Stonedeep Reviews

This game has the potential to be very good but the lack of polish holds it back. mostly it works very well but at times The AI of the dwarves can lead to them doing incredibly stupid things like just standing in one place while spears are thrown at them or getting stuck in a loop of collecting and then dropping resources. It also badly needs better player assist when you are learning. e.g you are warned that your buildings need repair but there is no mention of how to repair them. the answer is simple but you have to go and find it. inventory management for your gathered resources has been made complicated with multiple separate vaults for no clear reason. yes it can be optimised and made to work but.. why? It has an overall feel of a game that should be more fun than it actually is. however it does draw you in and make you overlook it shortcomings. overall i have mixed feelings about this game but i keep coming back to it. if i could i would give it a neutral review but i can't so i'll go with positive because it does do a lot of things right

If you like building games, this indie game is definitely something you should check out. Solid and fun gameplay and very good graphics. Most of the content is something you have already seen in other building games: You build housing, "citizens" can marry, birth children, you fulfill their needs with products based on production chains, you protect them from danger and so on. But with being able to dig deep into the earth on a huge map, this one has a very unique experience. I was sceptical before buying it, because of those comments about bugs in the game, but the dev's certainly worked hard. The game still has minor rough edges, like typos or a not so clean UI at some places, but I hadn't experienced major bugs in my current playtime. This game is still in early access, so I'm looking forward what these (only) two developers will offer in the future!

I really wanted to like this game, and I certainly put a lot of time into trying to make it work. But I just cannot recommend it, as in its current state it is just simply broken. The developer is promising interesting new things, but there are a ton of bugs and many of the game mechanics are either unexplained or simply not implemented yet. I would add this to your watch list, as I think one day it may be a really good game... but I would not buy it yet.

buggy and abandoned went to report many bugs but 3 of them had been up there for over a year. didn't see any dev comments.

It's not a very good game imo. The UI stretches out badly on my ultrawide, and the gameplay is really slow with poor QoL features. I don't think i'll ever get back to playing more of this, would request a refund but it was only like 4EU. There's many better Colony Sims out there to play today.

Game is a cheap copy of Craft the World with darker graphics and a lot more bugs like not being able to place buildings (and Zero tooltips of why) or needing the hubbel telescope to be able to read some text

Hammerting is better, so is Craft the World. The logistics cycle is inefficient, the tutorial is insufficient for learning how to keep your colony going and finally the camera controls are unwieldy and limited. It also hasn't been updated since the end of 2021.

Needs some work on bugs, mechanics, and missing materials. I recommend this game to people who have patience working with incomplete builds and like a challenge. Otherwise I would recommend waiting until some more kinks are worked out. The game has a lot promise. I've enjoyed and will continue to enjoy paying it. Below I've put some more detailed notes on challenges I've encountered. After five restarts I've managed to create a fairly stable colony of over 100 dwarfs that I believe can grow further as long as I can get the dwarfs to live in a dwelling within a reasonable distance to their assigned job. Spreading out clusters of dwelling cells centered around their respective taverns works fairly well but the dwarf AI doesn't always pick the closest dwelling to live in and when I try to choose specific dwellings I want them to live in they reassign themselves to another dwelling. This means I have the occasional dwarf dying of thirst because their job is too far from the dwelling they chose to live in despite the fact I have empty dwellings available that are much closer to their job. Finding ways to work around the AI quirks and dwarfs' and enemies' pathing has been two of the biggest challenges. The bonfires that prevent enemy spawns in the living and work areas have to be placed within 7 spaces of each other to be 100% effective which means it is necessary to overlap the building that is used to maintain the bonfires in order to get the dwarfs that light them to keep up with bonfire maintenance. The fireflies that are supposed to show up some where near the mushrooms aren't there so I'm unable to craft the firefly lanterns that would replace these troublesome and labor intensive bonfires. Later in the game I am able to find the fireflies in the shop. I tried to have more warriors to kill enemies instead of stopping the spawns in so many places but then all the young dwarfs get sick and start dying before they can reproduce, creating a downward spiral of decreasing colony population that is impossible to recover from (This happened in my second colony). Some of the achievements seem to be broken. For example: my dwarfs have drank far more than 1,000 beers in a single colony but my achievements don't even show that they've drank 100. The same problem with crops planted. The dungeon gates have a button that is supposed to be able to turn spawns on or off but it doesn't work. The enemies tunnel wherever they want, (usually into the center of my dwarfs' living cells where my children are hanging out) despite the fact I've dug out a path for the enemies to follow. As a result setting up gauntlets and sentry towers for the dungeon spawns is pointless more than half the time. The spike traps and pounding traps stop working some times even though their durability is fine. Destroying them and remaking them works some times but is very costly in materials. With only a few dungeons active enemy spawns are manageable but when the number of active dungeons gets over 10 my dwarfs start dying before I can heal them.

The current state of this game has a lot of problems, most of it regarding the A.I. Current Problems: A.I. Dwarves will spend a lot of precious time idle even with dig spots and tasks needing to be queued Due to poor A.I. and pathing, A.I. have trouble depositing and retrieving needed items from vaults Due to this above issues, even with enough mushroom farms, a brewery, and a honeywell, they fail to create the process of beer due to not creating beer, theres no supply to the tavern, which in turn causes your entire workforce to turn into dark dwarves While this is an early access game, I reccommend waiting till the above issues get patched before considering buying, as this is critical to surviving in this game. ---UPDATE--- The current state of the game is pretty stagnant, no real changes in a few months, as well as the developers not making enough profit to work on the game full time, it is now a side project. So if considering to buy this product, keep in mind that the current alpha stage it is in right now is pretty basic groundwork and it may be a while before we get actual game changing updates.

I love games like this, however this one is just too unfinished to be enjoyable. There is an overall lack of documentation and tooltips that leaves the player at loss when trying to figure out why things are not working and how to fix them. The AI also seems a bit wonky with workers ignoring essential materials needed to finish active construction and leaving them laying on the ground for ages while you wait and hope for a vendor. Other issues such as upgrades not listing costs or effect, rampant disease with little information on how to control it, and a super detailed research system with no documentation on how it actually works leaves the player more frustrated than fulfilled, Production balance also seems off with farming buildings producing tons of resources but requiring 3 or 4 processing buildings to keep up with the supply while storage backs up and caps out with no way to delete excess materials aside from hoping the vendor wants to buy what you are selling. I tried to like it, but I guess I will check back in 6 months or a year to see if it has some polish.