With the early-access release of Pathea Games’ My Time at Sandrock, players get an early look into what’s in store for new builders settling in the crumbling desert town of Sandrock. While balancing workshop commissions, navigating sandstorms, and battling lizards and outlaws, players have plenty of things to explore and do in the new game.
While there’s no shortage of things to enjoy in My Time at Sandrock in its current state, there are still plenty of areas that are rough around the edges, unpolished, or have yet to be fully implemented into the game yet. This is a fact of most early access games and they are bound to be improved upon as the game is updated, but a few areas for improvement do stand out more than others.
10 Dialogue Camera Angles
An early access game being unpolished is often just par for the course for any game that’s released while development is still in progress. One of the ways this shines through in My Time at Sandrock is with dialogue navigation.
While My Time at Sandrock gives a lot of freedom for players to talk to NPCs in nearly any place or context they can find them in, an unfortunate side effect of the freedom has been many awkward or downright unusable camera angles that can block the character, the player, or both from a player's field of vision. Even in less obstructed angles, the zoom-in feature during dialogue is far from polished so far.
9 NPCs Need Personal Space
In a similar vein to objects blocking characters during a conversation, the pathfinding for certain NPCs can pose problems if the player starts a conversation somewhere that has a lot of foot traffic. At the moment, NPCs are scheduled so that their paths rarely, if ever, cross.
However, one stopping to talk to the player throws a wrench in an otherwise smooth arrangement, as other NPCs’ pathfinding isn’t equipped to handle getting out of someone’s way, and will continue their path regardless of who’s in their way. As entertaining as it can be to have a Sandrocker walk between the player and who they’re talking to mid-conversation, it quickly becomes immersion-breaking.
8 Missing Scenery
The town of Sandrock is full of colorful and lively scenery, surrounded by Old World ruins and the harsh sand of the Eufaula Desert. While the areas the player visits all the time are full of no shortage of polish and decoration, farther-out areas leave some room for improvement.
Whether it’s large areas with very little to do, find, or explore near the workshop, or empty or even unfinished scenery around farther out edges of the map, My Time at Sandrock has plenty it needs to add before it’s ready for a full release.
7 Inconsistent Artifact Nodes in Ruins
Mining through abandoned ruins is one of the main ways builders will gather resources in My Time at Sandrock. For the most part, the ruins are a consistent and reliable place to gather not only ores, sand, and clay, but various artifacts from the Old World as well.
Unfortunately, in its current state players may run into trouble with artifact nodes being inconsistent, difficult to find, or sometimes even leading the player to an empty hole where the artifact should have been, making navigation and artifact collection far more difficult.
6 NPCs Should Be More Expressive
Part of what makes life in Sandrock so appealing is the townspeople who live there. Whether it’s passionate and impulsive ranchers like Elsie or more subdued and reserved people like Fang, there’s no shortage of interactions in Sandrock that make the town come to life around the player.
That being said, the animations and level of expression NPCs are able to show outside of cutscenes leave a lot to be desired, and often don’t match the tone of what the dialogue and voice actors are saying the character feels.
5 The Time Should Be More Noticeable
Just like in real life, a good night’s sleep is an important part of running a functioning workshop in Sandrock. Because of this, players should be sure to keep an eye on the time when they’re out and about at night, lest they start the next day already exhausted, or even pass out if they can’t make it back to their house in time.
Considering how long it can take to get home from certain places around Sandrock, the time can easily sneak up on players in the current build, as players are given one warning a couple of hours before lights out while the time is otherwise tucked into a small, easily forgettable corner of the screen that makes it hard to keep an eye on while doing other things.
4 Better Navigation in Town
The town of Sandrock may be small, but it’s still home to plenty of people, with many shops, houses, and venues that players frequently visit throughout their time there as a builder. Built mostly on a hill with winding streets and narrow alleys and staircases, it takes some time for new residents to get their bearings on where everything is.
At the moment, the number of directions new players are given leaves for a lot of wandering, confusion, and checking the map multiple times, making the adjustment period confusing and often frustrating.
3 Rentals Should Be In The Calendar
Whether it’s buying a pass to the Eufaula Salvage Abandoned Ruins, or renting a mount at the ranch to make travel easier, players often have a lot of weekly rentals to keep track of while also managing their workshop and commissions.
While players can thankfully add custom reminders into the in-game calendar whenever they want, the calendar in its current state does little more than keep track of the month’s holidays, and manually adding every rental to the calendar would be cumbersome to do every time.
2 More To Explore Throughout The Map
While the town itself may be small, the area around Sandrock is a large place, one that builders will have to explore and travel through often to gather the supplies they need to run their workshop.
As the player ventures farther away from their workshop they’ll likely notice that the amount of scrap, creatures, and materials, in general, becomes far more sparse, as a good half of the area around Sandrock is likely unfinished. While there are no doubt plans in store for more features, be they material or creatures, for players to explore in future updates, there’s no denying that the map quickly starts to feel empty.
1 Stamina Should Be Easier To Replenish
Unsurprisingly, a builder’s energy is not infinite, and players will have to rest and recuperate so they don’t over-work themselves. This also means players often won’t be able to do everything they want within a single day and will need to plan meals and rest. Unfortunately, both methods of regaining stamina during the day are currently slow, often ineffective, or difficult to access, especially during the early game.
Certain foods will regain a small amount of stamina, but without dipping into their savings, often isn’t enough to make much of a difference. Once the player adds benches to Sandrock, these can also be used to gain stamina over time, but are slow and unavailable until much later in their first year.