Steam indicates that I first added Farworld Pioneers to my wishlist back in August 2022. It was described as Terraria/Starbound meets RimWorld/Oxygen Not Included, and since I very much enjoyed all those games, it seemed like this one would be up my alley. Well, it had a surprise (to me) release a few days ago and was on Game Pass to boot, so I was super excited to start playing.

Unfortunately, the game is pretty much trash right now.

First off, the game is labeled “v1.0” but it is very much in the “minimum viable product” category. Like, barely Early Access. There are periods of inexplicable slowdown; all electricity generators delete their fuel whenever you Save & Quit; Colony AI is abysmal to the point where colonists will readily starve/freeze to death while getting stuck on the very resources they were collecting; several research products literally say “Coming Soon!”; the ultimate goal for exploring the rest of the game, the Dropship, simply… doesn’t work. That last one was the final kick in the balls for me, as I ended up exiting the game several times to try and get unstuck from the inside of the cabin, only to finally teleport out back to the original planet… sans Dropship. And its contents. According to others, I was lucky: they didn’t have a teleporter so they were truly trapped and had to abandon 10-hour saves.

As bugs and sloppy code, those things can hopefully be fixed. What is a bit more concerning is the overall design of the game.

Terraria and Starbound both have NPCs that you can “recruit” to basically progress the game. They are not active members, but more like glorified workbenches or vendors. In colony sims like RimWorld and Oxygen Not Included, giving detailed orders and blueprinting out a base is important because you can’t control people directly. In exchange, you can see most of the map for planning purposes. Farworld Pioneers is a bastardization of the two – main character and colonists – and it just doesn’t work.

You can certainly give orders like “cut down these trees in particular” or “build a concrete room that looks like this.” And if you happen to have the resources in your stockpiles to accommodate the request (and the AI doesn’t wig out), they will even build it for you! The problem is that your colonists will not move the Iron Ore into the Smelter to make Steel Ingots and then move those to make the Steel door. Colonists will use existing resources, and they will work “bills” at crafting stations, but you have to set those up manually yourself. In which case, you may as well do it yourself.

Now, perhaps that is a deficiency of the existing AI. Certainly possible. But even if that piece is fixed, the fundamental problem is that you can only manage things that your character can see – no setting things up remotely while you are mining or exploring underground caves – which kind of renders the entire exercise moot. About the only functional things colonists can do while you are gone is perform Research and farm food.

I also have grave concerns about the scope of the game. Obviously building a Dropship and heading to another planet to get more advanced resources is one of the top goals. But what comes after that? Are they truly going the Starbound route wherein you then head to new star systems and discover even more exotic minerals and so on? Based on the current tech tree, it seems unlikely. And based on the gameplay on the starter planet, where you might get notified raiders are attacking your base while you are deep underground, I have my suspicions that this is a more “defend your colony” and/or “play on multiplayer and PvP strangers” endgame.

Overall, the game is a hot mess and should not have been released in this state. As someone starved of exactly the genre Farworld Pioneers professed to belong to, this has been extremely disappointing.