Starground Early Access [Impressions]
Build complex factories in automation roguelite Starground.
Starground. Credit: Big Boy Games
Big Boy Games’ Starground is lauching into Steam Early Access soon. I’m fairly new to automation games but I found a lot to enjoy here despite being a bit intimidated at first.
From Big Boy Games:
Starground is a top-down automation and roguelite combo. All progression trees are completey independent from each other, so you can play through in a truly flexible way. Spend all your time automating, dungeoning, or maybe a bit of both. There's no right way to play the game, and any path you take will let you win. If you want to play together, invite your friends to work on the same things, or divide and conquer each part of the game.
I spent my time in Starground automating, since that’s what I was most curious about. The game doesn’t hold your hand at all, which is what I found intimidating. Outside of a couple very basic tutorial text boxes, there’s no step-by-step tutorial of the core automation components. It took me a little while to figure things out, and doing that in itself was a rewarding experience.
Starground. Credit: Big Boy Games
You’ve got to harvest raw materials, sort them, process them into fuel or other materials, and power the whole thing. You use conveyor belts with filtering gates to move things around. Making a production line and seeing everything move from point to point on its own is super satisfying.
I had a lot of fun with this part of the Starground on its own. I still need to take the time to explore the game’s roguelite dungeon crawling experience. I’ll report back once I do. Even so, I’d say Starground is already worth picking up if you’re a fan of sandbox automation games.
Just one word of warning—I played the game on Steam Deck and it didn’t run out of the box. It would crash immediately on the first splash screen. Thankfully, there was a solution available in the Steam community discussions: for the moment, you have to force the game to run with an older version of Proton. Once I had that dialed in, it was smooth sailing.
Starground recently hit 7.0 and will be available on Steam Early Access soon.
