It was announced last week that we were getting a new world for the weekend’s play test.  Saturday would introduce us to Escarion.

The new world was billed as having the following features:

• A new world, Escarion, has been added. Like the other worlds, it is accessed by going to Space and traveling to it via Portal.
• There are large sections of creature-less and buildable areas in this world, including the extensive cave network, a good chunk of the beach, and the hill area between those areas. Also the big island in the middle of the lake is free of terror.
• Other parts of the world have a wide variety of creatures on it, most of which would like to eat you.
• Escarion has a couple of new resources available on it, including:
• New zone sweeper mobs: Joules and The Hart
• New creatures: Paindeer and Spitting Roaches

Paindeer.  Just what we need.  And spitting roaches.  But every planet has its flora and fauna.

There was also an announcement about some changes for this play test.

In addition, to make sure people could get out and see things rather than spending most of the two hour play test grinding up skills to unlock abilities

Because the duration of these preview tests is only two hours long, we’ve decided to make it much easier for players to get a sense of the game.

We’ve given you all of the tools in the game. You can equip them onto your toolbelt and use them, even without unlocking the skill nodes associated with them. You’ll be able to start accumulating experience that way that can be spent on the various skill trees. (Skill trees are opened via the “K” button.)

Additionally, there is a crate near each portal. You can access that crate to get small starter sets of building tiles (for the Fabricator), blocks (for the Instaformer), and road tiles (for the Paver). You can get these multiple times by clicking the crate multiple times…but be careful not to overfill your inventory…it’s kind of a pain to delete stuff at the moment.

Lastly, we unlocked the skill nodes for “additional camp size” and “enable homestead” so that you can lay down a Camp Kit and convert it to a Homestead to start building right away. Enjoy!

Definitely try the Grav Mesh and the Grapple! They’re both super useful and fun.

So, while this was still no doubt a play test, it was also clearly being setup as a demo to spur interest in the upcoming Kickstarter campaign for the game.

When the test launched on Saturday I jumped in because I wanted to see the new planet.  I started out on the desert world, but took the portal to space and found myself on Escarion quickly enough.

The spawn and portal on Escarion

I had the voice coms for the test in my headphones, but had my headphones off so I could half hear what was going on… but I caught somebody saying that moving between planets was too easy as though that wasn’t the point of the portals.  Again, this is pre-alpha and not the finished product.  For this demo we were given a lot of short cuts so we could try things rather than learn all the crafting mechanics.

I was, naturally enough, happy to have the grav mesh and all the tools in my inventory from the get go.

Fully loaded with stuff

Since I didn’t have to craft anything, I was able to go do whatever I wanted… which hobbled me for a sec.  Then I decided what I wanted to do was see the new planet and there is no better way to do that than to survey it, which requires you to venture into all squares of the 8×8 matrix into which the planet is mapped out.  Survey tool in hand, off I went.

All those survey nodes are just waiting for me

The oppressively fast day/night cycle does hinder seeing the planet.  Sure it is easier to find nodes at night, but it is more difficult to see the scenery… and due to the speed of the cycle it always seems to be night when you want day and day when you want night.  Still, I got around.

Escarion was pleasant and, as advertised, not quite so full of aggressive mobs looking to kill you should you wander into their line of sight.  Sure, there were some roaming about.

A heard of ballhogs our on the grass…

But mobs were not seemingly set to hem you into the spawn point the way they are on Pyromycis.  I ran around the world, scooping up survey nodes.  Some people had nicely created ledges or places to stand for some of the awkwardly placed ones and I did the same on a few of the cliff-side nodes I found.  With the grav mesh available and a relatively peaceful world, I was done with my survey in record time.

Been there, surveyed that

Along the way I saw the layout of the planet, which seemed to be centered on a lake with and island in the middle, where people started laying out their homesteads to start building.

The lake… at dusk… or maybe dawn… it is hard to tell

With the tools all available and some basic building pieces being handed out, people were going to town… so to speak… trying out the building mechanics.

Homesteads popping up everywhere

I decided to give it a try as well and picked an open spot within sight of the lake, but not too close, where I started paving some land to get right of the grass, which will otherwise grow right up through you floor plates.

Some paving on my homestead

The building tools… remain a bit twitchy to me.  I probably don’t have the patience for it, not being the base builder type beyond basic shelter, but I did find it a bit tricky to get things to snap to where I wanted them to.

I also found that the building materials we were given really were as basic as they get.  I wanted to put a window in, and some stairs, but I had to go unlock that.  The team gave us the tools, but didn’t unlock the skills that led up to being able to create those tools, so I had to do some remedial training to unlock things.

And, on doing that, I unlocked the recipes for windows and stairs and such… but those all had to be crafted, which meant going out to harvest all the materials and… well, I wasn’t going to commit to that.  I only had about 90 minutes of time for the test.

Though, the biggest problem with my building attempt was that I laid down a homestead right next to a spawn point for paindeer so the paindeer kept spawning and attacking me.  I was happy to have been given the drones as weapons, so I was able to fight them.

Pain for the paindeer!

The problem was that the spawn point was pretty much eternal and on a quick cycle so I spent at least as much time chasing off paindeer… and they are aggressive… as I did building.

At least they weren’t the spitting roaches I guess.  I never did run into any of those.

So I did not get very far with my homestead.  Just another half built structure in the middle of nowhere.

Like Vegas in 2009… only with grass

Overall the test seemed to go pretty well.  There were a lot of people on, but performance was very good.  I didn’t jump around or lag out or teleport.  The only problem I really saw was when trying to access things, like the box of supplies, only to be told the object was

The object is right there… also, the interaction frame should size around the text… that “s” is killing me

I saw that a few times as I tried to work with things in the game.

This object also seems to be within range

Not the worst thing in the world.  Eventually the game decided I was, in fact, close enough.  there is probably someplace there needs to be a queuing mechanic in the back end rather than a reject if busy.  It is just a bit of a pain.

And, of course, no play test would be complete without that guy looking to undermine and otherwise make the spawn point annoying to access.

Nice things? No, these are not allowed

I didn’t stick around to see how far they got, but they seemed determined to make the platform a floating island.  Such is the price of freedom.

Now to see if the play test did what it was clearly meant to do, which was bring more attention to the project and get people invested and ready for the Kickstarter campaign to launch.  The follower count on the campaign is past the 6,600 mark as I write this on Sunday morning.  We shall see if it is enough to put the campaign in motion or whether it will be delayed further.

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