeezed by the space and research tree design we did back in the early years of the game's development and the current map is an attempt to squeeze the most out of what we have. We'll try to balance it out a bit, but we'll put the main effort into developing a new one.

[crude imp]

By the way, I'm not quite sure why microchips shouldn't be behind the purification of rare minerals? That makes a lot of sense. Obviously you wrote a review back when the map was closed and did not give detailed information about future research, now it is open and the player can plan his development in advance. Good

[crude imp]

Here I can only wish you good luck in your development. Try to make a good launch of the game on steam within very limited resources and have time to take everything into account. Our main mistake is that we didn't test the new EA launch update enough, and the main problems are observed on weak machines. It's a constant search for a compromise between adding new interesting content and full-scale testing. Nevertheless, we've fixed the major bugs fairly quickly, made many edits to the balance and continue to develop the game.

[crude imp]

Yeah, the company in The Crust is not for the faint of heart. You're right to point out that Satisfactory doesn't have timers for time, and neither does The Crust in sandbox mode, because Satisfactory is essentially a sandbox, there's no story component or challenges at all. We released two modes at once, but people's main focus is on the story. We understand that people play in different styles and have different gaming experience, so in future updates we will add a choice of difficulty modes and detailed settings for starting a new game.

[crude imp]

I disagree with your statements about the game being unfinished. The game is constantly evolving, with new content and mechanics being added regularly. Back in May, we showcased the game to a large audience, and it was ready for the EA release because it didn't include the story mode and some new mechanics. Perhaps we should have released only the sandbox mode and held back the new mechanics, as Satisfactory did, but we chose this path, and it's not a bad one. Many people are absolutely in love with The Crust, and this motivates us to continue developing it.

Another good observation about Satisfactory is that we know it as it is now, but it went through a long journey of problems and mistakes, starting its EA on the Epic Game Store, which didn't have reviews at that time. They faced issues similar to ours.

What matters is what you focus on and what you do. We are focused on developing a good game and reading all the constructive suggestions we receive. However, empty speculations about vague concepts do not help us and only distract us.

We have a very simple choice every day - spend time on development or spend time reading and responding to long massages with very little constructive feedback.

This experience might help you in developing your own game, and I wish you good luck with it.

[crude imp]

Thank you, we have tried to get a lot done over the last two weeks and will continue to work hard on the game.

[magic rune]

I can't thank you enough for the responses. I hadn't considered the sandbox mode at all (which largely invalidates a lot of what I have said), and can definitely see that this game is quickly being worked on and improved tremendously. I see that my review was largely rash and didn't get to the point nearly enough. I am very fond with this game and see that you guys really care about this game. I wish you all good luck!