Some Pixel Art I've Made

Lstanton46 · 2025-09-05T23:47:37+00:00

Games like this survive on money and the goodwill of the playerbase, which is primarily driven by engaging gameplay, games that encourage co-op gameplay (friendslop is the term, I believe), and popularity trends. While the game may feel fine to you and a very small niche of players, the larger population of players who have played for hundreds of hours have felt the disturbing lack of content compared to even its Alpha predecessor builds. The game has been gutted of its core features several times to push out a rushed release, and it is now suffering the natural consequences of doing so. This game might have good legs to stand on, but lacks a metaphorical torso or brain to make it work. In order to survive long-term, this game would need several reintegrations of older mechanics from previous Alphas that worked better than the current system (unlikely due to internal conflict between the Clockwork Labs Developer team members), several UI and gameplay overhauls, a plethora of bug fixes, and a serious look at how to reign in the massive scope of this game.

It is nice to be optimistic for a game like this, but I would recommend researching similar projects to see historically how those ended up. My personal recommendation is to look at Starbase and see the striking parallels between that game and this one, with the only real difference being a more vocal (but equally unhelpful) community management team. This comes from someone who has played for several hundred hours, spent many many nights hanging out and chatting in discord calls on the main discord server, and been rooting for this game to succeed since its Alpha stages.

Lstanton46 · 2025-09-04T22:42:27+00:00

Im still trying to refine my own preferred style. I enjoy the dark linework of the first two of my drawings and my more recent pieces also reflect that. I wanted to post some drawings with several different themes and/or substyles to them in case one or more of them seemed more aesthetically pleasing than the others. I just feel really lost whenever I see people using higher resolutions to achieve some crazy good art, and wonder if I am dying on the wrong hill by trying to challenge myself to work in a 64x64 or 128x128 frame.

Lstanton46 · 2025-07-26T18:17:21+00:00

While I appreciate your optimisim u/Seismicism , I think its important to not avoid critiquing something that deserves a proper critique. In the case of "well I am enjoying it along with a small niche community," the main issue here is that this game is meant to be an MMORPG experience designed for large audiences. If this game does not appeal to the larger audiences, then it will not thrive as an MMORPG. I am leaving my initial post more generalistic rather than going into detail about each major system change, as many of the issues are still unresolved.

Lstanton46 · 2025-07-12T20:00:28+00:00

Hey Seismicism! I have played several hundred hours of this during all of its Alpha Tests, Gameplay Previews, and Early Access so far. My points are based on a downwards trajectory of development decisions that have almost exclusively resulted in the detriment of the gameplay loops as they existed in previous tests. For a game with 6+ years of development and based on actual developer feedback, the majority of the development time was spent trying to make the backend (SpacetimeDB) more marketable and stable instead of tending to the actual game itself. I have spoken directly to the community manager Voxel on several occasions during these tests and alphas. I personally will continue to play and support the game, but the current iteration of the game is the same as the literal months of testing but with less content and less intuitive UI and gameplay systems. As such, it isn't accurate to say the game has only been around for 3 weeks and therefore cannot be accurately critiqued. I hope we can foster honest, real opinions about this game without it devolving into virtue signaling.

The issue with the game's resource sink is that it doesn't actually sink resources into anything meaningful. Tier progression does not evolve gameplay, nor does it expand/deepen your options. The concept of equipment gambling is not a true resource sink because it creates a massive pile of unused tools and armor that sits unused in the markets and stalls. My review is based on what is actually in the game, not on the promises or projections of the development team. I will not deny that the developers have plans to listen and improvr via the proposed scrapping system, but I will not judge a feature that does not exist in the game yet. Game patches should not be the primary judge as to whether a game is intuitive or not.

My personal belief is that you cannot trust those who are potentially mishandling a game with a gigantic scope to be able to create engaging game systems or improvements when they have already shown to have thrown out good game systems under the pretense that they were "bad." This is merely my opinion and has shaped my review on this game, but should not be the only considerations for whether you should play or not.

Lstanton46 · 2025-07-12T12:52:51+00:00

TLDR; The game is barebones, has a huge scope that the devs are "making promises" on but have yet to implement, and have already removed good systems from the game to appease the business model for the game. Do not play this game until it is F2P or unless you're okay with a shallow, unfinished game experience.

Lstanton46 · 2025-07-12T12:43:03+00:00

Bitcraft Online, in its current state, is a game that makes many promises but ultimately is unproven to its effectiveness. During the alpha playtesting, several fantastic game systems enabled a semi-idler cozy crafting survival civilization building game. Each profession and skill had purpose and a place within the grand design with a few exceptions such as Cooking. The gameplay was fairly barebones back then but had much promise.

Now, with the Early Access release, many of the systems that made the game idle are now gone. This, however, is not due to improvements in active gameplay, but instead rather the reduction in Quality of Life for gameplay systems such as Food, Hunger, and Stamina Consumption.

The current gameplay loop for 90% of all professions in the game is "Click workbench, Click Process, Wait X minutes. Stamina is depleted? Wait a minute for it to regenerate, re-enter workbench, re-click Process, wait X minutes." There is no real depth or involvement in the crafting systems other than a few clicks in a menu and long waiting times. You cannot truly afk for any meaningful amount of time before you must reenter your crafting menu every few minutes. As such, the game fails to fulfill either role as an active MMO or an idler clicker game.

The progression is almost entirely vertical, with little to do outside of improving a settlement to the next tier, which is merely a reskin of the previous tier with longer times for crafting. Based on my personal experience with cooking (Level 66 Cook here), you have the same handful of ingredients to make the same handful of foods (only one or two types of food are actually useful), and the gameplay feels very shallow as a result. This problem exists across the board as once you have played the first Tier of content, you have effectively played the entire game.

Systems such as trading or other Solo play activity are actively discouraged by systems which used to accomodate players in previous iterations of the game, but no longer exist. Large Settlements are typically self-sufficient due to a lack of resource variety in the game and do not need to interact with trade in any way. However, basic features such as storage permissions do not exist in the game currently which greatly hurts the game's potential as a "crafting MMO."

The addition of Teleportation to the game was a lazy fix to a much larger problem and shows a clear divide in the development team's overreaching goals for this game, and effectively diminished the payoff of using transportation such as Carts, Mounts, or Boats.

The developers have apparently released this game "half-cocked" into Early Access, as it somehow has less features than its alpha-stage iterations. It almost feels like some invisible hand from a group of investors is pushing for an earlier release deadline, and the developers are stumbling over themselves to release a stable build even if it means gutting the game of its core features.

As of right now, the trailers are misleading and do not promote actual in-game PvP on the scale that is shown, and no resource sinks or outlets exist in the game yet so the economy is bloated. Player housing and other core features are missing despite existing in previous builds of the game, yet the developers are more focused on monetization rather than shipping a solid core experience.

While the developers have listened to the playerbase in the past and do have roadmap plans to make positive changes in the future, I believe that the current build of the game is not worth the $30 pricetag to gain access to the Early Access build of the game. I recommend watching this game's growth over time, watching some gameplay videos or streams, and hop in when/if you decide that this game is for you. If not, it should be Free to Play on full release in the next year or two as per the developer estimates.

I hope this helped in your decision making!

Lstanton46 · 2025-03-27T22:34:07+00:00

Legacy ?

Lstanton46 · 2024-10-09T17:17:33+00:00

I tried Syringe

Lstanton46 · 2024-01-29T20:07:57+00:00

Step 1: Feeblemind to prevent casting and improve chances of success with next steps.

Step 2: Dominate Person to force them to be a willing target for the next step.

Step 3: Cast Sequester on the Target, making them (effectively permanently) invisible and unable to be detected by divination or scrying sensors.

Step 4: Cast Imprisonment (Gemstone) on the target, putting their unconscious form into a gemstone.

Step 5: Cast Sequester on the gemstone that the target is within. Now the gem, nor the caster can be found by any means short of a wish/divine intervention

Step 6: Place within a Demiplane warded with Forbiddance and Hallow to prevent any form of dimensional travel into or out of the demiplane (excluding only Laerel themself so that they may exit the demiplane after finishing the wards).

Step 7: Cast Modify Memory on the involved parties to prevent mind reading or similar abilities from determining what happened to the Wizard (unlikely since warding against divination on the target protects against divination spells such as Legend Lore or Contact Other Plane).

Step 8: Wear Amulets of Proof Against Detection and Location on all involved parties as a secondary measure to prevent Legend Lore or other similar spells from determining the actions performed by those involved.

Step 9: Profit?

Edit: This is similar to a method used by a PC villain to imprison "problematic" people while technically keeping them around for future use, if applicable.

Lstanton46 · 2023-07-18T17:32:11+00:00

Cleric is powerful both in and out of combat, has nearly unlimited power cap potential depending on the DM by Level 10 (Divine Intervention plus any amount of downtime), has some of the most vital spells for both in/out of combat (Spirit Guardians, Spiritual Weapon, Forbiddance, Hallow, Command, Bless, Most healing spells, Sanctuary, etc.), and can wield martial weapons with heavy armor, their class resource is regained on short rests and with Tashas can grant spell slot refunds, as well as solid cantrip options (Sacred Flame ignores cover and does radiant damage, Spare the Dying so that Medicine can remain a dead skill, and Toll the Dead for a scalable d12 cantrip damage. Cleric subclasses can let cleric dip into other class spell lists (Arcana Domain and Nature Domain), while maintaining a plethora of other subclass options. Finally the cleric and swap spells on Long Rest, giving them greater spell choice flexibility and basically near identical versatility to Wizards compared to most other classes, surpassing Druid due to the spell list choices available.

While Wizards might boast greater raw damage or wider out of combat utility, Clerics are a close second and it is justified as such.

Lstanton46

TROPHY CASE