This game is a mixture of RTS style basebuilding married to tower defense with gorgeous graphics and an attention to detail.

As you can see I enjoyed the early access but as of June 3rd, 2025 the game has a serious system bug for an unknown number of people. My last play session was from 19:41 to 20:58 or roughly a little more than an hour. In that time the log file grew to 42GB of useless error messages. 42GB/77 minutes is 9 MB per second. A longer play time of 4 hours would be ~130GB. I tried to report this and they blew me off.

I suspect they made a deal with the devil and rushed the game out to appease Sony for the sponsored release show.

If you like Oxygen not Included but want a game with absolutely no real tutorial, this is the game for you!

The game's difficulty curve starts with a cliff of trying to figure out what is going on and what do you need to do. Once you get over that little hurdle its a pretty gentle but unstoppable climb upward.

My mini-guide for getting started at standard/normal difficulty: First priority is to make cots for your staff in a closed room (don't forget the doors) and then full speed ahead to get research going ASAP so you can unlock the Medical bed. As soon as that's unlocked, redirect toward cooking/sustainable food. iron is in the further underground room in the form of a few rock piles. First and highest priority with the iron to build are two medical beds (yes two! your magicians will get beat up a lot)

Otherwise I currently have a professor attuned to lightning, another is green/plants, and the last is your enforcer attuned to the "dark" purple tentacle magic school. Basically lightening person is dedicated to research, green person is best for chopping/harvesting, and purple person does a bit of anything. If you get the ghost helper, ramp up their priority for cleaning up spills, secondary cooking. Always have double the meals to staff/students. Also I don't think food every spoils. The ghost will never level up but it makes up for its uselessness in having unlimited mana and not needing food or sleep.

When the ghost isn't doing anything important: select everything/anything fauna related (esp seeds) and (m)ove them indoors on the floor. If the rain comes you will lose all of it. Select the ghost and then while holding down shift, right all the stuff marked to be moved and assign that task to the ghost. The game doesn't tell you until like day 4 that shift right click queues tasks onto a dupe... I mean magician.

Word of warning when fighting with the "dark" magician. They're your heavy hitter but there most powerful spell (miasma) costs a blood sacrifice. As long as they're in the back, just spam it like crazy for an easy win. Once the battle is over, force them to eat, and then its straight to medical rest (right click it).

Last thing, when you have 3-4 hours left in the day, send all of your staff to do the push the fog back ritual, and try to do it every day so your level is above 200 (the number is on the mana font stone).


Anyway good luck and have fun!