On the surface Stationeers is a base building/survival game like a lot of others, but what makes Stationeers shine to me is the extreme detail that's been put into the building portions. You aren't just slapping an "airlock" building on a room you slapped together to make a safe habitat... you're setting up the display console, and wiring the airlock up to your power grid, building the pipes to vent the air, making sure the interior space is properly up to pressure and setting up the airlock computer. It sounds like a lot of details, and it is, but it allows for an amazing amount of customization of design, not to mention the warm glow you feel after finally getting something setup and working.
When you start a new game, you start alone, in the red glow of survival flares, on one of a few starting stellar bodies, right now including Mars, the Moon, and asteroids, each with their own difficulties and quirks. You also start with a number of crates carrying various tools you'll need to get a base started as well as enough survival rations to last for a few weeks of game time.
To help illustrate how well a lot of the game is modeled, I have one story from just the other night of my almost pulling a Mark Watney. I have my basic base built, and I've painstakingly got the temperature and oxygen levels up to being breathable, but last night after leaving the base through the airlock like I'd done a few dozen times before I suddenly noticed a lot of air pouring out of the top of my base.
"That's weird" I thought, "It's almost like there's a hole in the roof of my base!". I went back in, and sure enough, two sheets of metal that made up the ceiling near the door had ripped off and let all the atmosphere vent outside. I had a save from right before I left the building, so I went back, pulled out my portable touchscreen, loaded up the atmosphere scanner program, and cycled the airlock to see what happened.
Sure enough, a few seconds after the airlock finished cycling, the pressure spiked to 1.5x Earth standard which was too much for my simple iron walls, and the two panels near the door popped off. After some more investigation and trial and error, I realized each time the airlock cycled it was letting in a tiny amount of martian air, this constantly increased air pressure and, in addition to the internal air constantly heating up, caused the pressure to spike to the point that it ruptured. I spent a little bit working on a currently manual system to vent extra gases when I needed to bring down the pressure, and I'm working now on the infrastructure for an automated environmental system that will monitor air quality, pressure, and temperature, and turn on and off subsystems automatically to keep things equalized.
A random selection of a few of the more impressive features:
- (as I mentioned above) To make a breathable atmosphere in a base you need to consider the air temperature (taking into account that gases will expand and increase pressure as they heat up), pressure, and the type of gases present.
- By default solar arrays won't automatically track the sun... you can adjust their angle manually with a wrench, but the ultimate step is building either a series of sensors and logic controllers to match their angle to the sun, or program an integrated circuit to read in the sun angle settings and tell all the solar panels how to align.
- I mentioned integrated circuits... from in the game you can build a computer with an editor motherboard that will let you plug in IC modules and program them to do advanced calculations from an in game code editor
- Day/night cycles including temperature changes from noon to midnight
- The furnace in the game requires different temperatures and gas mixes to smelt different advanced materials. For basic alloys like steel you can make due by adding frozen oxides and volatiles, but for the more advanced ones you'll need to build a system of storing various gases and mixing them to feed to the furnace
- Air pressure is a big issue to deal with, both in habitable areas, and in all your piping as pipes that have too much pressure will rupture
- IIRC the lead designer on this was previously the H1Z1 designer
As a footnote: this game is definitely not for everyone. It is insanely detailed, and there is the constant pressure of trying to survive as you are building your base in a hostile environment, and if you lose focus for just a bit, bad things can happen. That said, you can also turn down or off food consumption which goes a long way to making the pace of the game more sedate. If you've played a lot of Minecraft or Factorio, think Skyfactory is a breeze, and love researching and learning little subsystems, this game could be for you.
) your structure is probably well insulated, so there is little heat transfer. So anything on the inside (including you) that is generating heat, adds to the total interior heat. Think of yourself outside on a very hot day, sitting in the shade. Your body is trying to kept you at your normal temperature, but since your body is constantly producing heat and the ambient temperature is above body temperature, your body produces sweat to try through evaporation to regulate the body's temperature.
