I haven't played a city builder like this in a while. It's slowly and steadily opening up, and I can see how you'd easily lose a lot of time in this one. It sounds like it has about 10 1-hour runs per campaign. I enjoy it so far.
Okay, obsessed with this, lol. The tutorial was almost cozy, and I was enjoying making my orderly little streets and putting in decorations and such, taking it easy. Then I start the real game and they drop me into this inhospitable alien landscape and are like GO FOR IT.
The main game is won by building a settlement that meets gradually unlocked orders. With each order, you can choose one of two options, so you can try to steer your city a certain direction. Each time you complete an order you choose from buildings to unlock. There is overlap in what the buildings do, so you can choose based on resource availability and needs. It took me a couple games to get the hang of it, but once I got into it, I really got into it.
The overall campaign proceeds across a larger map and I guess there are 10 settlements to build per campaign. You earn persistent upgrades as you move through the campaign. In between you can return home and talk to your aunt, and I'm not sure what's going on with that beyond learning more about the overarching lore (there is a queen, and you MUST NOT displease her, that's all I know). But this world is cyclically ravaged by a storm, so living there is a constant process of establishing settlements, retreating when the storm comes, and going back out to resettle the land again after it passes.
One thing I appreciate is after you meet your goals, you can continue to work on your settlement. You won't get additional experience, it's strictly for your personal enjoyment, but I can see building up a particularly nice settlement and wanting to play with it a bit. I only explored a fraction of my map when I finished the first round, but later in the game I should unlock things that allow me to explore further on a run. It also sounds like around level 10 you unlock the Obsidian Archive, which allows you to customize runs, so you could set up a sort of endless mode that way.
Exploring new biomes, and starting to get the hang of various production lines. The jungly one is probably my favorite, in part because the trees sometimes offer other resources beyond wood.
Wandered into Scarlet Orchard, which is a more dangerous place. Things were a little dodgy for a while. The soil there cannot grow, so you have to forage or buy food, and I was always kinda low. This is the first time I had a villager leave me (sob). In the beginning, I had a LOT of impatience built up but the tide eventually turned.
There's an archaeology feature here, and treasures to be found, but I wasn't able to get into that I was mainly focused on keeping everyone fed and happy.
Playing a lot of this. Had a few losses now. One, I expanded too far out without fortifying my hearth area. On the other, I completely lost track of the Queen's impatience and lost by a hair, basically. I got greedy and looted all the caches instead of sending some periodically back to the Queen. I sorta forgot (?) about the ability to reduce hostility by making sacrifices at the hearth, so I'm doing better with that. Rainpunk is still a ??? I'm harvesting rain down but IDK about the pipes and I keep forgetting to look it up.
So I guess I'm obsessed with this now. And I'm aware, back in my hindbrain, this game is extremely repetitious, so I feel a little weird about my fixation in the, "Why do I like this?" sense. I haven't played many city builders but in a lot of building games one of the most fun parts for me is starting out. That's why I continually restart my game in Shapez and Factorio and so on. This game has me constantly restarting every hour or so. So that part mashes buttons in my brain that like to be mashed. The meta progression is pretty slow IMO, but as a result, I feel like I'm developing a really solid feel for the mechanics.
It helps that you can speed things up. I sit on 3x speed most of the time now.
The screenshot is one of my better towns. I've begun experimenting with setting up multiple hearths rather than having a sprawling mess where my workers are constantly scurrying back to the home hearth. Now I set up additional hearths and warehouses as soon as I have space (their radius cannot overlap), and I move houses over when I do that.
After dieying twice I decided to switch up my strategy. I used to go for the small glades, but now I completely ignore them and go for a big glade as soon as possible. I nearly always have enough time to figure out how to manage the threats before anything terrible happens, even early in the level. The rewards are much better and the level of tree hate is more manageable comparatively. I always keep an eye out for tools, because sending caches back to the Queen is a necessary boost of reputation. I'm also a lot better about sacrificing fuel during storms to keep hostility/tree hate down.
I've encountered one situation where I couldn't fulfill deeds (based on the territory, deeds were locked), and that made things much harder, because the only way to reliably get a boost of reputation was to send back caches or have extremely high resolve. That's the only hazard I would consistently avoid at this point.
I finally looked up pipes and figured out I haven't unlocked the rainpunk update that lets me actually use them. I wish they'd explained the rainpunk generally a bit more, because I assumed I needed to connect collectors to buildings or something, but could never figure out how. Turns out you treat it like a mine upgrade and just plop down x pipes for a bonus. Currently, I usually start collecting rain in the mid-stage of a town because I can use the water for crafting and quests.