This is a great survival game that is one of our favorite "survival styles" where the game does not require the player nor hint them to "scale up", by contrast to Factorio or similar where the playing style is infinite scaling and deduplication of facilities, instead the game is designed around fewer constructions that then get upgraded or remade to the next version.

For the rest, here is some critique:

• the interface for some reason is not too intuitive and the controls often defeat the principle of least surprise; for example, attacking is done with the right-mouse button but moving is done with the left-mouse button or there is no way to force-attack something meaning that it comes to a point where some micromanaging has to be done, especially if mistakes have been made,
• some omissions around construction, for example, it is not possible to expand a room but one has to rather delete the current room (sometimes piece-by-piece, wall-by-wall or floor-tile by floor-tile), and only then rebuild it larger,
• the game is fully capable of supporting remote outposts, and we've built some during the gameplay, even by pulling wooden power lines all the way from the main base and back, but there is some excessive micro-management required that makes remote outpost a chore even if with little adjustments they should not be; a presence-detection sensor (note that the motion detector does not really detect motion but rather "attackers") would allow switching off all appliances when the survivors vacate the area, which would allow a seamless transfer between outposts of personnel,
  • there exists a mod that implements "teleportation", but it seems it would be more cannon by using balloons instead,
• high-praise for sensors (on our behalf, for sure) but the current sensor rooster is short and they do not seem all that useful:
  • the motion sensor (a) is not a motion sensor, it's an "attack sensor" at best, (b) it only works for "animal attacks" but animals that turn aggressive are not detected, which frequently leads to wondering why the whole base has been wiped out and the turrets are not taking care of the problem,
  • the "temperature sensor" is something that is not really needed because the air conditioners can maintain their own temperature such that linking them up to the "temperature sensor" seems superfluous,
  • similarly, having more sensor types available would be nice (wind, weather - as in raining or not, falling, etc.,), should be easy to implement and would allow for some interesting automation,
  • vehicles would be nice, especially for transport and travel, aside the mechs that are unfortunately too expensive (by the time the mechs are researched, the survivors are already leveled well enough); implementing rideable animals would be one way but it would seem like much more work,
• some very counter-intuitive and almost hidden problems that should not be because they do not represent game difficulty but rather defeating the principle of least surprise, such as starving animals in case the trough is not configured to the regime of the animals (meat vs. vegetarian) and no indication why the animals are dying,
• dogs have extremely high upkeep to the point that they almost need an assigned valet (ie: they won't eat, need to fed, and then they turn aggressive),
• modernly, permanent-death is bad game design, given that people have a large(r) vested interest in games and there should be a way to "rescue" Conner from his demise-by-design,
  • it's funny but people comment that by building the radio, Conner can be extracted off the planet before he dies, however technically that isn't "saving him", it's just making it someone else's problem because his illness is terminal by the lore,
• there should be a way for terrain to regenerate and AFAWK the fact that terrain (as in insect nests and ship crash landings that destroy the terrain when they spawn) never regenerates properly is the one and only property that makes maps incapable of being played through to infinity (and there is no reason why they wouldn't be?); there exists a mod that regenerates the terrain but it's a third-party solution,
• animal attacks add a nice "tower defense" facet to the game but after a while these get a little tedious and it is clear that the AI is computing the weakest point and attacking just that one every time to get attention; maybe animal attacks could be made relative to "insect nests", which would be the same as in many game thereby satisfying the principle of least surprise, such that if the player clears the surrounding nests then the attack rate of the animals decreases,
• by the time the player manages to build the satellite dishes and the radio, "rescue" is certainly not a goal anymore and more than likely the player does not need "resources" or help to be sent down either because at that point the player would be so advanced that contacting ships is superfluous,
• for us (might be incidental) resources are disproportionate to each other massively, with wood being extremely frequent and cheap, stone being a waste of time, carbon fiber (which is incidentally an end-game material) being in massive surplus due to the nest tubules while metal always being short due to not many ships being around to scavenge,
• some environmental - climatic challenges could be added; and there is a "heavy freeze" reminding one of Frostpunk 1, in particular, because the whole framework for the game is sufficiently powerful to accept such "challenges" and it would add some variation to the nauseous "animal attacks",
• we always like to build on the water but it seems this is not possible in "Stranded: The Alien Dawn" ; however, this should actually be a very easy fix by just adding a requirement for the foundation / platform height relative to the water level as well as prohibiting survivors to move on the water, and then just letting the player build,
  • no fishing massive loss of opportunity, "fishing" is a gamer hobby in all games,
• while "work" areas and survivor activity priority tables are a highly interesting feature, there is some feeling of lack of control that leads to senseless reloads because there isn't really any way to tell the survivors to perform some action in particular (except once) but rather every activity has to be somehow managed through activity tables (very nice, but an override would be nice),
• could do with some "bosses", large ones,
• really no multiplayer? there can just be two managers managing the same base and assets, a one hour implementation (client, server and let them manage the same things). . .
• planting trees leads to unexpected results because planting itself implies a "managed" field so every spring survivors will start felling the entire forest (if it was planted) while ignoring any other duty (lol),
• ability to build underground (should be easy to do with the existing framwork because it would not require any extra graphics and everything in the surrounding would just be pitch black),
• there is an "advanced hospital bed" but by the time that the player gets to that part of the research, the actual bed would add nothing because everything can be treated using bandages and antibiotics,
• romancing
• trade with bypassing ships instead of "asking for help"

and we'll just stop here.

The following:

• endgame.zip

is a save game file with the following properties:

• crash-landing scenario, region sorbius, moon concordia, medium difficulty and seed is CITY-SPRAY at year 8, day 9,
• unmodded save with no cheats or cheating (caution: officially, some mods will refuse to start on an unmodded save),
• all the research unlocked including some of the "breakthroughs" that have to be discovered by using the "Explore" expedition,
• rooster consists in: Melody, Rakha, Rita, Paulette, Carter, Katrina, Laara, (Conner was in the initial party and died in year 4 which is by design),
• all technology has been built, including the radio and rescue shuttle,
• there are no active outposts and they have been removed,
• both in-door and outdoor farming with large patches as well as 4 harvesting units relieving the entire rooster from farm duty,
• the base is defensible due to turrets (playing the game further would mean extending the perimeter and adding turrets around the fortifications, which is very doable given the ample resources but just as not been done yet),
• all materials including carbon unlocked,
• one huge granary / depositing silo full to the brim with resources (even so lots of resources rotting away due to ampleness),
• two expedition balloons,
• expeditions unlocked: "Supercomputer debris" (endless loot of CPU cores), "Oil tanker debris" (endless loot of oil), "Mystical grove" (complete healing of one party member), 5x"Alien terraforming machine" (can change the current weather once, regardless the season, ie: making it snow in summer), "Hunting ground" (endless hunting for raw meat and leather)
• just for style, except for the landing pad that needs to be made out of carbon (or at least better than stone), everything is built using wood / wooden planks (some bio-endeavor, given that carbon fiber does not biodegrade and lasts forever) but all of that is convertible to carbon if need be in two button clicks (batch),
• 1x"Combat Mech" named Colonel Malthus (almost single-handedly defeats waves of enemies),
• few, if any, neighboring nests because they've all been cleared out,
• power-generation is stable, solar and wind,
• multiple generations of Ulfen farming, some of them not even named even if they are descendants and are tame

TL;DR after placing the turrets and the motion sensors and powering everything up, players tend to turn the turret off using the "on-off switch" in its profile page, when, in fact, the turret should be set to "on" beacause the motion sensor turns the turrets off by other means (the turrets will be off, but their profile page will show the switch set to on).

The correct setup for using motion sensors with turrets, assuming that everything is laid out, in range and powered up, will be the following:

• place each turret on the same circuit as the "action" motion sensor circuit
• switch each turret on,

One problem with storage in Stranded: Alien Dawn is that containers will be happy to stash stacks of items of the same time to the point that the whole storage space is entirely full. In case there is lots of storage available or the player has been building devices with large storage, some of the items will never end up allocated or distributed to other devices that use them as ingredients because the storage will just stack them up ad infinitum.

The trick here is to select "One slot per accepted item" on all storage to ensure that only one stack is stored with the rest being distributed to whatever needs the items. One typical symptom for this, for example, is that in spite of being attacked by bugs and reaping the corpses, fuel never ferments in the fermenting barrel from the bugs such that expeditions never start. By choosing this option, only a single stack of bugs will be stashed in the freezer with any excess distributed to the fermenting barrel.

Unfortunately one of the problems with Stranded: Alien Dawn is that the terrain does not regenerate, for example, after having cleared up a nest. The problem is that as time progresses and given that nests spawn randomly on the map there will be a moment of saturation when the whole map will end up covered with nest terrain. Even if one clears out the nests, the terrain will still not be arable such that the only thing the land could be useful for is constructing buildings.

It is possible to plant hay on top of land that has turned to soil in order to restore it but there will be no vegetation regrowth nor is that an option for insect nests. Fortunately there exists a game mod called that can be used to make sure that the terrain regenerates after nests are cleared out after some time in order to give the possibility to sessions to be endless.

This perhaps the most confusing problem out of the entire game, namely the fact that the trough does not set itself automatically, nor is it set by survivors, to the regime that the tamed animals have such that the player has to manually pick whether the diet it is omnivorous or vegetarian. It is however easy to do so simply by using the interface and picking the correct regime by using the list icon.