Craft the World is a small sandbox game published in November 24, 2014 by Black Maple Games. The developer behind the game is Dekovir Entertainment – yet unfortunately I wasn’t been able to find any detailed information about this company. The game collected over 7700 positive reviews on Steam and is widely considered addictive and interesting. Of course the main merit of the game is that for last few years it has been professionally supported by the team of developers who keep making it interesting.
The game consists of four levels, or four worlds to be exact:
1st Level – Forest
2nd Level – Snow
3rd Level – Desert
4th Level – Underground
To pass a level you need to complete certain activities, not get yourself killed, and build complete portal that will take you to the next world. It takes a lot of time, and it is very absorbing. I’m currently at the Desert world.. Every world has higher difficulty level then the one you just left. Not in every world you may have the same resources, and the balance of resources changes between the worlds. For instance – desert world has a lot of sand, while winter world is the only one with ice and snow.
Huge part of the game is crafting. You craft armour, and weapons for your pack of dwarfs, you craft elements from with you build your shelter, you craft food and drink to keep your dwarfs fed. Crafting tree is wide and based on your current technology. To upgrade your technology you simply need to craft a number of items from previous technologies. It’s all very simple.
Upgrading technology is extremely efficient in many areas. With better technology you can craft better tools and weapons. You start with wood, then iron, steel, silver, gold and mithril. You may gather the materials – but depending on your level of technology and the world you’re on some may be harder to come by. To get metal you need to dig deeper in the ground. The more valuable the metal is the deeper you need to dig. Also the more valuable material is the lesser amounts of it are on the map. You can also dig faster or slower depending on the type of ground your digging in to. For instance digging into the sand is fast, but diggin into the stone is much slower. There are a different types of minerals and the only way to dug faster is to upgrade your technology and craft a better tools or perhaps a machines (which are powered by mana).
You start with one dwarf, and by completing set of tasks you may add new dwarfs to your tribe. You also get awarded in mana points. Mana is important in terms of spells. You have small number of them, identical to every world – but also very essential and practical. Like the spell to collect all items lying on the earth, or grow trees, or just standard, old fireball for your foes. For coins you can purchase machines that will allow you to gather, produce and store mana – which I recommend you do.
Every dwarf can learn three skills. The skills are counted in percents, and basically a dwarf can learn something for 100%. Each dwarf starts with one skill, with the score of 10%, but you can develop that skill and add two more. Skills makes dwarfs do things faster of better. For instance developing cooking skill will allow dwarfs to produce food faster or developing warriors skill will allow dwarfs to inflict greater damage. To enhance skills dwarves gather skill-books. They can be found while digging or purchased in the store for coins. There are also other types of books that dwarfs can produce. Books to increase learnability, give more health to the dwarfs or expand the mana storage. By hovering dwarf with the mouse (in equip menu) you may see his personal statistics: monsters killed, mugs of beer drunk and some more.
You of course need to build a shelter for dwarfs, and you can use natural materials for it – or what is way better craft building materials like walls, roof, doors, windows etc. There are a large variety of building materials and each one is different from the other in terms of cost, technology level you need to have to craft it, durability or comfort level it provides. Note that if the shelter has any hole in it, it will not work properly. Once you build your shelter and place a totem inside to mark it, you need of course the furniture. Some of the furniture are necessary like beds (when dwarves sleep they regenerate their health), or table (you need to place the food somewhere). And some other furniture enhance comfort level. With higher comfort level dwars regenerate faster so it is important to keep track of it. Sometimes you need to repair your shelter, monsters can break into it, so durability of the materials used to make it is important.
About the monsters.. There are a lot of them. Every hour you get attacked by a wave of monsters (more powerful each hour), with the goal to kill your dwarfs, and destroy what you’ve made. Aside from that, random monsters respawn on your maps surface, or you can find some while digging. Should they succeed in killing a dwarf it will respawn after few minutes but all his learned skills will be gone. Killing the monsters is a matter of survival but also when you kill some of them they leave weapons and coins on the battlefield. I mentioned coins before – you use them in game shop to purchase additional items (you can use only ingame coins, no real cash). So killing monsters may be profitable.
There are also tons of other features in the game but i don’t want to describe them all here not to spoil the fun. Some things provide more entertainment if you discover them yourself after all.
The game is considerably priced: 18,99€ / $18.99, and what is more important the DLC’s are cheap, and they add interesting features to the game. What makes them worth buying. Amongst the DLC’s there is a multiplayer option for the game, cosmetics or some cool new locations and monsters.
So far I had only one main issue with the game. When DLC Bosses & Monsters was introduced I didn’t purchased it and yet it was activated on my account and in ongoing game. Later it was blocked and my game crashed and I … (i’m not proud of this) purchased the DLC just to continue the game. But since the DLC costed less than $3 i suppose I wasn’t that big of a deal. And I actually starting to think that it worked for the best. Because probably I wouldn’t purchased DLC’s from an indie developer if I hadn’t knew how much fun they were.
Game is best suited to play in the bus, or after work when you’re too tired to play a game you need to be invested in, but you still crave entertainment. Considering how long the game lasts, and the fact that DLC’s are still under development I belive it to be money well spent.
