Solarpunk

Peaceful building game on floating islands powered by the sun and wind

My Score: 8/10

This game has all the things I like from several other games I already love. It has the build system like that of Valheim, but without the combat and death, so you can focus on building and exploring without having to worry about losing your things (if you choose the soft option). It also has the farming elements that are familiar to those who play a lot of farm sim games, although I would say the crops grow a little too quick, but in a survival game this makes more sense as you need to keep your food and water levels up as starving is one of the few way you can actually die in this game.

The automation you can make further into the game are also essential, otherwise I would be constantly mining every ore on every island. The power system is a good way to allow automation in a controlled way, so you can't just go straight to max level, you have to build energy sources like solar panels and later wind turbines and turbines to balance your energy demands, which makes it more realistic.

The only improvements I would suggest are more interior furniture, as currently there is only one style of bed and limited furniture options and even fewer clutter items. For a building sandbox focused game, I feel there could be a lot more options for decorating with. It would also be nice to have a stone building type as currently there are only three types for building with: wood, glass or brick. They could in theory add stone blocks or metal for building constructions without having to add more ore types, as stone and metals are already in the game.

The flying system works fairly well as you can either land perpendicular to dock, or you can fly slow over the land and drop down carefully like a balloon. I haven't done a lot of damage to the craft, and the only time I completely smashed it was when I misunderstood how the advanced dock works. When you target a powered dock, it gives you a boost power option and all this does is slam you into a cliff at full speed, so I believe that the advanced dock could use a little more work to make it work as expected or add more uses for it.

What could they do in the future? Assuming there will be future content updates, not just bug fixes and balancing improvements, there could be more islands added (with or without new items to find). But as a builder in multiple games, I think the most obvious way additional would be to just add more furniture and building option as mentioned above. This would be the easiest way to extend the game without having to create new worlds.

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/1805110/Solarpunk/