Current impressions of survival VS 2.3

Okay, so, I tried survival with new version.

Props to the devs. It's way better tutorial than the last one, I will give them that. It's faster, you get to Engineer fast and do stuff. That's fun and fair.

The problem? The rest of the survival.

So, we get Barn as an easy access base with some basics in it and modest power generation. That's good.

You have added Lead, Magnesium and Gold to Verdure, meaning we are not stuck at tier 1 tools. We can upgrade our tools to tier 2.

Most of the missions are relatively simple and teach player the basics, except the ice. However, that will probably change with water, which will replace ice.

The problem comes with space and building ships for that. Let's start with the biggest problem. Welding. You don't have block welder, can't get area welder tool, meaning you have to build your ship piece by piece. And if you miss a conveyor, great, now your ship doesn't work. That's the first problem. Still doable, just the ship has to be very simple with no decorations.

The second is reaching space. The game asks the player to reach space. Fair enough. Building simple hydrogen ship works for that. Then you get to space, find the station, start looking for contracts and realize how under prepared and limited you are.

So, the biggest thrusters we can build are 2m ones. They are strong alright. However, we are also limited by the sheer number of blocks we can build. Basic cargo container, no wind turbines, no big batteries, etc. We have to research everything through contracts. The best choice would be to make a good ship and fly into space, set up base there.

This is actually doable. It's time consuming, but can be done. The problem once again comes down to welding everything and projection system. You can only design the most basic ships due to sheer limited blocks. This can be engineered around, but forget any blueprints you could be using, most won't work here.

PS: There is currently a bug that lets you build ships, with blocks you haven't unlocked via blueprints. I am treating it as oversight, not something to use normally.

Last, but not least, the first mission I chose, which unlocked welders. I went to location, found out what needs to be done and groaned from annoyance. You have to build a base for somebody else, using your own resources, while still being limited by what you can build yourself. Forget building solar array that tracks the sun or at least rotates closely enough with it. You need higher tier materials, you can't even get in verdure.

In fact, Verdure really lets you make 3 production facilities:

-Smelter

-Assembler

-Gear forge

These seem decent initially, but you need resources too. So, really, your first order of business is to find a good place for a base, set up your place there. Then you can move to do stuff.

Do I like it overall? Yes. Do I think it could be better? Absolutely.

I would love if the reward for finishing the initial quest chain was area welder tool for us. Valuable and just one tool. Not full block. Not that we can build more of those early. Just to speed up the welding process of base, etc.