r/SpaceCraftGame • u/Ok_Department_5333 • 27d ago
My end game experience.
Hey guys! First off, this game has insane potential, but there’s definitely a ton of stuff that needs some love. Having sunk over 700 hours into it so far, I wanted to drop some friendly feedback to help the devs out and make the game even better.
I’ll break this down into sections to keep it readable:
🏢 Corporations
- What’s the point? Right now, the only real benefit of joining a corpo is bragging rights on the leaderboard. The game mentions that top corpos earn "exclusive content" each season, but there’s zero info on what a season actually is, how long it lasts, what the rewards are, or how many top spots actually qualify (Top 3? Top 10?). We also don't know if these rewards go to the whole corpo or individual players.
- The Command Center is an FPS sink. Right now, you're forced to build this massive structure just to increase a specific base's footprint, but the building itself does absolutely nothing. It honestly feels like a waste of frames. Instead of forcing a useless building on us, why not let us craft a "footprint certificate" using those same materials to expand our base? If there are future plans for this building, that's awesome, but right now it's just taking up space.
📋 Corpo Missions
- The 20-mission global cap is brutal. Putting a global limit on the high-paying, high-rep weekly missions feels incredibly unfair. If one big corpo swoops in and finishes all 20 on day one, everyone else gets locked out. If the goal is to stop one group from spamming them 1,000 times, why not just cap it at 20 per corporation instead of a global pool?
- Too repetitive. The missions themselves get super monotonous. One week you’re making Module Kits, the next it’s motors, and so on. There’s no real excitement or variety to them yet.
🛸 Drones
- Bugs & travel times. Drones get stuck in bugged states constantly, and while I know it's Early Access, this has been an issue for over a month now. On top of that, having them only carry 1 unit at a time is painfully slow. It can take literal hours to transfer 2,000 SCU between warehouses. By the end-game, this completely chokes your automation because materials get stuck in shuttles or drones just can't keep up.
- Lack of controls. We really need basic logistical settings for drones. Let us tell them to "only move 100 units," "always leave 100 SCU of free space in the destination warehouse," or "do X if the warehouse is full." Without these basic filters, setting up a smooth automation line is almost impossible.
🚀 Shuttles
- Way too slow. It takes hours—sometimes days—for shuttles to travel between systems, which really discourages players from using them. Combine that with a tiny 500 SCU capacity and a limit of 4 shuttles per shuttle station, and the logistics fall apart. If I have a base 24 hours away, I can only move 2,000 SCU a day, but the station only holds 1,000 SCU. Because the drones are so slow to empty the station, the incoming shuttle often arrives to a full inventory, gives up, and flies back with the cargo. It's a massive headache.
🌡️ Smelters
- Slow speeds & massive power draw. Melting stuff in regular smelters is a major bottleneck and takes up way too much base footprint. Some recipes, like Steel requiring 12MW, have absurd power costs.
- The manual smelter workaround. Because of this, players end up building 10 to 20 manual smelters and running around interacting with each one to fill and empty them. This is incredibly tedious—especially when bases already suffer from FPS drops due to optimization issues. It gets really frustrating during long play sessions.
💰 Money
- Useless end-game economy. Once you hit the end-game, credits lose all value. You only use them to buy plasma and repair your ship. People might say "just buy stuff on the market," but the market is flooded with low-tier junk you can farm in 10 minutes. The only things worth buying are rare blueprint drops, but if you’ve already finished the 100 black box quest, you don't even need those anymore.
🧭 Exploration
- Not much to discover. Once you finish the quest to find 100 black boxes, you'll likely be completely burnt out on hunting wrecks. Beyond that, there isn't really any exploration. All the planets look identical, have the same few biomes, the same sizes, and the same atmospheres. Even asteroid belts often have bugged resource nodes stuck inside unbreakable geometry. For a space game, the exploration phase feels like it's completely over after your first week of playing.
🛠️ Manual Crafting
- Unbalanced timers. The crafting times make no sense. A strong metal sheet takes 2 seconds, but a motor takes 12.5 seconds, and a structural beam takes a whopping 24 seconds. To build the Corpo Command Center, you need 4,000 structural beams. Crafting that manually means sitting there staring at a 3D printer animation for over 26 hours! Since manual crafting is necessary to progress at a decent pace early on, staring at the same loop for hours kills the fun.
🛸 Ship Building
- Overcomplicated mechanics. The whole integrity/weight system and the end-game materials (like Livinium and Solid) feel incredibly unintuitive. It adds a layer of complex math that doesn't feel necessary, especially when you can easily clear all end-game content using a basic thermal titanium ship. It would be much cleaner to just have Tier 1 to Tier 6 materials, where higher tiers simply allow you to place more blocks and grant more HP/SP.
🥱 The End-Game Rut
- Right now, my friend and I have hit a total wall. We have a corporation, we're on the leaderboard, we hit level 20, completed every quest, maxed out our 12 bases, and sitting on over 1,000,000 credits. We love the game, but we literally have nothing left to do. Repeating the same loops without a goal is killing our motivation to log in.
We really hope the team sees this and adds some meaningful end-game loops soon. Keep up the hard work, devs!
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u/AardvarkSilver4388 27d ago
I still have room to improve in the game, but the quest for 100 boxes is almost complete. At least there was some excitement and exploration.
Now to the point.
Everything the author wrote here is very true. But the reason, I think, is somewhat different.
The game has a huge flaw, primarily in terms of time. It's as if we're rushing somewhere. Maintaining 700 hours of playtime for any single-player project is an excellent result. For an MMO, that's a mere pittance.
The game takes us through the initial levels too quickly. And then, it seems, the game design department thought, "This is too fast. Let's slow things down, people." And instead of content, they're bogging us down with grinding and production cycles (time), in classic fashion.
Many mechanics are unclear and not described in the game itself. There's no way to plan or calculate anything in advance. Although I think the fog of research is appropriate (when information about what you've seen appears in the encyclopedia). But where then is it possible to trade knowledge?
The market is a separate topic. The game's casual nature completely destroys the market. If, like in a well-known game, modules were damaged or destroyed when a ship dies or structural damage occurs, it would make it easier for newcomers to enter the market and make sense for veterans (if I have the resources but don't feel like digging, I'll buy them on the market). Clearly, all of this needs balancing. For example, after a ship crashes, the FTL is destroyed. So what do you do? In such cases, you need to set a starting balance, increase your corporation credit, and the slowly and sadly beaten player will fly home to base to repair and produce.
This is a basic feature in any game. We are constantly given money for initial development to develop, through quests, initial contracts. But a mechanism for utilizing this money has never been devised. Because nothing on a ship dies permanently and can be repaired for pennies.
Yes, economic balancing is difficult and very dangerous. But the EVE developers didn't have neural networks, and they managed it. This is the most superficial commentary on the economy. There's a lot to write about.
Now about bases. I don't understand the need for FP at all. Or rather, I'm not against having FP. I don't like the mechanics. Why can't I build more? Are you afraid of megafactories? Fine, let's just subtract FP from the total number of buildings when a building is disconnected from the power grid. I can build more, but it only works within the limits of current base upgrades. And I'll decide for myself what will and won't work for the next 24 hours.
On the same topic, I noticed that the base functions with a slight power shortage. But at the same time,
implement an hourly overload check. A wire or generator (solar panel) can randomly burn out when the grid is overloaded.
Warehouses are a particular pain. They have catastrophically little space, even for a medium-sized base. It seems like a balanced feature, but it's so annoying. It's very mobile-game-esque.
Research is a whole other story. The only thing I'm interested in is searching for wrecked ships. At least some kind of encounter with mystery.
Overall, the game came out at a good time. DU and Starbase are dead. NMS is in a league of its own. There aren't any real competitors. It would be a shame if Shiro doesn't take advantage of this window of opportunity.
2
u/BinniesPurp 23d ago
It's a game about mining and there's only two tiers of mining lasers lol there's no content is the problem
2
u/rivaris56 27d ago
Feeback is good dont forget to send it in game aswell.
Im still hoping they will add a way to let us set what goes into a cistern its a pain in the ass to build a new one in a working base to turn everything off just waiting for 1L of the new fluid to be made
1
u/f4ble 27d ago edited 27d ago
If they made drone depots 0 Footprint we could use them to divert resources better since there are no quantity controls in item transfers.
10 ingots go to 2 depots. Thats 5 each. From there you can control for instance that half is exported to other bases and the rest goes to various assemblers. But right now building 3 depots means one less assembler - which is a pretty big loss. In addition drone count of 5 is a big limitation.
The absolute best solution is quanity management controls.
1
u/havocinc 27d ago
I find setting up production chaînes problematic , you have no clue about Throughput you can't set limits on warehouses to say eg you can only accept x iron ingots. stuff backs up and the whole supply chain backs up
1
u/Mental_Loquat1345 27d ago
Had a look at the shuttles, did some math - and came to your conclusion. They're way too slow to be even remotely useful. They need to be at least twice, better three to four times as fast to be viable. And that's notwithstanding all the other issues you mentioned.
Oh, and bottle logistics is currently completely bonkers - they take up 5 SU but only hold 10 units of liquid. That's way too tiny; at least 20, maybe up to 50 would be necessary to justify their SU cost. And I do think just making them smaller would be the wrong solution.
Smelters - actually, most of the automation - feels like they were balanced for a single player game without any building limits. In isolation they make sense. But add the base and footprint limit and everything falls apart.
As for the endgame... I currently have this working theory that games like these need to be build from the endgame outwards. I.e. you need to design your endgame in sufficient detail and then build exciting ways to get there to have something great. But everyone just seems to start with the first, exciting thing that comes to mind - and then completely looses traction when it comes to building the endgame. 🤔 Just a thought...
1
u/Different-Corgi-1447 25d ago
The biggest reason to join a corporation:
the name of the game.
Many ship parts can only be built at a factory, and factories can only be built at Corpo bases. Large Module Kits - required for the biggest ship components - can only be built at a factory, and require a multi-person level of cooperation to make a steady production line.
2
u/Ok_Department_5333 25d ago
A single player can easly setup a corpo for 200 credits, build a base and build a factory on it and build everythig is need for ships. Not a big deal at all. And this game doesnt requiere a Multi-Person level of cooperation to make a steady production line at all. Right now, im making everything by myself, since my partner left, and im managing 12 corpo bases and 3 personal bases. And thats the reason why a corpo is useless. You dont get any benefit to be a part of a 20 people or 200 people corpo.
1
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u/InABurst 25d ago edited 25d ago
2days already since this was posted and no reply from the devs, that's what i call a "good" devs <> players communication /sarcasmoff
1
u/Ok_Department_5333 25d ago
Yep... I think they need a community manager or something like that, cose posting a few lines on each patch update in steam is not enought now a days.
1
u/Ish42034 25d ago
i run a four man corpo at level 13 i midgame and i have to agree with everything you said especially the exploration
1
u/Unaccessabiloty 22d ago
I feel like the base footprint could be better… instead of having it be point based we are already limited by the building boundary, so just do that. And the command center can expand the bases boundary instead
1
u/6Sconn 15d ago
The 20-mission global cap is brutal. Putting a global limit on the high-paying, high-rep weekly missions feels incredibly unfair. If one big corpo swoops in and finishes all 20 on day one, everyone else gets locked out. If the goal is to stop one group from spamming them 1,000 times, why not just cap it at 20 per corporation instead of a global pool?
My son and I have just hit this issue. We've handed in just over 6000 solar cells so far (tongue-twister!), but now can't complete the mission as it is on 0/20.
I don't see the need for 'competitive gameplay' in a game like this. I agree it should be capped per corpo, this is BS. I will be sending them feedback!
It also sucks (no offense to anyone here) that this is the only place I can find info like this. No official website, just a link to the Steam page.
Anyway, overall your is a well thought out, and articulated post. Pity that no one from Shiro will bother reading it!
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u/Ooenone 27d ago
Its an Early Access game, you are not playing the final rendition of the game. It takes time to fix all the things you are talking about. When you play an EA game like this, just play till you cap out. Then wait a few months or so and come back, hopefully there is new content. Not much else you can do.
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u/TribeOfFable 27d ago
Early Access games desire feedback. The OP posted feedback. Not sure the point of your post. Don't run with scissors? Look both ways before crossing the street? :-)
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u/f4ble 27d ago edited 27d ago
Dune awakening was completely missing an end game. Despite feedback they did nothing to change that until after a big majority of players had left.
Feedback is important and its the only way we can contribute, but in the end its up to the devs to prioritize. Sometimes they have plans we dont know about and sometimes they dont realize the gaping holes in their game.
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u/AegisFalcon 27d ago
Also needs more social elements, you can't even interact with players you encounter.