The Crust
VEOM Studio · Simulation, Strategy, Base Building
RELEASE MILESTONES
Dates from IGDB release data
Overview
Build and automate a lunar colony that Earth depends on. Mine regolith, run conveyor-and-drone factories above and below the surface, manage colonists, trade with rival Earth factions — and play a story campaign with multiple endings.
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1.0 OUT NOW — full campaign with multiple endings, Planning Mode, Sandbox 2.0, global events, macOS
Mine resources and automate their production processes
Mine lunar resources, craft processing machinery, and power up your base with satellites and batteries. Unlock scientific advancements across three research trees to enhance your technological capabilities.
Automate resources with conveyor belts and drones.
Streamline your resource management as you deploy conveyor belts and drones for seamless automation
Explore
Embark on lunar expeditions to unearth the moon's hidden secrets, deploying your rover to various locations and delving into the mysteries of humanity's newfound lunar habitat.
Trade Resources
Engage in resource exchange with Earth through contracts, where your decisions have the power to shape their political landscape. Choose a faction to support or navigate the field strategically for maximum profit.
Assemble a team of colonists
People are your most valuable resource. Keep track of your colonists' health, mood and needs. Hire the best experts and make sure they work as a team: it’s their unique traits and skills that will allow you to truly optimize your production and research!
From the game's Steam store page.
THE GAMEQ VERDICT2,333 reviews analyzed
What players are actually saying
1. Summary
The Crust combines a conveyor-belt factory game, a Surviving Mars style colony sim and a commodity-trading business, wrapped in a fully voiced story campaign on the Moon. Reviewers usually describe it as a mix of Factorio and Surviving Mars. They praise the soundtrack, even in reviews that do not recommend the game, and talk about losing whole nights to the loop of mining, refining, filling contracts and getting through the fourteen-day lunar night. Some negative reviews start by saying how much the writer enjoys the game.
The "but" that follows is mostly technical. About half of all negative reviews (50%) cite bugs, crashes or broken saves: drones that stop working, quests that soft-lock, machines that forget recipes, colonist rooms that refuse to build, and patches that corrupt long saves. The 1.0 launch did not settle this. Reviews from the release month dipped back to 69% positive as a room-building bug and a save-breaking hotfix hit players dozens of hours into a run, and one reviewer said it "should not have left Early Access". Behind the bugs come design complaints: heavy clicking to manage contracts and shipments, a slow and opaque early game with a weak tutorial, and late-game frame rates that collapse on big bases.
2. What keeps coming up
What players praise
A factory game, colony sim and trading business in oneHigh
Production chains run on two layers (the surface and the excavated underground, linked by conveyor elevators), with a global Moon map above for rovers, outposts and expeditions. On top of that sits the colony (oxygen, water, food and comfort for colonists) and a market where you sell to Earth and fill corporate contracts. Comparisons to other games turn up in 17% of reviews. Factorio is named most, then Surviving Mars and Satisfactory, with Dyson Sphere Program, Captain of Industry and Ixion further back, and a few sum it up as "Surviving Mars meets Factorio". Fans single out the market as the twist that makes it work; one reviewer loves "the idea that I'm not hoarding all this crap". Dissenters, often Factorio players, find the factory side thin (no blueprints, awkward belt routing, a CPU cap on machine counts) and say the trading game crowds out the building game, a tension covered under the split themes below.
A story campaign with real voice actingHigh
About a quarter of reviews (26%) bring up the story, campaign or voice work. One calls it "the only factory game with a real story", and others value that choices between factions change what happens and like that the narrative gives production a purpose: an asteroid catastrophe, a laser cannon to stop the next impact, then a spaceship. A separate sandbox mode lets players skip it. On the other side, some found the early dialogue preachy or the characters grating (see frustrations), some feel the campaign is a long hand-holding tutorial, and a few late-game players found the big timed missions punishing.
The soundtrackMedium
Even negative reviews praise the music. One tells readers to "just get the soundtrack" because it is the best thing about the game, and another calls it one of the best soundtracks they have heard. "The soundtrack alone is worth the cost" turns up in a few forms, with players citing the vocal tracks and the Apollo mission audio. A handful found it overdramatic for drones moving bricks, or were thrown by a song in Russian.
Atmosphere and the lunar settingMedium
The grounded look ("Peak NASA punk," one player writes), the long lunar night that forces you to stockpile power, and meteor strikes draw praise for making the Moon feel like a real place to engineer around. A minority call the grey surface and dark caves visually monotonous, or hard to read when several resources look alike.
An addictive, relaxing loopMedium
Positive reviewers describe lost evenings ("GIVE ME BACK MY TIME"), hundreds or thousands of hours, and a pace that feels comfy rather than frantic once a base is running. The slowness itself divides people: fans find it relaxing, and critics use the same word, slow, as a complaint.
A team that patched constantlyMedium
Positive reviews regularly credit the developers for frequent patches, quick hotfixes and answers on Discord, and several reviewers say they switched to positive as specific bugs (drone logic, save compatibility, performance) were fixed during Early Access. The same patches often introduced new bugs, which comes up under frustrations.
Where players are split
Contracts and the market economyMedium
Contracts are the main source of income. Fans love planning production around shifting demand, speculating on prices and failing a contract or two as a learning experience. Critics say contracts arrive for goods they cannot yet research, scale poorly with actual output, keep the goods you already delivered when a contract fails and add a penalty on top, and that the Moon-side contracts are not worth doing. Long-haul players add that income depends on clicking through contract menus over and over, which feels like busywork rather than strategy.
Pacing, difficulty and the research treeMedium
A slow, grindy feel comes up in 20% of negative reviews. Examples include basic resource production that crawls early on, research points that pile up across three separate trees with a short queue, oddly placed technologies (gym equipment or showers deep in the tree), long waits for ships in the endgame even at top speed, and timed story missions such as the laser cannon that demand more than a new player's base can produce. Many positive reviewers agree the start is slow but call that part of the appeal, and advise ignoring the main story until your production is ready; one veteran suggested gating story pressure behind research for exactly this reason. Some found the early game easy and the mid-to-late jump brutal, while others found it challenging from the start.
Belts and building toolsMedium
Players enjoy laying out supply lines and the surface-to-underground elevators, but builders coming from Factorio complain about the lack of a blueprint or copy system, underground belts that can only jump short distances in one direction, machine inputs and outputs on awkward sides, a CPU limit that counts even idle machines, and (especially in Early Access) belts that cost real money and refunded little when moved. Some optimization-minded players say these limits made them quit.
What frustrates players
Bugs, soft-locks and broken savesHigh
Bugs are the most common complaint across the whole history of the game. Half of all negative reviews (50%) cite bugs, crashes or broken saves, and so do a fifth of positive ones, usually as a caveat. The reports stayed consistent over two years: drones ignoring priorities or refusing to finish buildings, quest triggers that never fire until a reload, story missions that soft-lock if steps are done out of order, machines losing their recipes after upgrades, rovers stuck in limbo, colonists vanishing on reload, and crashes linked to runaway memory use. Early Access patches repeatedly broke existing saves, which hurt most for players dozens or hundreds of hours into a single run. Players past ten hours mention bugs more often than newcomers do, which fits problems that surface mid-game rather than in the first hours.
The 1.0 release felt unfinishedHigh
Bugs, crashes and save problems appear in nearly half (47%) of negative reviews written from the release month on, and save loss or corruption in about a fifth of them. The main problems they named were a room-building bug that cut power and water to whole bases and blocked expansion, comfort scores that stopped updating, and a hotfix that left saves corrupted or crawling at low frame rates. "Calling this 1.0 is disrespectful," one reviewer wrote, and some said they liked the game and would change their review once it was fixed. Defenders pointed to the rapid patch cadence and urged others not to let launch bugs scare them away.
Late-game performanceMedium
Performance comes up in 12% of negative reviews, and players past 50 hours mention it about twice as often as any other playtime group. Big bases drop to between 10 and 30 frames per second on high-end CPUs and GPUs, and one player notes a single CPU core near its limit while the others sit mostly idle. A spring 2026 performance update helped some (one player went from 23 to 35 fps on the same save), others saw no change, and late-game players still describe mega-bases as impractical. Early-game performance is rarely a problem, and several players praise how well it runs on modest laptops.
Poor tutorial and an opaque early gameMedium
Lack of clear explanations appears in 16% of negative reviews, and it is the most common complaint in negative reviews written in the first two hours. Players describe a tutorial that skips core mechanics, an encyclopedia that says little, tooltips that do not match what buildings do, and constant trips to forums, YouTube or the wiki ("you never know if something isn't working because you are doing it wrong or because it is bugged"). Story pop-ups that pause the game every few minutes and interrupt building annoyed another group.
Too much clicking and micromanagementMedium
Long-haul players describe the management layer as click-heavy: queuing shipments one transport at a time, scrolling long lists to find idle trucks, repeatedly checking contracts and prices across submenus, scanning for ore veins with narrow cones, colonists picking the worst jobs, and too few keyboard shortcuts. Some say they enjoyed the factory but burned out on the admin, and an autosale feature did not fully fix it for them.
Drones that misbehaveMedium
Drones appear in 17% of negative reviews. For much of Early Access the cargo drones were a leading source of bug reports: ignoring priorities, getting stuck with drained batteries, not building placed structures, and digging tunnel tiles in random order. Several players say a rework fixed the worst of it, but others hit the same issues again in later builds.
Grating early dialogueLow
A cluster of very short-playtime negative reviews quit over the tutorial's opening exchange, finding the guide character Alice condescending and rude. About half came from the July 2024 launch and several more from the 1.0 release month, and it accounts for some of the earliest refunds.
AI-generated assetsLow
A small group of negative reviews object to AI-generated character portraits and some voice work that they say was not clearly disclosed, and that put them off the game regardless of how it plays.
Platform problems on Mac and Steam DeckLow
A few players reported crashes and a cursor offset on Apple Silicon Macs at 1.0 (some later said fixes helped, or that running it through CrossOver was more stable), launch problems on Steam Deck in desktop mode, and no option to turn off chromatic aberration.
3. The player conversation
The tone is affectionate but exasperated. Many negative reviews come from people who liked the concept and were stopped by something breaking, and some promise to switch their vote once it is fixed. Outright dismissals of the core design are a minority, concentrated among genre veterans who wanted a deeper pure factory game and among early quitters lost in the tutorial.
Launch week in July 2024 ran 69% positive, with drone bugs, soft-locks and crashes the main complaints, and sentiment climbed into the 80s within a few weeks as patches landed. Through 2025 and early 2026 reviews settled into a pattern of praising the game while warning about bugs and advising others to wait for 1.0, with occasional dips when updates broke saves and a separate thread of late-game performance complaints. The 1.0 launch in September 2026 brought the biggest wave of reviews since the original release and a return to launch-week sentiment (69% positive): new players praised the story, music and blend of systems, while returning veterans hit the room bug and save-breaking hotfixes. The last days of September looked better as fixes arrived, though few reviews had come in by export.
4. What the developers could do
- Make save integrity the top priority. Saves corrupted or made incompatible by patches cost players dozens or hundreds of hours in a single run, and the problem kept recurring from Early Access through the 1.0 hotfixes.
- Fix the colonist room systems for good. The room-building and comfort bugs that cut power to whole bases and blocked expansion were among the main problems of the 1.0 launch.
- Run a mid-game stability pass on quests, drones and machines. Soft-locked missions, quest triggers that need a reload, idle drones and machines that drop their recipes are the long tail of bugs that pushes people from "I love it" to "I can't recommend it".
- Improve late-game performance. Veterans with big bases on high-end hardware report 10 to 30 fps and a single overloaded CPU core, which makes the large bases they build toward impractical.
- Cut the management clicking. Bulk shipment queuing, an idle-vehicle filter, searchable trade lists, repeatable or longer-running contracts and more keyboard shortcuts would address the clicking complaints from long-haul players.
- Rework contract fairness and early pacing. Players asked for contracts that only offer goods you can research, penalties that return delivered goods, and story deadlines gated behind progress so new players do not spiral early.
- Rebuild onboarding. A tutorial that covers belts, research points and colonists, plus an encyclopedia and tooltips that match the real numbers, would help the players who quit in the first two hours, for whom poor explanations are the most common complaint.
- Add factory-builder basics. Blueprints or copy-paste, more flexible underground belts and a looser CPU cap are what genre veterans name as missing.
