Outworld Station Steam Charts & Stats

Really enjoying the game, my first attempt at the genre, im not very good but getting better, nice gameplay, plenty to do and lots of updates around 33 hours playtime so far but plenty more to do, look forward to many more hours and look forward to more updates. EXCELLENT.

This game is actually one of the few base building/automation games I like. There is no over complicated micro managing at the beginning but once you get further into the game/base you will need to worry more about managing certain aspects. It is relaxing enough to be able to play while watching a movie/series but interesting enough to not get bored of it quickly. Graphics looks really nice as well, with attention to the details. Optimization is fine, even on the most ultra settings.

Hey’all my current Station Level is 9, so my review/feedback is regarding that point in the game. First of all let me tell you, that I think this game is worth more than the price it costs. It looks and plays really great, the developers have promising goals(see roadmap below ), are open to feedback and active in the discord. I like this game/the Devs so much, that I’d really like to play more Games from them(if they fit my genre) or support them more(Founder Pack, when?)! This review is my first with text formatting and open comments, so be kind please :). [h1][u]What I Like[/u][/h1] [list] [*]The Ctrl+c copy mode for a single object with all their links is awesome ! [*]Freighter/Mining/Extractor System is awesome! Especially changing freighter settings in the map overview! [*]It is cool to figure out why something doesn't work right. Pipe Flow direction/flow rate or faulty Links [*]ctrl mode for efficiency overview :) [*]Power Connector <3 [*]There is a ton of stuff to do in this game, if you want to play solo. But with up to 3 friends you could divide the tasks between them(exploration, station building, station building + exploration in another region). [/list] [h1][u]Feedback/What I don’t like atm[/u][/h1] (Some of these points are already adressed in the Roadmap at https://steamcommunity.com/app/3242950/discussions/0/598524660653530418/?snr=2___ ) [list] [*]Solar Panel alignment perk rework needed(since there is no more alignment loss), maybe counteract the diminishing returns from the number of panels ? [*]The Coloring of chosen perks should be different/more visable. Choosable but not enough points is orange, choosable with enough points is white, chosen is a dull blue but the ones behind orange ones are almost the same colour. [*]Sometimes I get visual stuttering at my main station with: 32 Fabricators, 26 smelters, 4 shipyards, 7 freighter docks, 28 matter printer, 32 fusion reactors and 4 wormholes (SEEMS ALREADY FIXED) [*]You can link one object to many but not many objects to one(ctrl+shift+click to gather and then shift click to link ?) [*]Advanced setting mode needs bigger resource images to be choosable(or maybe automatic from the produced ressource/material) to be shown in the ctrl mode. (ALREADY FIXED) [*]Colourable labeling would be nice for the Power connector, Freighter and Wormhole. Wormhole Settings are overwhelming, maybe let the selection menu be more minimizable(just showing the connected wormhole) and maybe input/output storage advanced mode editable in one location? [*]Some Pipe arrangements need some visual correction(weird angles or broken flow direction/resource indicator) and sometimes you get more possible pipe connections if you start from top/bottom or bottom/top. I have screenshots for those visual bugs if needed. [*]Every new station level I had to remodel my first station with the basic 3 production facilities therefore copy/save/detached parking of whole station arrangements would be cool. [*]Maybe a Meta Progression System, that let’s you start new runs with the earned station level/artifact perks from former runs with the option to reset that level for new runs.( I’m not sure with this pointer .. Outworld station is my first automation/basebuilding game.) [*]There should be more uses for the constructed ships, at my station level I only need to build them to advance the station level. [*]More Hub Storage Space needed(maybe for the choosable main hub?). This could be counteracted with a better storage usage .. but I’m still learning.. The quantum storage(see roadmap) could negate this need, because I could just put the basic construction materials in that one to share it with all locations, but quantum storage seems like a high tech building .. so we’d have to wait for a higher station level to get something this essential(for me at least) :/ .. [*]Maybe a bit more clarification(highlighted words in tutorial or tooltip) where the new buildings are usable(cloud collector was confusing for me). [*]Choosable flow direction at the wormhole pipe nodes(like at the pipes). [*]I'd like the option to hide upper Level shades completly with the button toggle(maybe in the game settings?). [*]Tug Bay is hoverable with the mouse despite upper level hidden. [*]Upgradeable Small Shipyard(MKI) to Medium Shipyard(MKII)(and further ones) with enough free space around them? [/list]

Unstable. Usually crashes within 5 minutes of start of game. Problem didn't start until mid-to-late in the game's play time, (about 20-30 hours) which prevents refund. Curiously enough, the dev asked me at the start of troubleshooting if I could just refund the game because it crashed consistently. Dropped a bunch of debugs/crash logs on them. After a couple of weeks they concluded that the problem was entirely my hardware (despite other people also reporting crashes regularly.) My specs exceed minimum and exceed recommended. This is the first Unreal Engine game I've played in a while. Mostly I play games built with Unity and have zero problems. Last two beta versions they released had game-breaking bugs (which tells me they aren't even testing their code before pushing it to beta.) Multiple players reported that pipes and resource transfers stopped working. (They also tried to insist at the time that we were imagining things because 'it worked for them.' Of course, once you showed them video proof it only took them a few minutes to find the problem. That seems borderline incompetent.) Since they took the final position that there was nothing more they could do for me I uninstalled and threw the game on the trashheap., It's unplayable in its current state. So lesson learned is (1) avoid Unreal Engine games, (2) avoid games by this developer. OVERVIEW Game is a mix of semi-ARPG elements (you control a drone, there is fighting of random drones that spawn in each region) and factory builder elements. As it is in EA at time of writing this review, the game is subject to change, but at the time that I stopped playing (due to the stability issues) there were still a number of things wrong with the game. 1. Station Overview was clunky and effectively useless. It should tell you what each part of your factory is doing, but the devs didn't really think through what was important to players who didn't know the ratios and formulas by heart. 2. Main drone control is frustrating. Your main drone wanders around the screen, following the mouse, even when you're in building menus. This is pretty critical later in the game when the devs introduce uranium which can kill you-- but you can't really interact with your factory or monitor it without exposing yourself to the killing embrace of the radiation. 3. Upgrades were a mess. Only about half of them were worth anything. 4. Solar had been improved before I quit, but it was still pretty terrible. They went from forcing the player to adjust panel angle every quarter hour (or so) to never having to adjust the panels after installing them-- but you still have to do it once-- and they added a increasing performance loss from adding more and more solar panels. It really didn't make any sense why they kept panel angle at all once they made the shift, My guess is that they couldn't bear to throw out the panel angle feature, even though the reason it was needed was removed. (Sun used to rotate around the map, which is was necessitated changing the panel angle. This was a frequently player complaint, so they removed the sun rotation and panels only had to be adjusted once-- but if sun always is in the same place, why can't the game just set the panel angle correctly on build?) 5. And, once you add loss of performance to solar panels, you force your players to not use one of the potentially cool early game unlocks (a power link that linked all of your structures together into a single power grid per map.) Now it's better to run a bunch of isolated outposts on solar than to power link everything (at least until Junkyard.) 6. The worst part of the game was that the limit on available raw resources inhibits the factory portion of the game, and the complexity of setting up unbelted factories that have to deal with multiple throughput limitations was fairly tedious. And as you climbed the "rankings" to access later techs and maps, the amount of things you had to produce kept growing out of proportion to the resources available. Basically it was a way to time gate the player so that the game wouldn't be over too quickly. 7. Then they introduce illogical ship building where ships built will explode without fuel and ever increasing fuel tank sizes (despite throughput limitations) to force players to scale up their factory (despite raw resource limitations.) CONCLUSION There are some fun elements in this and I would have given the devs more time to solve the gameplay and performance issues except they made it clear they didn't think they could do anything for my stability issues and tried to gaslight me into thinking that I was the only player having a problem. (People had reported crashing even the day before.) Instead, where I quit playing, the game was very start-and-stop. You couldn't really lean in to the ARPG combat elements because there were simply no real rewards from that-- and you couldn't really lean into the factory elements, because of scaling (throughput) and raw resource availability issues. The game left like it was early access. I certainly hope they solve all the problems as it could be good. I wanted to like it, but when the game crashes within 5 minutes of launch, I'm forced to go play something else-- it's the only game in my library that does this.

Good factory games are excellent quality even in early access. This game continues that good tradition. It is also perhaps the most beginner-friendly factory building game out there, with the best tutorial and a slow progression without any sudden difficulty spikes.

Outworld Station is a slick factory and logistics game with most of the usual gameplay friction removed. It may not be very complex, particularly starting out, but it is fun. I like that the development goals include production of spacecraft. It's a good way to tie different production chains together and gauge your factory throughput. Most factory games have been slow to utilize finished products like this.

I'm a big fan of factory games in general. I've played over 4,500 hours of Factorio as well as multiple other games in this category. Seeing as this is still in Early Access it's far more polished than any of the others I've played at this stage. The developer is engaging with the community and seems to take community suggestions into consideration when making changes. There are some aspects which could use improvement but there are a lot of things that very well done so far. I just purchased the game a week ago and already have 55 hours played as of the time of this review. There are some boring parts as in waiting for a large number of items to craft but the easy way around it being boring is reconfigure your base to make things more organized, explore more of the map if it's not all done yet and other such things. Yes I would recommend this game to those who also like factory games and management style games. There is even a little combat and mechanics to figure out. It may not be the big exciting game everyone wants but for those of us who like relaxing and thought provoking this game has that for sure. I'll be playing this for quite a while I'm sure.

[b][u]Introduction[/u][/b] I have about 55 hours in this game and I'm on my second major playthrough. I'm an avid restarter of games like this. Not because I've not enjoyed them but because factory games (as they have come to be called) can take trial and error to perfect and find the best layout. Yes, Outworld Station is another factory game, in the vein of games like Factorio, Satisfactory or Dyson Sphere Program. It's early days for Outworld Station but the game has released in early access with a lot of "game" to it. There are 11 stages of production, as of the current time, and a lot of scope to play with. I like to be fair to a game in early access. There are going to be bugs. I've had a few crashes and there are some niggly little bugs, but I've not encountered anything game breaking. The developer(s) are frequent on the discord and seemingly very open to communication with players. That's a good thing and bodes well for future direction of Outworld Station. Saying that, Outworld Station is already an immensely enjoyable game. There are things I'd like to see added or improved, but it is early days. There's not a lot of quality of life currently. The devs have posted a roadmap for early access and there are some nice ideas in there. I'm looking forward to seeing Outworld Station blossom into a game that is easily on par with the likes of Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program. [b][u]So what's the gameplay all about?[/u][/b] As I said, Outworld Station is another factory game. You mine resources, feed them in to a production line and steadily progress to more fanciful builds and more complicated production chains. Outworld Station is closer in setting to Dyson Sphere Program, in that it has a space setting. You start off in an asteroid belt and collect resources, in the form of asteroids, with your space faring drone. You grab the asteroids with a tractor beam and feed them in to your production line via what is known as an atomizer. Further along the stage progression you can unlock mines that will feed resources in to your production line in a more conventional way. There is a system of docks and freighters that will ferry resources about. This is similar to the likes of trains or trucks in Satisfactory or freighters in Dyson Sphere Program. In contrast to many other factory games, Outworld Station does not use conveyor belts. The resources travel through the segments of your space station along paths outlined by connecting one factory to another. You can separate this into stages with storage. It's all very simple. The one thing that I think would improve this is the ability to waypoint your routes so that you can beat the efficiency game by sending resources different ways. Outworld Station does have a simple technology mechanic at this early stage. You collect glowing orbs from wrecks scattered around the map. These orbs can be placed into a machine that extracts tech points. These tech points can be used in a variety of ways, such as speeding up the flow of materials in your station to improving your drone's abilities in combat. The roadmap states that the devs are looking to add more 'science' later down the road. Yes, there is combat in Outworld Station. It's pretty basic currently. There will be enemy ships or turrets around the map and when you come across one you can switch in to combat mode and take to battle. It's not really challenging combat, it's simply a case of flying around the enemy to avoid its fire right now, but I've seen the dev say they have ideas for improvement. Back to progression, the game opens up after a few stages to send you to other areas of the games star system, each area having new resources and production chains to mess around with. The gameplay is further enhanced by the fact that you can move resources between the areas of the system with wormhole gates, and there are resources that can only be found in certain areas but that are needed in your main hub. Each stage will have a number of orders for you to build. This will be the production of certain resources and the production of ships for a faceless employer. It's similar to the 'quests' you get in Satisfactory. I hope that further down the line we will see some more lore to explain where the ships go, but that is wholly understandable as something to be added later in the day. [b][u]Art and Sound.[/u][/b] This is one of the aspects of Outworld Station that I have been very impressed with. The music is nice and futuristic sounding and the sound effects are well done. The true genius of Outworld Station, at least for me, is the art design. The station look is great, as are the background space vistas, but the real treat comes as you move away from the start location. I won't spoil too much, but at one point you head to a gas giant with a really unique art style. I heartily send applause to whomever does the art for Outworld Station. I am very, very impressed with the look of Outworld Station. I really do think the art style deserves some raucous applause. Well done, Trickjump Games. [b][u]How does Outworld Station run?[/u][/b] You have to remember that Outworld Station is in early access. Nobody should expect any early access game to be perfect. Saying that, I've had very few real problems. I'm on a very new PC, with a reasonably beefy system, and I'm getting FPS of at least 100 at a good stage of progress. I got further in my previous run through and may have hit a lower FPS, but there are stability improvements coming all the time. I think some people have had more crashes and errors than others, but there has to be some give and take when you decide to buy into an early access game. If you don't want to sometimes feel like a tester then you can wait. There are games that have been released with an AAA budget that have a worse performance than Outworld Station. The game is very, very playable. [b][u]Conclusions[/u][/b] I am so glad I was told about Outworld Station by a friend who thought I might like it. He doesn't even play factory games but he knew I'd like it. He was right. As I keep pointing out, it is early days for Outworld Station. There are bugs. There are glitches. There does probably need to be quality of life improvements. There is optimisation needed. But it's in an excellent state for a game very new to early access. If anyone reading this played Dyson Sphere Program when it entered early access then I'd suggest we're on similar footing with Outworld Station. There's possibly a few more key elements already in Outworld Station (DSP didn't have combat at early access release), but it's just as playable as DSP was. It's inevitable that I should feel the need to compare the games that are released in the factory game genre. I'd find it very hard to say "this one" is better than "that one". They all have their positives and "not as positives" (I like these games so it's rare I find glaring negatives). Also, excuse me for continually comparing to Satisfactory and Dyson Sphere Program. Those are the two factory games I know best. This will be a black mark in my factory games points book, but I haven't actually played Factorio. Yes, I know, I'll go straight to the naughty corner. I would definitely say "go ahead and give Outworld Station a chance". It's not pricey and I've gotten 55 hours of fun out of it so far. I'm also really looking forward to seeing how this game progresses. There are some future roadmap ideas that I think could be excellent fun. And what is not to like about a dev team that are keen to chat with players and will willingly discuss future improvements for their game? They are also very engaged with the reporting of bugs. I'm having a blast!

Put 25h into the game. Solid experience, with no major issues or bugs. Performance does get a bit choppy once you have a medium sized factory, but I was playing on 4K max settings on a 7900XT It does get quite grindy fairly early on. There is no proper opportunity to scale the factory due to very limited resource nodes after reaching level 8-9. At one point I had to leave my PC running for an extended period of time just to crank out the ships needed for the next level. There was virtually nothing to do, all nodes were fully maxed, all artifacts collected. This never happens in Factorio or DSP where you're only ever restricted by the efficiency of your build. Going to park it now and revisit it after a year, hopefully EA has progressed well by then.

It's got potential (and it's really pretty), but the gameplay doesn't seem very well thought out, and the QoL needs are... incredibly severe. As it stands today in the current version: - All the storages default to accept anything in all slots... which means you're going to get deadlocks if you use them for more than one thing. - ... Unless you customize and lock every slot, which takes an incredible number of clicks: you have to open "advanced" mode (there's no hotkey for this; go click) and then click the slot, and then search for the name of the item (no picture attached) (and it's not alphabetically sorted, or sorted in any way at all, and no there's no text search mode), click that, and then (you're still not done!) make sure you lock all the other slots (you don't want to know how many more clicks). - And you DO want to set filters on your storages, because if you use the copy-paste feature on factories at all, it's very very easy to accidentally route the wrong materials to the wrong targets, and they're you're stuck doing annoyingly manual cleanup. - Backpressure is just generally insane. There's huge buffers in everything by default. So if one resource is consumed by more than one kind of downstream user, and you want to balance them, you're gonna spend a lot of time locking slots. - Did I mention there's no balancing splitter concept? Huh. Welp. Get fucked, I guess. - The output rate of storage buildings is severely limited. The ratio of storage-to-factory is between about 3 and 8, depending on the factory recipe's hunger. So if you wanted to use storage modules as hubs to simplify your logistics connection graph (and you WILL want to do that, because otherwise the connection graph is very hard to read, and very very very hard to refactor)... well, it's actually a really bad idea, because you'll artificially induce serious throughput limits. - There's no other sane routing hub option in the game either. - You unlock freighter hubs after a few levels. _They have the same incredibly low throughput limits._ This throughput limit is so low that you'll already totally saturate it by the instant you've built it. - And this is not like factorio, in that you can't "run another belt". There's just absolutely nothing sensible you can do to increase the throughput without increasing the logistical complexity. The only thing you can do is add more storages (which increases the already excessive buffer sizes), and then DEAL WITH THE EXPONENTIALLY MORE CONNECTION SETUP CLICKS to connect everything in a mesh. - When you build freighters? Once they're in motion, if you want to reprogram them? CATCH UP TO THEM. There's no overview menu showing your freighter roster. - Want to use those docks for more than one type of resource? You can, sorta. With an incredible amount of clicking to set up all the slot locking. But then you'll probably want to set up the slot locks on the freighters bound to the dock, too. And also you'll need to remember to set ALL freighters sharing that dock to not have the (default infinite!) wait for full unloading, or they'll jam all ONE dock slot that a dock has. And even then? It's gonna give you a warning about blocked freighters, even when they will time out and continue their loop momentarily. So basically, don't bother: this, AND the fact the output limit applies on docks too means using one dock to do more than one thing would be an incredibly stupid choice. (So why is there these mountains of UI that make it so hard to tell the dock to have exactly one job? Hm, good question.) - Actually, about freighters and backpressure. You're *always* going to get that warning about stuck freighters. Even when they're doing backpressure correctly, with a single resource, and you're not consuming it, so it's *correct* for the freighter to wait in the dock. It's the same warning as if you've got a deadlock because of multiple resources. Cool. Good UI. (Not.) - At no point can you easily see what's overstocked or understocked. You'll have to go through every storage and look yourself. So I hope you kept them clearly organized! (Despite all the UI defaults making that so very hard to do!) - Remember that throughput rate I already complained about several times? If you upgrade storages and docks, it goes up... by about 50%. While your slot size goes up by 3x. This should be basically flipped, lol. - Meanwhile if you upgrade factories, none of these throughput rates go up. So you can upgrade things without... getting any result. Because everything will constantly be bottlenecked on the throughput rates. - There's a tech upgrade for the speed in which things move through your connector tubes! Wow! That's what I was looking for! ... Nope, no, sorry, it's not. It decreases latency of things, yeah, but **it still doesn't change throughput**. Throughput is STILL locked at the same fixed output rate per building. (Is this nuts?! Yes, it's nuts! Devs: have you playtested this *at all*?? This makes *no sense*.) - If you lock slots on a storage so that factories don't push too much into it, can you then manually drag your *player* inventory into it, to unload when you accidentally picked up junk (as you regularly do, from deconstructing things)? NO, of course not, that would make too much sense. (I have seen zero other games make such a basic, player-hostile mistake. Devs, seriously, do you playtest this? At all? Ever? Even once? I'm so confused. This makes inventory management a pain within the first hour of play and it never seems to go away later, either.) Basically the core gameplay seems like it's all about logistics, but then all of the game logic design and all of the UI design is aligned to make the easiest thing to do be the stupidest thing to do. And every choice that helps you scale in throughput causes you to scale up in complexity in the worst imaginable ways. Every part of the design works in almost opposition to the goal. I love the conceptual direction, but I think the design team needs to seriously sit down and think about what logistics are, and then redesign damn near everything here. And to the dev team: if anyone on the team doing that review doesn't know what the word "backpressure" means,.... Man. Go read some wikipedia. Go play some factorio. Meditate on those. You can't be doing a logistics game without having a concept of backpressure and deadlocks and giving your players some reasonable ways to build systems that don't get wedged.