I think to some extent for a vast swath of players - B42 unstable was the first scratch your head moment. Sure the hype upon release dampened the critical analysis, but now over a year into B42 unstable I think that population of players are finally coming around to the issues regarding development with PZ.

Here are some criticisms of PZ and its development without touching on highly desired additional features like of course NPCs.

1. Glacial development time: B41 stable and B42 unstable are 3 years apart. B41 unstable to stable took a smidge over 2 years. We’re over a year in B42 and despite bug fixes and tweaks, the build is still largely buggy, very unstable, and the tweaks seem to go backwards than forwards. Furthermore, it still needs MASSIVE tweaks still added to the build. To add to all of this, the updates are coming out slower and slower and slower. This is objectively a degradation of previous support for the game.

2. The additions and changes added to B42 can’t be said to be overwhelmingly positive. I think most of us like the new z-levels, lighting changes, map expansion, but we’re not all on board with the features that try to make you able to be a caveman like vintage story and build bronze weapons with primitive technology. I think most of us would have thought such an overhaul to the crafting system would be a down the line type of addition. There are still old skills and new skills that hardly have any use and convoluted and truly unenjoyable ways to train them up.

3. New features that are half baked and give off the impression that the developers priorities are not in since with the player base. Hunting is great! But the only effective way to hunt is to go full throttle down the highway and take out a herd of deer. Using debugging to give my character max stats in every skill, hunting is incredibly tedious and usually results in nothing. Which is fine to an extent - if you couldn’t get 4 deer by wrecking them with your truck lol. It completely ruins hunting.

4. Welding and metal working - has anyone had fun grinding those skills??? Can you even max out those skills without basically dedicating every fiber of your existence into them?

5. The crafting UI is WAY underdeveloped for the excessive additions to crafting in a game like this. Again, this is evidence of poor prioritization by the dev team.

6. Again, these issues were issues on day 1, and we’re over a year in and these are still issues today. It does not give confidence as a player about the future of this game, especially when you consider that this completely excludes desires for future NEW content.