The Crust Steam Charts & Stats

Heads up: this review includes a light spoiler about a mid-game mission. I really enjoyed The Crust — for about 30 hours — it combines factory building like Dyson Sphere Program with expeditions that remind me of Frostpunk. Just as I was really starting to get into it, the laser gun mission at stage 4 hit me like a punch to the gut — it came way too soon. That’s when the waiting started: a lot of downtime just waiting for modular frames to be built, which slowed the pace a lot. I looked ahead to stage 5 and saw it involved even more waiting and slogging through building tasks. That kind of killed the fun for me, so I stopped playing there. Still, I’m giving it a positive rating because those first 30 hours were worth what I paid.

I really like the concept of this game and there is a huge amount of potential here. The only 2 issues I have noticed so far is it crashes from time to time during a save and you may loose some progress as that save file becomes corrupt and unable to load. I have also noticed a small error in geographical terminology as it is now known as the "GULF OF AMERICA". It is good that it is in early access, it should not be an issue for the devs to correct this small problem. All in all it is a good game.

bold look forward in a future that must become a reality, The Crust, is a point in time we are coming to age, children are we now. Great game

This game is fabulous... it does need some more interesting content waiting on 1.0 release for a proper review

very good game. lots of update and fun to replay

Very well made game, with plenty of updates, Good community, Devs that fix bugs as fast as they are found. Would highly recommend for a automation game.

TLDR: the game shoulda been called "The Slag" because you are drowing in slag, without really having a great way to deal with it. over 100k slag by the time i gave up. All in all its fun, but alot of it is more annoying than it is fun. and, if you like your stuff organized, (like me) alot of your base layout is going to annoy you. not sure if the game actually gets to an end, because i got too frustrated with the game to get there. The game has a bit of a learning curve, and the worst part deleting and moving stuff around doesn't really feel good. once you get late game, and you don't mind spending 200k on new belts, that's one thing. but early on, needing to drop 50k on belts is rough. the open map where you explore on the planet just feels bad. the amount of time you have to wait for your rovers to get around just feels bad. and waiting such a long time for your rovers to get half way across the planet just hurts. you end up having like 10 of them, and its still annoying. i also gave up on POIs, because it takes forever to explore them, then they barely pay off. i just did contracts that left the planet, and it was cake. they need to fix this somehow. Mining feels the worst, especially once you run out of ore at a drill. need to reroute ore from the other side of the map just feels bad dropping 50k on belts. later you get a large moble drill and you can send it to a spot to drill stuff, but its really really frustrating to get it setup. it does feel good to get it going, and seeing the scale at which you can build on the surface, but the amount of slad you get just feels bad. colonists felt irrelevant i had a bunch of all of them, and im not entirely sure what they really did other than just a few things. which might be their only impact, just felt shallow. belts in this game is probably some of the worst belting system i have seen. not auto adding in underground routing while routing is misserable. each time i was annoyed. they just need to add an option to auto go under, and when its under its just twice as expensive. allowing you to free up alot of surface area. also, the fact that the belts cost so much as it is felt bad. once i had millions it was fine, but when i was sitting at 200k, and needed to drop 50 for belts. ouch. expiditions where you send your rover to drop stuff off was annoying, you literally can't even tell which one you were doing, just had to remember. they need to fix this. endgame you get to build some laser to blowup a meteor that is going for earth. i searched and searched the planet, and there were SO MANY POIs i had no idea where to go to find it. and you had to search it out with a rover for some reason.... why, just lemme know where. why make it more annoying. just let me send the resources. this made me quit the game. i just wasn't interested in spend a few hours keeping myself busy while my rovers slowly made their eay around the map. maybe if i had build 20 of them early on, might have been easier, but at this point... im over it. sorry earth.

I am a sucker for games like Factorio, Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Project. This game has alot of potential. Albeit the game has alot of work left to be done in order to be competative to the listed games(in my opinon ofcourse). I like the spin of where focusing on building 300 smelters to create a production line is not the solution, in order to create a decent production line with output. Also I like the idea that the main resource contains multiple resources. I wish there was more depth to the resources since there is a lot of potential here. There are too few recipes at the moment but looking at the road map, it seems like they are working on that. I wish there was more depth to the contract system. Maybe it makes more sense in the story mode. But I tend to play these kind of games in sandbox so haven't really checked that out yet. But that part feels incomplete in the sandbox. I wont touch on the UI and bugs cause I feel its too early to assess these points. So def worth putting on the wishlist to see how this game develops. I am looking forward to see this project evolve into a real banger of a "factory game", eventhough the game aims to be much more than that, which is super cool. Good job!! :3

Update #2: More annoying stuff that needs fixing: flipping between surface and underground recenters you EVERY time. When you're trying to solve a problem or layout issue this is wildly unhelpful. The thing is, that it is helpful in the early game but at some point you need to go the corresponding surface location and then this mechanic quickly becomes AWFUL. HOWEVER -> This game shows so much promise, it's an easy recommend -> just understand there's more work left to do. This is a review that will be updated. I REALLY wanted to like this game, but there's something about the pace of the tutorial/storyline that leaves it wanting. The speech is so slow and so very highly interuptive as you're exploring parts of the game. There's no thought in the pacing - especially for an initial play-through. It shows a lot of promise - but wow does it feel like I'm getting bombarded by a lot of talking all at once. And even that would be fine if the speech speed was a little more quick (or even configurable). But as it stands now, it needs some tweaking and it really detracts from the experience of the game. The other big issue, selection of buildings and units is clumsy. Sometimes I click (primary click) and don't get what I want. I don't understand it. Other times I'm trying to build conveyors and they're attached to seemingly previously selected buildings. Weird. I'm very much looking forward to it once these get ironed out. Also a couple of untranslated menus and screens.

I had high hopes for this game but after revisiting after a long hiatus I'm disappointed in the complete lack of advancement in development, as well as their development "methods." As far as I can tell the game is identical to where is was about a year ago. Not only do they not seem to be actively developing it, they didn't even finish the existing roll outs. They made it so that players can waste time and resources researching helium 3 and related techs, and players can even accept trade deals & missions for Helium 3. But Helium 3 doesn't exist in the game, so it's all a waste and you'll get penalized if you accept such trade deals since there's no way to fulfill them. This is not how you roll out features. This is just plain bad development.