I’m surprised to be here reporting to you all that I am still playing Solarpunk. It has managed to wriggle its way into my ‘currently playing’ queue somehow.
I can’t even articulate why. It’s in so many ways your standard crafting game. You collect materials, build things, and those things lead to you building better things, or researching better things to build. And that cycle just repeats. There’s no clear goal or anything here, other than ‘advance the tech’.
Despite the name of the game, the real hook here is the floating island aspect. You start on an island floating in mid-air. Your first big goal is to build an airship dock, which comes with an airship included. Then you can fly to other islands that are within range of your starter island. One of these islands is actually a hovering air ship inhabited by a robot who will trade you some of your crafted items for either blueprints or airship upgrades.
Blueprints are used to unlock new tech, and the airship upgrades expand the range of your ship. This is the gating system. Your first island has Iron Ore. Once you get your airship you can fly to another island that has Copper. With the next airship you can reach an island that has Quartz, and so on. The range you can cover seems to be based on some arbitrary point on the map (it might be the robot’s airship/shop). In other words the gate is a ‘hard’ gate; you can’t, for example, build a second airship dock on the peripherary of your current range and then extend the range from that dock. It’s a very videogame system but I get it…
At this point I’m 10 hours in, or thereabouts. I have researched solar panels, sprinklers to keep the crops going, automated drills for bringing up ores, and so forth. I’ve start caring for animals (chickens only, so far). My most recent ship upgrade required me to trade 6 eggs so I had to find a chicken, plop down a house for it, and a water and food bin. Once the chicken was happy it conveniently started placing eggs in a basket outside its house. Then it vanished, but eggs keep appearing so I dunno if that’s a bug or what.
On my ‘home island’ I plopped down a chicken coop in a random spot and it had a nametag on it, but there’s no chicken that I can see. I’ve put down food and water and I’ll see if I get phantom chicken eggs here, too.
This is not a game I play for hours. It’s like a mellow 20-30 minutes then I start getting a little bored. Flying between islands is fun at first but after a bit it becomes a dull routine. Imagine I need glass, iron and copper to build something (a solar panel, for example). I have to fly to the island with the copper mine, then fly to the island with the sand ‘mine’, then fly home to the island with the iron mine. Between the limited capacity of the drills and your limited inventory space, you’re not hauling huge amounts or ore. Generally it feels like enough for one project or so. I’ve been working on doubling the drills at each location, but it takes 2 solar powers to power a drill. In other words installing a 2nd drill in a mining spot requires the drill itself, two solar panels, and two cables to connect them. So it’s taking a while.
I will be very surprised if I don’t eventually research a way to do automated mining runs or something, but until then it’s lots of flying back and forth. There’s also no fast travel. I did upgrade one of my airship docks which lets me ‘boost’ to it, assuming it is powered. I haven’t quite figured that process out yet and I’m afraid of crashing into the dock and damaging/destroying my ship.
Solarpunk is the ideal game to play after work and before dinner. I have a small-ish segment of free time and a load of stress on my shoulders from work. Piddling around in my Solarpunk world, gathering some crops, building a couple items, building houses and bridges and such…it’s a really relaxing way to transition out of work mode. As I mentioned in my first post, I am playing it via Game Pass but I almost wish I’d bought it on the Switch 2 as it feels like something that would just fit really well on that platform.