No-one ever said that colonizing a planet would be easy. In Stellar Settlers you land on a series of challenging worlds, each with their own biomes and issues to overcome, mining them for all they’ve got before you blast off in a makeshift spaceship to make your escape. Taking the best of colony sims like Rimworld, city builders like Surviving Mars, and the madcap creativity of Kerbal Space Program, it contains a heady mix of influences. In its latest update it just got a whole lot tougher and more interesting as a result.
Despite marketing itself as a chill city-building game, Stellar Settlers is a title that definitely has a lot of deadliness going on under its hood. Each of its alien planets is ripe for colonization, but they also come with varying, unique dangers you’ll have to handle. The point of the game is to make a stable settlement, mine and gather resources, and finally build your own spaceship – much like you would in Kerbal Space Program – to take off in search of virgin territory.
The latest update for Stellar Settlers has upped all the aspects that make this an intriguing game. The two new worlds you can colonize are challenging and require you to completely change the way you play in order to survive and succeed. The first consists of an ever-shifting series of rocks, high up in the clouds. You won’t have much space to build on so you’ll have to spread out, connecting as you go. The conundrum here, however, is that the world will move about periodically – so those connections may quickly become broken, and essential facilities may end up far, far away.
The second planet is a much more organic affair. This world is covered in trees that are, in effect, one single organism. Here you’ll have to cope with extremely limited space organized in patterns that defy logic, causing you to have to make tough decisions with every single building you plant. In addition, it’s a high-gravity world, so your escape craft will need to be hardy and powerful in order to make escape velocity.
Along with these new planets there’s a ton of fixes and updates that have also arrived in the game, including some much-needed quality of life adjustments that should make every aspect a little easier to manage.
The Uncharted Update is out now for Stellar Settlers and you can also save 25% on the game until Monday September 9. If you’d like to read more about this update, and check the game out, you can do so over on Steam.
If you’d like to get a taste of something else, our recommendations for the very best simulation games and the best management games will keep you in fine company for many months to come.
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