[CaptainCrunch]

So I started playing Space Haven and I'd really recommend it. Its a lot of fun and pretty well done, though in the early realease there are features still to come.


The tutorial is nice. But there are two scenarios right now.


In the first one you and your crew of four start on a mining base, and you have to gather and harvest and start building your ship from the ground up.


The second scenario you have a really basic ship, like no engines or weapons or anything but a big old power plant, a shuttle and 2 mining pods. From there you start installing components around environmental controls, food and water production, creature comforts, engines navigation, weapons, sensors and a ton of other stuff.



There are a few ways to get the components from building materials to life giving things like water and medicine and guns.


You can mine asteroids

You can salvage dead ships (Or live ones depending on your roles
You can trade.


To go with that you can kind of design your ship around different roles


You can be military, which means you go around killing pirates and aliens. More about those bastards in a minute
You can be a pirate and shoot up ships and salvage the derelicts
You can be a miner
You can just be a trader. You don't even need to build a ship, you can just build a trading post. Lots of choices.


The learning curve is deep, everything from dealing with limited space and resources, and dropping the ball can be fatal. I build my ship and thought I had it under control, and had a pretty cool ship, but I jumped to another system and started salvaging wrecks and when I came back to the ship I was having power failures. I had run out of energy rods and didn't have the materials to make more so I thought I would jump to another system but my hyperdrive won't spin up.


I also got cocky and sent two crewmen to explore a derelict so I could decide if I wanted to salvage it. But I walked in and the ship was infested by aliens. These things were crab like, and fast and nasty, and they grabbed one of my guys and we tracked him back to a lair and they had basically webbed him to a wall to feed on him or breed with them, since there is a queen out there. We rescued him and got him back, and I realized I hadn't built a sick bay, so he died as I frantically tried to build one for him.


Its a cool game but if you get started you'll look up and 3 or 4 hours have passed as you've been trying to figure out how to jam all of these systems into your ship and why is it -36 in the crew quarters and +30 everywhere else.


Its a lot of fun, and I think its a great game for $25 bucks.


Oh and you can build a fricken fleet of ships as well.