Figured I'd start a thread for this.

I played an hour or so, got through two days of game time. I'm not a huge fan of the genre, but the combination of Obsidian, the unique setting, playing with friends, and already having Game Pass got me to try it. It is very much "one of those" games, but I enjoyed it well enough. Being able to craft smaller component items inside the menu for larger items is a HUGE convenience thing that every game with crafting should do. The lawn mites are low-level enemies that seem to aggro on sight. The stink bugs are high-level enemies that aggro on sight. I didn't see any spiders, and I'm not looking forward to it.

DO NOT ATTACK A LADYBUG EARLY ON. It will go poorly for you.

I haven't gotten too far into the building yet. Bigger materials that you need to build walls, like weed/grass stalks, can't be added to your inventory and can only be carried on stacks of 5, which makes gathering the supplies necessary a bit more tedious than it would normally be.

I'm having fun so far. Has anyone else played this yet? What are your thoughts?

So in a nutshell it's Nickelodeon survival game.

The premise looked interesting and me being old enough to remember a movie gem called Honey, I Shrunk the Kids I was interested in playing this.
But I'm not a fan of survival games so I'll probably pass on this one.

I'm definitely interested in trying. After playing loads of Subnautica, the promise of a story focused one of these sounds great!

In the trailer it lightheartedly said you can play this solo. Is that possible?

@merxworx01: The game is definitely designed for multiple people. There is a single-player mode. Based on what I've played so far, it seems like a single player would have a hard time maintaining a base and defending it from attacks that often include a dozen enemy insects.

@bladeofcreation: the insect can destroy your base and crafting stations? Hrmm I might hold off till it get update more. No one on streams I've seen mentioned it yet but the style and the visuals of the game (I know this kind of praise is easy to mock and dismiss but) really looks like a pixar film rendered in real time. I'm surprised no one is talking about how great it looks.

Also the crafting seems well thought out and the enemies look like they have default neutral/agro states that speak to the type of creature you are dealing with and what tech level you possess so you can start converting real threats to farming sources.

@merxworx01: Yeah, they can destroy your structures and it's incredibly frustrating.

I agree that the game looks fantastic.

Played some co-op with my brother and had a really crazy few in-game days where we kept getting attacked seemingly out of nowhere. While a swarm of ants can be dealt with, we got attacked by a swarm of larvae. Despite having crafted armor, we didn't notice a difference in survivability. Enemies will chase you across large distances, but can break aggro.

The problem is that once they're in your base, there's really nothing you can do. The penalty for dying is that you drop all of your gear. You can pick it back up (and you don't lose it if you die before picking it up; I have about a dozen half-full backpacks strewn about the yard...). Picking it up will re-equip your weapons and tools, but won't re-equip your armor. This means that it's really easy to get into a negative feedback loop of dying, respawning, and so on while you slowly whittle away a mob's health.

We had to re-locate our base twice. One of the most frustrating things was getting attacked by a wolf spider. We managed to get to our base and sleep with the spider staring at us. Sleeping didn't cause the spider to de-aggro or even move. It watched us sleep (creepy!) and attacked us in the morning. We then went absolutely ham on the spider and in the middle of attacking, it moved it a way that caused it to de-aggro, regain its health (we had it down to about 50%), then immediately re-aggro. I quit in disgust; i have little patience for this genre precisely because of these issues. My brother managed to trap the spider under a leaf in a way it couldn't get out and he managed to kill it.

This is very much ONE OF THOSE GAMES. I don't really see how single-player could possibly be feasible. We're gonna play some more this week and hopefully we won't have the same issues. I'll definitely post more impressions if people are interested.

I just don't get it. I really do not understand why this game is doing so well online. After a few hours I was so bored and felt like I had no reason to ever pick this game up again.

@mrgreenman: Are you generally a fan of this genre? Is this game doing something (or not doing something) other games like it tend to do? As I mentioned earlier, this genre isn't really my thing so I'm not sure how it compares to others.

@bladeofcreation: So I finally got chance put a few hours into this. I like a lot of what it is doing and I like how the ants seem to follow each other to resources(like the containers in my base)but it looks like I am running into the same situations you've outlined.

Playing this single player and I find my self getting killed often nearby my base. Once you built enough sedentary items, bugs start to congregate at your base. I don't know if I saw them breaking anything yet but they are shaking things around like they are trying to. Stopping regular ants isn't a problem but when they call in four or more workers it becomes difficult to block all their attacks.

The wolf spider seemed to have a path finding issue navigating the tall grass and was not able to leave the research station which made progression a bit difficult. Next time I'll try to make a base at the machine and see if I could double fortify the four holes outside and maybe use some of it as a forth wall or use the holes as bottleneck should I find myself in a fight.

I'll keep try in it out and hopefully I can figure out a way to do this solo.

@bladeofcreation: So I finally got chance to put a few hours into this. I like a lot of what it is doing and I like how the ants seem to follow each other to resources(like the containers in my base)but it looks like I am running into the same situations you've outlined.

Playing this single player and I find my self getting killed often nearby my base. Once you built enough sedentary items, bugs start to congregate at your there. I don't know if I saw them breaking anything yet but they are shaking things around like they are trying to. Stopping regular ants isn't a problem but when they call in four or more workers it becomes difficult to block all their attacks.

The wolf spider seemed to have a path finding issue navigating the tall grass and was not able to leave the research station which made progression a bit difficult. Next time I'll try to make a base at the machine and see if I could double fortify the four holes outside and maybe use some of it as a forth wall or use the holes as bottleneck should I find myself in a fight.

I'll keep try in it out and hopefully I can figure out a way to do this solo.

@merxworx01: It seems the devs are responding to player feedback and making changes, so we'll be trying again later this week. Apparently there was an issue with the larvae where making a certain type of trap caused them to keep spawning. Gotta love early access games!

@bladeofcreation: I ended up turning the Lazer Machine into a fortified base and using it as places to run back to if things get out of hand. Unfortunately while relocating the base I was able to find a number of re-producible bugs/crashes associated with some mechanics. I'm not disheartened. I've played a quite a few early access survival games that outright pooped itself on the occasion. I still think this thing has lots of potential and next time I'll boot it up I will just work around crash triggering actions and see how far I can get before running out of places to explore and items to make.

I think this has a lot of potential but not much going for it right now aside from being available on Game Pass. Base building kinda sucks, the Wolf Spider is a pain in the ass if you just happened to set up camp and one shows up.

But there's a lot of room to develop here, I'm looking forward to how it shakes out.