To this point I’ve been mostly focusing on my personal Craftopia journey in terms of crafting, gathering, and house decorating (such as it is). But now it’s high time that I focus on some of what this column series is actually about: other players’ creations. Such as they are.
As you can perhaps appreciate, Craftopia isn’t exactly setting Steam on fire, although its numbers are a lot more respectable than one might assume of an early access survivalbox. That does make finding other players’ experiences a little bit challenging as it’s not really a game that many “big” “influencers” will care to hitch their wagon to. In spite of its niche presence, however, I have managed to run into at least a few other players, and so I decided to take a look through their approach to this unique little title.
The first (and one of the longest) is from a streamer named Caztecz, whose whole bag is primarily survival RPGs. As one might expect from someone who plays the game more about the survival part instead of the creative, his setups are a lot more utilitarian, almost to the point of what I would class as alarmingly sweaty. For example, I get the impression that he placed his base of operations over the water purely because it’s the flattest ground possible to build on.
Still, watching pieces of his nearly five hour-long stream was interesting from a preference standpoint. I was especially impressed with a lot of his automation work that he’s set up, including a horse-driven money farm that he’s managed to put together and what looks like a wizard-spawning loot farm to gather up goodies to sell. Basically, for those who like watching people approach this game like a Minecraft in terms of setting up Rube Goldberg-style machinery and refinement, this is an interesting watch.
In a similar vein is Inexperiencedgamer, who also approaches the game from a refinement angle. I was almost immediately taken by his battery production machine, which utilized a pet-run generator wheel to crank out batteries that were then fed through a pipe directly to the market stall for sale, all while using what appeared to be a press machine to cause some little green enemies to issue a big healing burst in order to keep the generator creature alive. This was a brilliant little master stroke since putting a pet into one of those wheels literally works the thing to death, but this person figured out a way to make the pet essentially invincible.
Luckily, that video doesn’t get too mired in the minutia and starts to get into house building at around the 10-minute mark. It was kind of reassuring to see someone else struggling with the poor house-building in this game, and his design does once more lean towards the basic and utilitarian, but even so I have to admit that the complex he put together was quite impressive, especially in terms of scale. He also used a lot simpler housing materials, which seemed to be more complete even if they seem kind of ramshackle. I’m probably going to be forced to do the same thing in the interest of completion, honestly.
Next up is some footage from MrSpecies7, who has an approach to base building that I appreciate, particularly in terms of location, as he opted to put down some roots as close to a fast travel location as possible. In fact, his placement is so good I am almost pondering following his lead, as he’s just a simple glide flight away from his homestead.
I probably won’t, though. I really like the way I fire myself out of a cannon towards my nearest fast travel location.
Going back to his video, I see he has a very similar line of thinking as mine when it comes to tool and storage placement, but it also seems like his journey kind of ended shortly after it started; most of his recent videos appear to be fixated on Farming Simulator 22, which is fair.
Finally and probably most enjoyable of all is ShabbyDoo and this creation video where he begins putting down some new housing roots. Of particular interest to me was how he seemed to put together aesthetics with functionality. I was a rather big fan of how he had set up ramps to elevated (and flat) floor segments that were framed with wooden walls. He also seemed to follow my personal aesthetic enjoyment of meshing simple wood and simple stone together. There’s just something rather homey about that pairing to me.
Most of all, I appreciated this video because of his laidback approach to the problems of building in Craftopia, with what sounded like some verbal shoulder shrugs as he went with the flow and put together his work. It was a pretty entertaining watch if not groundbreaking, and it’s probably no surprise that his more recent video log has him deep into Palia, a game that seems to suit his style of content creation the closest.
As I alluded to before, there don’t seem to be a whole lot of creative folks in the wider Craftopia community, which probably isn’t too terribly shocking considering that this game really does seem to lean more into the survival sandbox elements instead of the personal expression and decorative side. Still, it has been nice to see what other players are doing, and watching these videos and researching for this write-up ultimately made me eager to fire the game back up again, which I suppose means these influencers did their job.
Of course, wouldn’t you know it, the game’s most recent patch has not only opened up the continent that was locked off to me a couple of weeks earlier but also added a bunch of additional housing items. So perhaps there’s some value in me coming back in, revisiting my personal space, and seeing if perhaps there are some new goodies and gubbins to put together to make my house less like a base and more like a home.
It’s also been nice to step away from guided travelogues into one of my own. Perhaps I’ll do this again on my own in future if people care to read that. In the end, Craftopia appears to have found a place in my rotation as a sort of comfy little blanket made by a shaky-handed grandma. It ain’t perfect, it’s kind of jank, and its style most certainly isn’t keeping with the times, but it’s still got heart where it counts and is lovely to be with despite its flaws.
MMO designers construct thrilling worlds, but MMO players also build some amazing content within them! Some Assembly Required highlights player-generated content, from events to housing to quest-creation systems. There’s creativity galore out there, and MJ Guthrie will travel the MMOverse to find and share it.
