Mountaincore is a new settlement simulator set in a world of dwarves. Developer Rocket Jump Technology has described it as “a game of designing and building a burgeoning colony in a deeply-simulated fantasy world.” It’s currently in early access on Steam following a successful crowdfund campaign.
You start each game on a randomly generated map that comes in three different sizes. For this preview we used the small map and left all other settings on default. The tutorial takes you through the basics of laying farmland, setting up workshops and mining. It’s clear from the start that Mountaincore is a deep game that requires a lot of thought and strategy right from the off.
As a heads up, those that aren’t fans of in depth micro-management games will probably find Mountaincore difficult and overwhelming at times. This game is aimed at strategy fans that want a slow-paced and deep game. You manage everything from your settlers job priority, the output of each crafting area, when and where to mine, what food to produce, trading, army recruitment as well as building a safe settlement for the colonists.
The words ‘trial and error’ really come to the fore after you finish the basic tutorial. Everything has to be built individually and while your settlers are quite happy to take on tasks you will find yourself puzzling over how to build a furnace or how to finish a building at times. This isn’t a negative, far from it, it’s just to emphasise the level of detail in constructing a managing a successful settlement.
The main element that halts progress is lining up your worker with producing the right resources to finish a building. There are many types of raw materials to use and everything needs to line up correctly for a the right building material to be produced. This in turn allows your builders to finish a project such as a bridge or road.
During the preview there was many times when things came to a grinding halt until the mining of raw materials, fashioning them into blocks and setting the workers to build all started to happen seamlessly. Gamers that love the minute details of strategy games will fall in love with the difficulty of Mountaincore. Settlers die in mine collapses, they may starve or die of thirst, everything needs to be thought about to have any success of gaining new workers to your cause.
There were a few niggles when being stuck became frustrating rather than a fun puzzle to solve. These niggles were mainly around getting the workers to move blocks from the input or output queues. For example, they would leave a tool or material on the workbench and it meant construction would be halted until one of them decided to move it. It felt like an unnessercery bottleneck and needs some balancing or maybe a way to direct workers to move things along manually.
The overall feel is that this has a lot of potential to become a classic strategy title that will appeal to those who love depth and a challenge. Mountaincore still has some way to go before everything falls into place but there is already enough here to make this an enjoyable, if tough, settlement sim.
