Space Haven

[Apollo]

Anyone try this? It looks pretty good and it's on sale right now. Apparently it is similar to RImworld or like FTL and Dwarf Fortress had a baby.

https://bugbyte.fi/spacehaven/

[Paradroid]

It'll be a day one purchase for me when it leaves early access; I'm already a fan of the developer due to their previous Battlevoid games.

[dbt1949]

I've watched a couple of hours of Youtube on this. It looks pretty good. However I have spent too much on games this fall already.

[Paingod]

It'll be a day one purchase for me when it leaves early access; I'm already a fan of the developer due to their previous Battlevoid games.

I spent a fair bit of time enjoying Battlevoid as well.

I picked this up on GOG out of courtesy to the developer for their prior works.

So far I'm ... underwhelmed? It might be that it's taking me too long to get my own ship running. I ran through the tutorial and then jumped into a mining colony start where you design your own ship from scratch. I may have gone too big from the start as I knew from the tutorial that all the pieces I'd need were going to take a lot of space. I was probably supposed to make my first iteration of my ship a freight barge or something instead of a spacious corvette. As it is, I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel to tie off the last pieces of my half-built "big" ship so it can go somewhere else and continue being built.

The gameplay loop involves:

1. Create your randomly rolled group of space explorers. They each have a skill of 0 to 3 in a list of abilities, similar to Rimworld. Cooking, gunnery, medical, piloting, navigation, mining, construction, etc.
2. Start in a mining depot with a blank slate. The depot is a stationary object and is fully equipped with all the structures needed to recycle and manufacture goods to create your first ship.
3. Start designing your ship by drawing on a grid to create a structure.
4. Crew builds out the ship frame.
5. Add an airlock and start building out internal components, like power, power nodes, engines, recyclers, shuttle bays, mining pods, kitchens, bathrooms, bunks, etc.
6. Assign asteroids to be mined, collecting (cleaning out) what few resources they provide.
7. Set up queues for your people to craft raw components for making other things, like hull segments and ship tech.
8. Draft your best four fighters and arm them with basic guns (no ammo/resource management).
9. Stuff them into a shuttle and board a nearby derelict.
10. Watch their O2 and health bars as you move them through the ship.
11. Park them in open areas and send ahead one person to scout and lure enemies back into a kill zone.
12. Once the derelict is cleared, set up a salvage team to strip it of all tech.
13. Once all tech has been salvaged, tear apart the hull for raw materials.
14. Add whatever you can to your ship. Expand the hull or add new tech inside.
15. Once the sector has been completely depleted of resources, move onto the next sector. Return to step 6 of this list.

There may be more to it that I haven't found yet. This was all I got into during my first two hours. Nothing attacked me and I never felt like there was any kind of tension.

The gameplay itself is like using Rimworld characters to build a ship using the Prison Architect design elements, but isn't as stylish or fun as either of them. The pace your people keep is glacial without speeding the game up to 4x speed, but then at that speed you're missing all the little quirks of them chatting, eating, shitting, and drinking coffee.

I haven't set shifts yet or tried to keep a more varied schedule. As it stands, when everyone goes to bed there is NOTHING to do except fast-forward to morning. I haven't seen a reason yet to create a third shift crew yet, but I also haven't tried to get into the nuts and bolts mechanics of trying to create an efficient ship crew.

[Paradroid]

Thanks for the write-up, Paingod. This is one of the reasons I try not to buy games in early access; it sounds like a good game but only half baked. I guess I could buy it to support a developer I like, but then the temptation to play - and possibly be put off - would be too great. I do keep half an eye on the updates though.

[dbt1949]

Also eventually you get into pirates so you have to design defenses and guns and such.

[Paingod]

Also eventually you get into pirates so you have to design defenses and guns and such.

That's good to hear. I was hoping for something like that. I'm hoping they breach by the airlocks and not randomly along the hull. I designed my airlock to be a choke point.

[Tampa_Gamer]

I have to agree with the Paingod's game loop above. I bit awhile back and played it (before the research patch) and only lasted a few hours before I put aside it until its fleshed out a bit. I do like the idea of a Rimworld/Oxygen not Included on a moving ship/fleet, but I guess I was looking for a bit more meaningful survival aspect (not just saving braindead characters from running out of O2 because they need me to tell them to proceed through an airlock). With respect to the Rimworld comparison, its got a ways to go. For example, I read somewhere that the developer's are not even sure they are going to allow the character statistics to improve with training/experience or over time.

[Paingod]

I played for a while longer last night. In general, it's a relaxing game - but it needs more soul. I spend almost all of my time on 4x speed and don't really care about my people's well-being. My people are little blobs of stats. Their basic needs are met and I haven't seen any reason to care about their moods.

The only time I slow down is when I'm building something or when I'm going to go explore a derelict. I've jumped through a couple systems now. No pirates. Just ore mines and bugs on dead ships.

[Paingod]

I'm still logging time with this one each day; it's a good game for when the kids are up.

I think it can be interesting/fun to figure out how to get your ship to a point of sustainability. I did discover pirates - but can't attack them yet. Before my shuttles get to them, they fly off. So I opted to engage in some piracy myself and decided the "Slaver" faction was worth hating.

One word: Lucrative.

I don't mind having a single faction hate my guts, and it's helped keep things interesting. When I bump into one of their ships I'm either attacking it with a boarding action or offering to ransom them back their own former crew mates that I captured. Right now I have 6 slavers in my prison, waiting for the next ship I find.

I've decided the game isn't about the individual characters. They really are blobs with stats. It's more about creating a functional ship and the systems inside, and working out a good way to be sustainable. Right now I'm on a solid path to that with greenhouse tech, growing a surplus of food, and solar panels supplying fully half of my power needs. I could go to full solar, but I'd shut down when I entered a system with no sun.

I still play the game largely on 4x unless something happens - a fire, a boarding action, building. It's not a bad time killer, but it's also not really feeling like it breaks new ground or is highly compelling. I do like that I can custom build my ship, but don't like that my custom-built ship has basically turned into a brick because that's the most efficient design. I've seen screen shots of larger ships, and they're all bricks with no style. Some even take up the entire 56x56 build area.

[Paradroid]

I'm still reading and appreciating your comments Paingod. Still not persuaded to buy in early but I will definitely buy as soon as it leaves early access.

[dbt1949]

From what I've seen on YouTube everybody's ships are bricks.

[Paingod]

Still not persuaded to buy in early but I will definitely buy as soon as it leaves early access.

I think it could certainly do with more time in the oven. No doubt about it.

I haven't encountered any glitches, but will admit the gameplay loop can get old. Thankfully, once I hit a point of sustainability (took about 30 jumps and 120 in-game days to research everything I needed) I could go back and rip my entire ship apart and restructure it however I wanted. My brick is now laying on its side instead of jutting up towards the top and everything has been condensed with more facilities added in. Moving the Airlocks, Storage, and Production areas to one side of the ship is a HUGE time saver on crew movement. Stuffing all of the comfort items and beds into a central room helps too - and makes the entirely irrelevant crew moods higher. The only moods I've seen cause problems are when crew are mentally incapacitated by Sirens (an system-wide effect, not actual creatures) and prisoners that keep setting fire to their kitchen.

Sustainability came when I was finally growing enough food to sustain my crew, had enough solar to limit my use of power rods to run generators, and was finally able to produce tech blocks needed to create power items on my own without hunting for a merchant. Water is my last hurdle, I think. I don't yet have the tech to reclaim it out of the air. I don't think you can ever create a perfect loop, but you can limit losses.

Prisoners can be recruited. I didn't realize it until I had executed 5 of them because I couldn't find a slaver to sell them back to. There was a little button on their HUD to recruit. It takes time, but they eventually join and eventually stop being angry that they were detained. Sidenote: Executing prisoners currently has zero penalties to moods or anything else.

I did a thing, too. The game keeps asking me to position my "fleet" when I go somewhere. I finally added a second ship when I bumped into my fourth or fifth claimable vessel. It's basically a smaller construction grid with bits of an empty husk in it - but I have enough surplus to rebuild it and turn it into something useful. For what, I don't know. Maybe there's a limit of one gun per ship or something. I'm not hurting for storage space or crew quarters and plan to make it a massively stripped down shuttle.

Not that shuttles or ships move. When you warp into a space, you position your ships and that's where they stay until you leave. There are actual small shuttles that dock with them that do move around - used to board enemy ships, derelict ships, and perform trade.

I say a lot about the game, but want to be sure you understand that I have a relatively high threshold for tedium in games and sometimes find a 6/10 game fun enough to warrant a purchase. If I was forced to give this a rating as it stands, it'd probably be a 60 or 65 out of 100. I'm mostly playing it when I can't play Cyberpunk 2077, not instead of Cyberpunk. It has just enough complexity to keep me going for a prolonged test drive. I'm curious to see where it ends up.