Terraformental

Any tips what i should do ?

Given that it's a game about time loops and repeated deaths, I wish you had the option to fill your water at the river and die to an aggressive strain of alien dysentery.

Game crashed in Santorini :(. Did not copy the error bug sorry. but I was when I was exploring the control room in the quarry area for the first time. I can provide more info if you need for bug replication

Edit: game autosave clutched it 

The "Fill Water Bottle" and "Synthesize Food" actions at the central compound don't carry over loop progress from the ones in other places. Is this by design? I assume they're the same device as the one at Talos so it should combine.

I would like to suggest a map or memories overlay.

something like the options menu where you can review each major location, the links between them, and the limited and unlimited resources available there. maybe even special actions and their requirements, just to help in planning runs and reviewing things

suggest a message pop for santorini exploding even if you aren't there, possibly pausing in progress travel actions there?

also I feel like the tram between santorini and atrapos could be split up, I was travelling back to atrapos when santorini exploded but only had 30s or so of travel left and hoped I would survive to explore things I skipped instead of re-looping. similarity I died travelling to santorini but only after the action completed.

I know you added per-action familiarity in place of skills, but maybe you could have both? (Skills being rather minor progression compared to per-action)

As it stands, I have had a couple runs where I take a break and forget quite what I was doing and just head the wrong direction or do something that is effectively irrelevant by the point in progress I have reached. If skills still existed, it would feel a bit more like I still made progress.

It also makes sense narratively. If I tear down a solid metal door, I might not be ripping the next one down with my bare hands, but I'd definitely have some degree of awareness where to start. Same with the various hackings -- theoretically these stations were built to some standard, so learning how to abuse one's digital systems would give insight into the others'.

Game was updated? What was it?

Hey, out of curiosity, is there any point in forcing the door at the start? Because I have  no idea if it's even possible, and I would hate to waste so much time and effort on something pointless. (Don't tell me what it does, just tell me if it does anything worth my time. I'm lookin for help, not spoilers.)

A shame I cannot hook up and retrieve power cells from Laurion, to insert into my rover. Was thinking that was a creative means of still being able to implement the water recycler while retaining power. Instead, I end up burning more much-needed power for something that should but doesn't work.

You should be able to designate personal resource over area resource to be used

Also, forbidden resources should still be used in case of emergency (if not doing so would cause you to die), as forbidding is the only way to prevent consumption when your water/food level is mildly lower than full

Great game! It's great how much old areas expand over time as new paths open up and new resources become relevant. I liked Increlution a lot and so far this is better.

Very fun game but there are a few bugs, after finding the passage from Talos to Santorini I can't go from the Dam to Laurion, or from Santorini back to the Dam

this simulates the argument I had with myself earlier quite nicely

I really enjoy what you’ve got here with Terraformental. I want to qualify that statement- I made an account just to express it. I’ve been around the block on gaming. I was old when the earth was young. Cookie clicker, Adventure Capitalist, Theory of Magic, the idle genre, the incremental genre, the stories written as light novels rather than games, they were new once, I’ve witnessed their rise. You’ve made something good here. That’s not to say other people aren’t making good things either though. I'm quite pedantic so I'll leave a long ramble here, but that's the crux of my message.

One perspective of gaming is that it's a learning experience. In reinforcement learning, there’s a dichotomy of choice between exploration and exploitation. Choosing to acquire new information vs utilization of old information. However, you aren’t just making one choice, but one among a long sequence of choices. Often, they feed in to each other. You explore to find things to exploit- you exploit to be well enough off to explore. It is a dynamic process where you balance and evaluate both things. The through line underpinning it all is time, tempo. In this game, it’s a bottleneck, a duration. In other games, it’s an evaluation on what duration is shorter to elapse- to prestige or to just keep grinding- what is the faster pace.

In practical terms of what I mean with what is existing in the game- let’s talk about the water recycler. There is a rate of water consumption. Similarly, there is a rate of water creation through the recycler. There are three states those numbers can be in- deficit, balance, and surplus. Whether the artifact or quick recycler is acquired, it shifts it from a deficit to a surplus- from a finite span of time to an indefinite span. If food, water, and power are all surplus, like in the barracks of Santorini- you are leaning on exploitation, you don’t need to loop. So you then don’t need to exploit effective choices to get to Santorini quicker to have more time to explore. Even what it is that you exploit is a choice. “What happens if I arrive sooner? What happens if I arrive later? What sequence of events are necessary for something here? What gaps do I have space to do other things with?” You might recognize the resemblance to Majoras Mask, if that is in your pool of experience.

Oh, the story and fantasy is nice too. The overarching goal, space, future, terraforming a planet. It’s cool, you don’t see it much. The story is really important. It gives you something to read while you’re counting down the timer. It gives you some scaffolding to extrapolate for exploration and exploitation. Getting a solar panel eventually, and what that means for the choice of rover attachment, and how that impacts the routes you can take. This game is certainly like a puzzle/adventure game. Like games of old, a cutscene or some dialogue is a reward, is content, is enjoyable as well as connected to the gameplay. It gives a fantasy for the mind to run with and speculate in imagination. To tap into the joy of imagining a station that you power up with solar panels, food generation, water generation, air.

Well, the game seems in good hands dev. The artifact you dig out being optional, the intent for different routes, the exclusivity of options, the limitations of resources, packaging tasks to recognize that repeating them gets old, improving at some tasks... lots of intelligent design with these choices. Maybe some day you'll discover that the starting area is boring, and maybe you'll introduce an artifact that lets you have a different spawn location. Your choice to expand breadth and depth by revisiting the previous station helps keep all options fresh for possibility and exploration- as opposed to a content treadmill of power creep- while simultaneously the text and cues of the game give meaningful directions on what to explore rather than running in circles doing arbitrary tasks like staying in the starter station for 5 hours to discover something.

Glad I got to play it before it ends up having a price tag.

I played the hedge out of it.

Came across a few bugs and glitches.
(But I was so focused I forgot most of them.

• One was that certain elements couldn't be stopped via clicked once started. 
• Another is: if you start an action with play [top of queue] and {after having it progressed for a while} add an other action on top, and then add another of the first one on top, then that top one has the same progress as the identical below.  That can be repeated indefinitely, giving lot's of time saving in early play)

That aside. Did I read the end of game message correctly, that all that is just the prologue?

If true, then Holy F!

Shut up, take my money. I just hope I don't miss the launch on steam.

That is, if you manage to pull it off. Plenty of people got ambitious with their projects and burned themselves out on them. With the project forever in 30% limbo. 

Well, if you release the full version, I buy it.

Phenomenal game and the task mechanics blew my mind. Everytime I thought i got a grasp of the gameplay a new thing popped right up and made me completely replan my strategies in a good way.

I will say, some of the task groupings don't work as intended. Like gathering supplies outside Laurion and the lost rover, it states the 'return' task for each are within the group but then it doesn't actually complete that task when running the grouping.

I really hope Astrape gets implemented soon, keep up the good work!

It would be nice for us to be able to pre-program a long list of actions to load into the queue on start, so we don’t have to manually click back to where we last were in order to make progress.

Took 32 loops to fully complete the game, the only thing I haven't done to 100% it is max out the familiarity of everything.

Saw this on Wanderbots' youtube channel and played through v0.3.1 today.  I'm really liking it so far.   I'd be willing to pay $5-$10 for the finished game from what I've seen so far.  Looking forward to more!  Thanks for this, made my day!