I picked up StarRupture a few weeks ago and bugs aside (and boy howdy are there a good handful of them, not including the actual literal jerk-ass bugs in the game, called "vermin"), it's gotten its dirty little tendrils into my brain and won't let go.
It's a factory builder along the lines of Satisfactory, with a few unique mechanics that make it just different enough to be compelling and fun despite first appearances as a simple clone.
- Items move between machines via "drone rails" implementing a "pull on demand" logistics system rather than dumb conveyors with dumb or smart loaders. Even if there's a clean route from one machine to another, and the source machine is full, if there's no demand for its output, it won't empty itself onto the rails (items with no valid destination wind up "stuck" on rails and are considered an error condition you have to manually correct). Each item travels the rails on its own drone (you don't have to manufacture these; they just "exist") and can path to any reachable demand (so splitters and the like don't need "smarts" -- the items themselves go where they're needed if there's a path to it).
- Every hour or so the planet you're operating on gets bathed in what amounts to a planet-wide life-scorching solar flare eruption. If you're not inside a habitat (or the below-ground (current) end-game stuff) when it hits, you're dead. There's no surviving it with personal equipment. You must be indoors. All machinery (miners, manufacturing, rails, etc.) shuts down. Once the rupture is over, the planet is left in a "burned up" state for about 15 minutes, during which time there are no enemies, and unique items are available (vines get burned away revealing hidden caves with rare items, pods open up to reveal eggs, ponds dry up revealing other eggs and consumables that vanish once the water comes back, burning rocks are spawned, etc.).
- The asshole bugs ("vermin") don't actually destroy your stuff, but they contaminate it. If they do it enough, individual machines stop working. If they do it more and/or manage to shut down the local "base core," the whole area becomes physically toxic (increasing your "infection" percentage until it reaches 100%, which then slowly drains your health until you die or flee). And that's before you rank-up or upgrade your base cores, which turns the game almost into a tower defense type of thing by causing regularly-spawned waves of asshole bugs to swarm your base. Oh and they'll cheerfully attack you personally as well if you're around to witness their attacks and unless you're well-equipped and upgraded, they'll push your shit in every time. Fortunately in the current builds you can easily outrun them, so hopefully you've set up defense turrets at a nearby base you can lead them to or a rupture is looming to fry them, because otherwise they don't ever despawn.
- You can build anywhere on the planet, but machines can only operate within range of a "base core" (which you can build anywhere, provided you can adequately defend it). It auto-cools all machines in range following a rupture so they start working again on their own without intervention. Power flows through rails (and rails can operate outside base core range normally) so you can centralize power production if you want, but every building carries a "heat burden" that contributes to the base core's total capacity too. If you exceed the limit, stuff still runs fine until the next rupture, but afterward the core can't cool anything down so you have to go restore everything by hand.
- Literally everything is constructed on a single grid, planet-wide. At least I haven't found a way to convince the game to let me build something without it. It's a bit restrictive at first, but it's pretty damned nice being able to build walkways from one base to another, even a kilometer away, and have it all line up when you get there. There's also an annoying half-baked "stability" check to prevent you from building physically unlikely constructs like "an entire factory floor with a hundred machines suspended 50 feet in the air with one pillar in one corner holding it up off the ground," but building multi-level factories is an absolute pain in the ass because of it and because of how few floor/pillar structure options are available (i.e. 1 each).
It's in early access, and has had one major "content update" since launching in late 2025, but they've seemed pretty good so far with regular updates for bugfixes and the like. The biggest issue that seems to get the most complaints is the drone rail pathing. There are legitimate bugs in how pathing works that make certain designs non-functional, the biggest being that items will
never take a less-optimal path to avoid a jam, even if doing so would ultimately yield higher throughput. Items also never re-path once they've departed their source machine, making it possible to "strand" items on rails by deconstructing their destination machine before they've reached it. They just stop moving at the closest junction (or the end of the rail) to the destination.
Sometimes they'll recover if you reconnect the rail to another machine with the same demand, but usually once an item drone stops on a rail and starts beeping, you have to rebuild the rail to unclog it.
The pathing behavior also makes several rail features functionally useless, namely the 1-to-3 or 1-to-5 splitters if you're using them to increase throughput for one type of item along multiple rails. Once one rail fills up, they won't start taking the next rail over; they'll just stop at the clog. So for now the advice is to just keep items on separate rails and don't rely on pathing to pick optimized routes (it technically
does, but never re-routes to cope with clogs). Using storage buildings (which create demand on the rail network) is the recommended way to move resources closer to their consumers; you're actually encouraged to buffer basic and intermediate ingredients to some extent in this game.
It's UE5, but runs pretty well anyway, and already has a pretty healthy modding community. It's much more fun than it has any business being in its current state, but I really enjoy it.
