[Coda]

BLARGH. >_<

Astroneer is fun. It's addicting. It's really well designed. I love it.

AND IT'S A BUGGY MESS AND I HATE IT.

First there's the quicksand bug. The game doesn't actually have quicksand, but if you dig near a rover, there's a chance that the wheels will vibrate into the ground and get stuck. How do you get the rover out? You have to dig it out. Oh wait a minute...

Oh yeah, and what's the best way to make a tunnel? Put a giant drill on the front of a rover. Oh wait a minute...

The multiplayer isn't stable. It works pretty well... usually... but then it'll randomly bug out and drop connection, and you have to restart one or both instances of the game to make it able to reconnect. And if you're particularly unlucky, it'll corrupt the guest player's save file. The corruption usually only wipes out part of your inventory, but last night it happened to me while I was on a rocket full of supplies in orbit around a planet... and it was so damaged that the game thought I was a new player and put me on a dropship to the first planet... leaving the ship unmanned in orbit... and the game has no concept of docking maneuvers, so it's now a derelict satellite full of titanium ore.

And then... this isn't a BUG, but it's really hard to find your way back to base if you're on a rover and you get lost. Since planets are round, the beacons that mark the location of your landing pads aren't visible if you're too far away because they get hidden behind the curve of the horizon. This is why I was in orbit -- I was doing reconnaissance from a birds-eye view to try to give my wife directions on where to take the rover.