Table of Contents

Critique

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:

and we'll just stop here.

Save File

The following:

is a save game file with the following properties:

Making the Motion Sensor work with Turrets

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:

Ensuring Goods are Distributed

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.

Terrain Recovery

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.

Fixing the Trough for Animal Husbandry

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.