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Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

I'm very bad at making OPs, and last time I tried to make a thread for this game, it petered out almost immediately, but I thought it was time to try again!

From the Depths is a voxel building game that has been in development since 2013, and it is leaving early access today (November 6, 2020).

Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhTNESwAzs4

At it's most basic level, From the Depths can best be described as a real time strategy game with a splash of grand strategy thrown in, and a robust building system. The campaign mode has you fighting one or more factions (the game's main planet has eight) for control of grid squares on a map. You do this using vehicles of all shapes and sizes. The game gives you a few basic ones to start with, but if you want to be effective, you are going to have to build your own. The game's building system is similar to Minecraft in many ways, though the recommended control scheme uses the keyboard for navigation rather than the mouse like Minecraft does.

(Screenshots shamelessly stolen from the game's Discord server)





The main draw of this game is how specific you can (and in many cases have to) get with your vehicles. If your boat is made of lead, it's probably not going to float. If your helicopter doesn't produce lift correctly, it's going to spin out. If your engines don't pipe their exhaust out of the vehicle correctly, it may overheat and ruin your whole day. Your giant death laser won't do you any good if you put in on a submarine because the ocean is murky. Everything you build can be equipped with all sorts of weapons, from battering rams and age-of-sail powder cannons to guided missiles and particle cannons. You can set and customize all sorts of AI behaviors, even using LUA to guide your vehicles or missiles if you want. I'm not joking when I say that it helps if you know how to calibrate a PID controller, because that's a thing in this game. If you don't want to spend your time building things, and just want to see boats get torn in half by orbital death lasers, the Steam workshop has plenty of creations for you to use and abuse.

I have personally sunk over 500 hours into this game since 2015. Building in this game can be truly enjoyable, though it is admittedly quite time-consuming.

Resources

YouTube
Lathrix and Borderwise are two YouTubers who devote a lot of time and energy to From the Depths. They are both great places to learn how to play.

Community
The game has an official Discord and an official subreddit

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Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

The game is now officially launched (It technically had not at the time of the OP), and because of that there is a 20% discount on Steam, bringing the price from $25 to $20 in the US until November 13.

Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Considering the way the game has been developed, there are no surprising new bugs or anything like that. The devs are still working on the game too. The latest beta update adds even larger missiles to the game, and they're reworking the very popular mimic blocks (blocks that can look like any other block or machine in the game and be scaled, translated, and rotated to your heart's content) to be even more flexible and useful. I don't use mimics too often except to cover up the occasional seam in my designs, but overall the people in charge seem to have good heads on their shoulders.

If you're asking about sales figures, I have no idea.

Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Recent patch added huge missiles and a new decoration system that takes some getting used to, but is quite flexible and powerful.

I also finally got around to finishing up my latest ship, so that's nice.

Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

I just built my first helicopter in literal years today, then I built another one because the first was kind of ugly.

It turns out that letting missiles drop for a half second before they activate their engines drastically increases their maneuverability.

Finally, I have noticed one of my ship's guns kind of suck, so I am going to replace them with about a dozen vertically launched large missiles.

Game is cool and good.

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Inglonias
Mar 7, 2013

I WILL PUT THIS FLAG ON FREAKING EVERYTHING BECAUSE IT IS SYMBOLIC AS HELL SOMEHOW

Griz posted:

the single greatest QOL improvement they've made in the past few years was adding a variety of (unarmored, flat-bottomed, 1-thick) prefab hulls and example weapon systems to the in-game build menu. now you can get right to the fun part of putting guns on a boat instead of having to build an entire hull from scratch or search the steam workshop.

I agree that prefabs are helpful, but I typically use them as inspiration more than anything else. That said, you can do some really cool stuff with only prefabs

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