Next Fest is upon us once more. My M.O. now is to simply scroll through the options, find games which have demos and which look like something I’d like to spend a while with, and download them en-masse.

My first selection actually came to my attention through the LTGaming channel on YT. Looking at the image above, you should not experience any shock or surprise: it’s a space game, and it’s got crafting. It’s called SpaceCraft.

As if it were a sign of the times, I started out in debt, but having won a lottery I was given the opportunity to take out a loan (nothing is free, even in the galaxies far, far away) and acquire my own starter ship.

The tutorial had me doing everything from running around the workers station, interacting with NPCs and console, and then getting into my new (to me) scout ship to go out and find some resources.

It’s fairly easy to fly to the nearby planets; I just pointed my ship and held down the SHIFT key until my battery ran out and I had to fly at impulse speed. Approaching a planet is seamless, and I was at ground level in no time. Using my scanner, I was able to identify some harvestable resources, which I was able to mine easily courtesy of auto-targeting .

Then the tutorial wanted me to do things like refine the materials, craft parts, and then craft ship parts from those parts.

It’s cool that SpaceCraft lets you put certain components anywhere on the ship; the little ball-turret on the top of the ship in the image above was an advanced scanner, and I decided that it looked good there. I could have easily have put it off to one side, on the ventral surface, or anywhere.

Once I had this new scanner I was sent to the second planet in the system to locate some unidentified materials, identify them, harvest them, and return to the station. Then I had to craft a warp engine. This doohickey can only be slotted into a specific location on the ship.

This is more or less where I left the game, because the tutorial explanation and each step took quite a while. Steam says I played for 51 minutes, and this was as far as I got.

So the game is multiplayer, although I don’t think it’s MMO scale multiplayer. We will be able to build our own ships, and according to the Steam page for the demo, our own buildings on planets and such. At that point, it seems that the game offers Satisfactor/Factorio-style production automation gameplay that we can set in motion while we’re out doing what we do in the depths of space.

I’ll be keeping an eye on this one; I recognize the promo video on the store page as a game I had originally had on my wishlist, so I’m glad I got to try it out. In a lot of ways it’s like No Man’s Sky, with the transitions between space and planets and the flying around at ground level, although as LTGaming noted there’s a lot less to see and do on SpaceCraft than there is in NMS. Also, there’s no combat in the demo — or in the game as it stands right now, if I understand correctly — so it’ll be interesting to see how that pans out. It’s very much an arcade-style flight model, and after years of playing space-slight games using HOSAS, I have to say I can’t abide by KBM controls these days.