Hey, builders!
Playtest shuts down tomorrow. If your cabin is still standing there with half a roof, this is your last chance to finish it 🔨
Access closes on September 9 | 17:00 CEST | 15:00 UTC | 8:00 AM PT
First of all — thank you to everyone who jumped into the playtest and filled in the survey at the end. It wasn't a short one, and we still got 290 completed forms. Around 80% of you (228 people) played the test all the way through.
Didn't get into playtest? No worries, there will be more. We'll keep testing new mechanics and reworks of the existing ones in waves.
Here's what your answers told us 👇
👍 What you liked most
- 55% — building the house
- 43% — chopping down trees
- 29% — exploring the world around you
- 26% — sawing trees into logs and using the processing stations
Those are exactly the activities we built the playtest around, so it's good to see the bet land.
👎 What you liked least
- 36% — hauling resources around
- 26% — finding and collecting stones, sticks, berries and mushrooms
- 16% — cooking and managing stamina
These go to the top of the list before the next playtest. Plenty of you sent concrete suggestions for fixing them, and we want to actually listen — we'll dig into them one by one in the upcoming dev diaries.
⚒️ The rough edges
Three problems came up often enough to talk about them properly.
1. The house under the cloth.
We hadn't finished the furniture placement mechanic, so we temporarily hid the interior under a sheet of cloth. That sheet could trap the player and any resources left inside, and it broke the run for some of you. That should never happen — and next time you'll be placing everything yourself, exactly where you want it.
2. The car.
You reported getting stuck, the same music on loop, and no way to actually drive it. The stuck spots we'll fix. Driving is coming too, but it needs more than steering mechanics — it needs places worth driving to. So first we have to work out which stage of development that belongs in.
3. Cooking.
For some players the cooked food disappeared, and sometimes it burned the second it hit the pan. We'll find out why, and rework the system if that's what it takes.
💭 What you want from the full version
40% — an open world
32% — character skills and abilities
31% — new tools and upgrades for the ones already in
23% — more to do: fishing, a sauna, actual resting
21% — production automation
All of it goes into the plan for what comes next. This is how we find out which directions matter most to you and where our time is best spent.
One last evening at the cabin: jump in before 17:00 CEST tomorrow and get the last few logs out of playtest zero. And if you want to hear about the next test wave, add We Build Cabins to your wishlist.
Thanks for playing!
Project Zima Team