PAT34 The Calm Before The Storm

This is it. The final PAT - the last pre-alpha update ever. The Stars Reach pre-alpha playtest is coming to an end, and less than two weeks from now, the game will officially start being in alpha - while simulatenously launching on Steam’s Early Access.

As a direct result - this is going to be very last and final PAT “pre-alpha test report” I write on this blog. There will be more blog posts about Stars Reach in the future, and while I’ve not fully decided yet, what form they will take, they aren’t going to be “PATs”. These used to be more valuable in the past, when the playtest was still open to only a limited number of invited testers. All the people who were still on the waiting list, wanted to know what’s going on, and what’s happening in the tests. That’s how this series got started. Over time, a lot of that initial purpose got lost, and now the time has come to retire the series entirely.

For this last and final entry, I’ll be doing things a little differently than usual. Not just looking at the patch notes and the changes - but also talking about the upcoming EA launch a bit. So, let’s get into it.

The Patch Update

Launching on EA is pretty big. What’s even bigger, is the content of this patch. It’s like… homungus. Just on the crafting side alone, over 1200 crafting recipes got added. Besides that, there’s tons of new Quality-of-Life features and UI/UX improvements. There are new weapons and a new loot system. Characters now have a recipe book. There are a lot more different crafting stations now, and they come in 6 different tiers. Tailoring has been added. Character clothing has been added. Pharmacology has been added. Basic gamepad/controller support has been added. Performance has been improved. Bugs have been fixed.

It’s a lot more stuff than I can completely test/try out and write about here in detail. For one, there’s not enough time, as testing will shut down in a few days, followed by a 1-week break before EA starts. But secondly, a lot of recipe chains are broken, with missing recipes, unobtainable materials, and the 200-limit-bug making it incredibly hard to check out more recipes than that. It’s like a different form of dependency hell. But the breakage is quite pervasive and extensive, and many recipes aren’t craftable for three or four separate reasons even.

On the upside - all of those are just data-issues. Changing the recipe entries in the database fixes that. It’s easy to find, easy to do, you just have to go through them all, and work it all out. It’s more tedious than hard work. At the same time, most previous issues with crashes, disconnects, server rollbacks and other more severe problems, seem mostly fixed now. Those are significantly harder to find and fix things. In fact, during yesterdays “server slam” event, it took quite a few players all crowding together in the same spot, before we started to experience some disconnects, client-crashes and - finally even a server crash it seems. So, while crash-issues aren’t entirely gone, they seem a lot harder to provoke now.

The more prevalent, newer bugs, are tiny and rather inconsequential in comparison - but there’s surely many of them. And they do add up - to the point of making crafting a lot of stuff entirely impossible - and the rest rather tedious. I spent dozens of hours training up a new character from scratch and taking notes along the way. Writing everything up in a long feedback post that goes through all the different recipes for a number of different professions and crafting stations. The devs where quite happy about that, and Raph himself called it “fantastic” and “saving us a lot of time”.

But honestly and bluntly speaking… as a tester I feel that the difficulty of my job should rather be in discovering and reproducing the problems. In this case, the source of difficulty wasn’t finding bugs, but rather summing them up and writing them all down, just because there were so many of them. Small - but incredibly numerous. This felt a lot more like a friday late night job, where someone just wanted to get things done and call it a day - rather than a serious “I’m proud of my work and challenge you to find a bug in there” - moment. The real challenge would have been to do any crafting in the game without finding a bug. Probably impossible.

But I’m not really surprised either. This is the biggest - and most rushed update they have ever released, so this outcome feels entirely expected and predictable, and fully with the normal realities of game development. The only thing that worries me, is that they limited the time they have for fixing all of that to just two weeks, right before releasing the update (and thus without knowing how buggy it would be). That doesn’t seem like particularly clever planning to me. Why not wait two days until you know more, and only then put out a release date?

That being said, I do greatly appreciate all the QoL improvements and UI changes the patch brought. They are far to numerous to go into all of them, but I really, really want to underscore that overall the game feels a lot smoother to play now. You might think it’s just small things - but they color the rest of your experience as well. Never underestimate the effects of UI/UX - and this patch did a lot to improve that. The chatbox has become a lot more predictable in behavior. The ingame map has greatly improved. Keyboard-shortcuts work more consistently throughout. Drag&Drop works more reliably. The skill window has been split by profession (that’s a huge improvement!). Battery and cooldown meters cover more stuff now. Lots of visual and readability improvements. Better waypoints (with arrows!). New Crafting Window. Various bugfixes. Lots of stuff.

Further, I personally really do like the recipe book - and 300 entries is plenty for right now, as long as you don’t want to go deep into refining. You really aren’t going to need transmuting BarelyEvenExistsInTheGame-Ite to HasntAnyUseInCraftingAnyway-Ite. Ultimately there’s currently just a very few recipes in there you might actually have real use for - and once deleting recipes works (and the deleted ones also STAY deleted), you can fill the entire rest of your recipe book with the recipe chains needed to make items - tools, weapons, clothing, armor, building items - whatever you wanna specialize on. And I think there’s easily enough recipe space to specialize on two or three of these things. Probably more than you actually want to be doing in the game, because you definitely will want to limit the number of materials you have to stock, and the number of intermediate components you have to make.

The new loot system is pretty amazing. I love the idea of getting loot caches for all kinds of different activities in the game. And so far I’v collected caches for doing missions, combat, mining and harvesting. The contents of these caches is entirly random - and can sometimes include recipes. So far I’ve not been ably to recognize any difference in what you get, depending on whether you open a common cache or a rare one or an epic one - so I’m not really sure what’s that all about. But I still think it’s a great idea - and I also like the idea of the game only handing you the central, basic standard-recipes, and all the more exotic and advances ones being loot that you can find, and trade and sell.

A Suggestion For Recipes

Right now, you unlock recipes by training skills at a skill kiosk. Weirdly enough, you get to keep these recipes when disabling (putting out of practise) those skills. Since there are quite a few skills that don’t give you anything other than recipes - you can just train all of them, and deactive them again with no downside, thus gaining access to all the recipes that can be unlocked this way. You can still craft any of those recipes, even if you no longer have the skill that gave it to you. Which makes sense, because you could also have gotten that very same recipe from a loot cache, instead of unlocking it via the skill. So, it doesn’t make sense for the skill to delete recipes when being put out of practise either.

The other problem is of curse, that you might want to create chromium steel for space iron and space chromium - but the skill will give you like 50 recipes, most of which you have no use for. You are just spamming your recipe book there.

So, here’s my idea: Do not have skills give recipes to the player at all. Only have skills that unlock using a crafting station. Maybe even a specific tier of crafting station. Or maybe give additional benefits, like unlocking artisan crafting, or reducing processing speed, or allowing to use multiple processing slots at once, or increasing the chances of an “increased quality” crafting event or something. But no recipes.

Then, it’s also perfectly clear, what happens when that skill is deactivated. You don’t loose any recipes, but you loose your ability to use that crafting station, and you loose those other benefits. It doesn’t make much sense for skills to add to or remove from your recipe book. The whole thing made more sense, back before the recipe book existed.

So, how will players get their recipes then? Well, there already are vendors to get starter tools, starter weapons, etc. - so, why not add a few more such vendors, to get “starter recipes” from? For a cheap price, but individually purchasable. That gives players a lot more control over what does get added to their recipe book, and what doesn’t. Might also prevent bugs where deleted recipes never stop coming back - even after the skill granting them is already put out of practice. Recipes start behaving a lot more like items, which you can buy, sell, get from loot caches, etc. - and that’s a lot more in line with the recipe book, than having them be skills which you can train and deactivate again. That just doesn’t work with the limited slot space in the recipe book.

Launching into Eearly Access

It’s finally time to address the elephant in the room. Coming Wednesday will be the last day we testers play. The devs will apply more updates and bugfixes to the game - but the next we testers get to see and play these - it will be during EA. There is no more planned test-window for any new stuff or bugfixes before then.

There’s a lot of doomsayers going around right now. Reddit is completely full of them. Various comment-sections on videos and press articles may be more mixed, but still contain a lot of “this will fail” predictions. Some of them even show up in the official Discord. Many of these posters don’t give a reason for why the think so - or the reasons they give, have nothing to do with SR, and boil down to being bitter because of some other game - like Ashes of Creation, Crowfall, Star Citizen or whichever game happened to poison the well for that particular poster.

But that’s no way of making a prediction or even just a guess. So, let’s take a more realistic look, shall we? To spoil my conclusion right away: I think the truth of the matter is, that things are highely unpredictable. There are a lot of rules of thumbs and back-of-the-envelope heuristics that supposedly govern release on Steam. Discovered by websites like SteamSpy (back when the Steam API was still more open) and GameDiscoverCo.

People say things like PCCU on launch day times twenty roughly matches week-1 sales. That week-1 sales are roughly 15% of pre-launch wishlists. That lifetime sales match roughly 30 times the number of Steam reviews a title has. That the year-1 revenue is roughly 3 times the week-1 revenue. That number of followers is more telling than number of wishlists. The thing here is, that while these “rules” do hold mostly true, overall and on average across all Steam releases - the individual variability is very high. And there are many reasons, why these kinds of rules are less applicable to Stars Reach, than they are to other Steam releases. Further, these numbers have significantly shifted over time, and what was true in 2023 may no longer hold up in 2026. Steams machinery changes all the time, and it breaks these predictions, because these are mostly based on how much Steams algorithms will promote/surface a title, and NOT on how much buzz a game generates by it’s own merits.

None of that is probably particularly useful for estimating how Stars Reach will do. Stars Reach has 11.5k followers on Steam, and a very steady, linear growth curve - which is a good sign, as it shows organic growth based on real demand (rather than spikes induced by marketing events). Then there is the fact of roughly 6,000 Kickstarter backers receiving EA access keys as part of their pledge. Those are not going to be EA sales.

Player numbers for Stars Reach are historically not very impressive. All-time peak sits at 222 simultaneous players just before the Kickstarter - but for most of the time, numbers were nearly an order of magnitude lower than that, only to grow back up to 100+ very recently. Yesterday it was 135. Not a lot. But there is a reason for that. Stars Reach is a player-driven game, and needs a working, running economy as an incentive for a lot of non-scripted gameplay. A miner needs a market to sell ores to. A fighter needs a market to buy weapons from and sell creature loot to. A crafter needs both suppliers and customers. This cannot work on a low player-base, and as a result of that (combined with up until now a general lack of complete ingame gameplay loops), many testers felt there wasn’t a lot to do. But, this can change very drastically, once the economy actually gets going.

Apart from that, the audience that Stars Reach is attracting, only has a small overlap with your typical, actively posting Steam crowd. We got a disproportional amount of older gamers, people who played UO, SWG, or other MMO’s of the past. We got a diverse mix of more casual and more hardcore players, as well as a very broad mix of all sorts of different playstyles, including non-combat, peaceful ones. Stars Reach does have professions for that - which is not very common among MMO’s in general. There’s a lot of more “quiet” audience there. Your typical Steam sales data, is not particularly representative of that target audience, and “r/MMORPG hates it” is not indicative of anything at all.

What might be more indicative - but not necessarily - is the press reaction to the game. Journalists who have seen alpha-state games before, got a chance to actually play Stars Reach themselves - and they didn’t get hung up on the jank, but go excited over the potential. They are talking about “the second coming of the sandbox MMO”, “fulfilling the Dream MMOs have promised”, and “a much needed revolution in a stale genre”. That can of course also come across as aloof to the general reader. A SWG veteran will read “40+ player professions, player governments/cities, dynamic economy” and think “holy shit, they’re doing it” - but younger audiences might just be completely baffled and think: “but what do I actually do in the game?”

But there is also a potential problem with that specific, wider audience that Stars Reach might attract. There’s plenty of people on Steam who’ve been to an Early Access of an indie title before - where the game was still in alpha-state, and still under heavy construction. These people do understand that some Early Access games are actually early - and that big publishers using EA as marketing opportunity for a basically finished game in late beta, is not the norm. But, that kind of knowledge and realisation might be less present in that wider audience, leading to wrong expectations.

Will people realise that they are buying an unfinished game, and understand that a lot of things are simply not implemented yet at all - or if the are, still lack balance and polish? The developers are very honest, upfrond and transparent about what they are doing. In theory that’s the perfect antidote to this kind of expectation mismatch. But will it be enough? I don’t know. This does have to be very clear, so that people can self-select depending on whether they want to participate in the development of an unfinished game or not.

Right now, a player starts the game, decides to try some mining, and then asks themselves: “okay, been there and done that, what am I supposed to do next?”. But if there exists a market full of willing buyers for the ore they just mined, then that question changes to: “what can I spend that money on, which I just earned?” - and if then there exists a market of nice tool-upgrades which make their mining more pleasant and efficient… that’s like a completely different game. I really want to underline, how much a working economy has the potential to change how the game feels, and how much people perceive there is to do in the game.

That’s why I think getting that economy started up, is so incredibly important. Here’s the kicker though: there’s no buy orders in the game yet. No exchange market or auction house either. The only way for our miner to actually sell their ore, is either directly through player-to-player trade, which some might be a bit reluctant about, for the fear of being ripped off. The only other way, is to setup their own vendor - which they can only do on their own homestead. So, they have to first buy a homesteader and a vendor kiosk, and then find a place to set them up - and they probably want to do so on a planet with a government - and now we are at the point were some of the most active and experienced players will dump their Klaatus and resources in the GovBot, rather than using them to buy stuff from other player vendors.

And that slows down economy development a lot. And that’s assuming there aren’t any recipe-chain bugs left, that just prevent it from working in the first place. But, what’s needed is at least one level of GovBot, a homestead and a vendor - before our example miner can actually start earning any money for their collected ore. So, how are people supposed to earn the money to unlock govbot, buy a homesteader and a vendor kiosk - prior to being able to have an income? By running missions. Which is a boring grind. And, well, it’s also needed to train skills, which are quite pricey. And skill-chit rewards from GovBot have been removed as well. It would seem to me, that the starting conditions for an economy are not quite ideal.

What YOU Can Do

I wish I could give you some pointers or tips on how to start and get going during EA - but as a matter of fact, getting going in the game is near impossible with the bugs right now, and fixing the bugs will require changes - which we will never get to see before EA starts. So, the honest answer is, I have no way of knowing how to get started when EA launches.

But I still do have some advice, what you can do if you want to help the game. First, give a Steam review. There’s some sort of magical treshhold, where a game needs 10 reviews, before the Steam algorithm even starts taking it seriously. After that, the general rule is, the more reviews the better. Number of reviews might even be more important than how positive they are - but I’m not sure on that.

And then you want to play. Or at least just be online. Add to the games active player numbers, to peak users, to that line on the statistic. And beyond that, you want to help get the economy going. And there, I would recommend using the mission terminal on Haven to run missions there. It’s a lot faster to do missions, when you don’t have to go through a space/planet portal. Also, at the very start, Haven does not have any nasty critters around. Those might appear later, as the makers start to age - but initially, running missions should be fairly easy. Haven is also okay to run around on - it’s not the most difficult to traverse terrain. We’ve seen some far worse stuff with the newest planets.

Stock up on enough Klaatus, so that you can train a few skills later, but also are able to buy a Homestead and your own vendor kiosk. And maybe even get a little financial cushion on top of that. Once you’re out in the greater galaxy, find a place to put down your homestead and your vendor. And start selling whatever your chosen profession produces. Continue running missions for money - and instead of leveling up GovBot any further than just level 1, spend that money on other vendors on your planet. Support your fellow citizens. Buy stuff even if you don’t need it. You want those people to have extra money, which they can then spend on other vendors to buy whatever they want. That way there will also be money available in circulation to fund and make viable other kinds of gameplay and stuff.

That’s probably the best thing you can do, to help get other people hooked on the game. Buy their stuff. If you run across them, tell them “Thanks for selling that!”. I guarantee you - that matters more to people, than being the chosen on who defeats ultimate evil to save the world! If enough people do that, the economy will be doing great in the shortest time. I really think the best thing you can do, to really help this game feel great for new players - is to waste your ingame money on buying stuff left and right. Start a “support local businesses” campaign. Do whatever is needed, to get the money rolling. This sounds relatively easy, but it’s gonna be incredibly hard. Because the game will suck away money, into GovBots, nto Skill training… none of that money will re-circulate, and all of that will have to come back in through mission grinding. Yeah, the game is kinda setup to sabotage it’s own economy start that way. We gotta overcome that hurdle!

And then, when the economoy is running, and enabling people to enjoy their preferred, economy-supported playstyle - then we’ll automatically also get good statistics. Good reviews, good active player numbers, good word of mouth. We need to help people enjoy themselves in the game. And I strongly believe that the economy is key to that. Essential.

Stars Reach needs enough players simultaneously particpipating in enough different economic loops that the MMO actually starts behaving like an MMO. And only then, will all the gameplay possibilities come together.

But if the Economy does not start working… and many playstyles stay unrewarded or unincentiviced and people end up not knowing what they should do, and stop playing or decide to come back later… then the game is gonna be in a real pickle, even if those people leave positive reviews like: “Seems fine - can’t wait for 1.0 and more to do. Until then.”

In Conclusion

The danger is real. Between the audience situation, the EA-excpected-as-paid-beta issue, younger audiences not being familiar with this type of game and the whole affair being incredibly hard to explain to someone who’s never experienced it before - there is a real possibility, that the EA launch might go badly, earn bad reviews and not enough money for the devs to keep going. This is something that can happen - it’s not impossible. But I think the probability of that happening, is maybe a fair bit lower than some people seem to think. The game does have an existing community, a good Steam follower trajectory and new player feedback has been increasingly positive recently, while press response was even better.

To me, it seems way more likely that the game might maybe struggle a bit, but can eventually find it’s niche and it’s audience, and then do acceptably well there and achieve a healthy playerbase that it can continue on. That is what should happen, and people’s fears about this going badly are more rooted in Steam getting discovery wrong, and showing the game to the wrong audience, and people having the wrong expectations and leaving negative reviews when those wrong expectations are disappointed. And then those negative reviews scaring off, what would be the right people and right audience. Because I’m pretty sure, there are enough people out there, who would enjoy this game (at least with a working economy), to keep development going. Just look at how many people are still playing UO, or SWG private shards. And how many aren’t playing any MMO right now, but would be hungry for something that’s new and different, and not as on-rails as the standard-fare out there.

But what I actually hope for, is for the game to break out of it’s niche. To kinda get increased intention from outside the old UO/SWG guard. To strike a spark with new audiences and people who might not have tried MMO’s before, or only have tried a themepark and not found it to their liking. People who grew up on Minecraft and Roblox, and are ready for something more “grown up”. People who love Stardew Valley, or some other games along those lines. I’m not thinking about a fully viral, instant breakout megahit-success here - not because that’s impossible - it is another option of what could happen - I just don’t think it very likely. Not impossible though. What I’m more thinking about here, is the slow-and-steady growth over time route. Where the game might start doing a bit more average at first - but then will find it’s audience, and reviews will improve over time, and word will spread eventually. Could happen, right?

But first and in any case - we need a working economy. And that’s why I do ask YOU, personally, to help with that, and support it with your playtime and your ingame money. Buy stuff from your fellow players - even if you don’t need it. Just… spend your money, don’t sit on it, and don’t throw it into GovBot too early. The first level is enough to claim a planet and get a city started.

Thanks! You’re the best!