Blow-by-blow playthrough of the Settlements update

This is a blow-by-blow account of my first play-through of Godus following the Settlements update. I decided to do this with a view of giving 22Cans some very specific feedback on the look and feel of PC-Godus at this time, and have tried to approach this with as fresh eyes as possible as I know 22Cans are particularly interested in the impression Godus would make on a first-time player.

I last played Godus in April, so I've had a fairly long break before tackling the new update. Prior to this I had over 220 hours logged in versions 1.3 and 2.0. My MO was to leave Godus running in the background on my desktop, and I would occasionally take a moment to collect belief. Then when I wanted to actually "play" the game I could sit down to it with a massive pile of belief to do whatever I wanted. This is my disclaimer - I've tried to be as objective as possible, but inevitably my experience will be coloured to some extent by my previous experience of Godus. One thing I haven't been able to comment on very accurately is the pacing of the early stages of the game because I was frequently dipping out to make my notes.

Also I imagine I'm repeating a lot of stuff here that has already been said so sorry about that. I deliberately didn't read any other posts or reviews prior to doing this because I knew they would influence me. I imagine this will be extremely boring to a lot of normal users so apologies for that, I just hope it's of some value to the team. This documents my experience through to the first land expansion so I didn't actually get as far as doing any farming or building any settlements. I may pick up the game again to try these things out, but I'm not sure it's the right time for me to do this given my experience with the mobile-oriented design of the present build (which came as no surprise because obviously 22Cans had told us to anticipate this in the current build).

So here we go, from the loading screen onwards!

- 50.5% completed - I had been starting to get the impression it was further along than this.
- Immediately turned off the developer commentary but it didn't work
- Tried restarting whilst still in the tutorial to turn off the commentary - it crashed on close with "s23 application launcher has stopped working" (quitting through the menu rather than X'ing out)
- Upon restart the commentary was off (I think the commentary should be off by default and turned on according to user preference).
- "Drawing a circle" tutorial - on the PC version this has the problem that Godus runs in Window mode, and if your cursor leaves the Window (which it frequently does, especially if you're running a decent monitor resolution) the layer will spring back. - Is this smaller/more zoomed in than it used to be? Completing it feels like less of a chore (exception for the spring-back in part 1).
- Tutorial part 2 - "Clear the circle" - this still feels like it's drawn out way too much. We get the idea by the time it's half cleared. Dunno if this is just because I'm an experienced user, but you'd have to be a special kind of stupid not to have picked this up in the first 4 seconds.
- Ambient sound of birds/coast is nice and atmospheric and effective in creating a relaxing coastal atmosphere.
- Rescuing drowning followers - it took me 4 attempts to successfully draw the land out out to sculpt their rescue due to 2 'spring backs' and 1 instance of the land releasing too early (before I felt I had released the click) and therefore not reaching them in time.
- I kept idly trying to sculpt sand as my followers wandered towards higher ground but it kept dragging lower layers of the ocean instead, which was unexpected and not an intuitive follow-through from the previous tutorial exercise.
- Having just 'learned' to sculpt I made a few attempts to sculpt the land around my followers as they hunted for the 'promised land' and it was frustrating to see the land hillocks vanish then re-appear. This behaviour looks the same as the spring-back I experienced before when my cursor left the window, so it took me a couple of attempts to notice a message saying that in this case my sculpting was deliberately failing because I wasn't yet "powerful enough".
- 'Sculpting the way for my followers' - one follower lagged way behind and seemed utterly confused, taking significantly longer to figure out the paths I scultped. The other follower was so well ahead, every time I sculpted new land to make a viable path my follower enttered no-clip mode and got merged with the land layer. This did not look right. The behaviour looks bugged.
- Minor housekeeping point: the text prompts (eg. I'm looking right now at "This isn't right. Too ugly for a Promised Land. Your poor Followers are running out of options." look messy. The text is too cramped and it looks odd that "Followers" is capitalised and in a different colour. The lines are so close together they look like they're almost merged.
- Building an abode - first timer is 7 seconds, I barely notice it.
- Second timer - my builder makes the second abode in 10s, still ok.
- Suddenly I have 2 timers on my screen, one on each abode. I don't really understand why my first abode has a timer on it. Isn't that one already built?
- Timeline - this all seems relatively ok. I noticed the location of the text boxes on the screen seem quite important to the prompts being given - eg. "This is where your discovered cards appear" and the text prompt is on the lower half of the screen. I don't think people will necessary read it like this. When you get a pop-up message from Windows its location on the screen is not relevant, so it's not intuitive that this should mean anything. Where the messages have arrows and pointers though, this is not an issue.
- Beach huts - tall orange cubes that look like nothing I am familiar with in human history.
- Timers - making an abode seems to have now gone up to 25s. This is more than twice as long as before and we're still realistically in the first few minutes of the game.
- Just discovered the shrine card - building an abode is now 33s?
- Now my shrine is complete and I get a text prompt telling me to click it. Gonna be honest, these hand-holding text prompts are becoming annoying. The 1.3.1 version of Godus relied on users discovering things 100% using their own intuition. This has gone completely in the other direction. Nothing is left to chance.
- Belief - I like the sweeping graphic that appears, indicating that belief can be collected in a dragging/sweeping motion instead of click-per-abode which I think is a more intuitive first approach for a PC user.
- My followers are now building loads of abodes as they approach the pit of doom. They are talking a lot, repeating the same words - pretty much "buildem" and "completeson" or something along those lines. This is starting to grate on me.
- I have one follower building the Pit of Doom and it;s taking over a minute. One nearby house has a faded pip (it;s this builder) and one nearby house has a normal pip (available builder) but all my other houses have no pips. I don't know why these builders aren't available to help. The pit of doom is not far for these abodes. There are people in these abodes. Why can't these builders contribute to the project?
- "Gems in Godus" message. This appears to be very closely addressed to a particular type of player - players who are aware of the PC vs. mobile debate, who are predisposed to hate gems, who are going to have a kneejerk negative reaction to the introduction of gems. To other users (like a new user who casually happens across Godus on Steam and decides to give it a go) this message looks really odd, and frankly draws attention to one of Godus's less positive aspects. I think the caption should be renamed "Gems" and the first two paragraphs should be removed. "Godus gems are different from other games and you're a PC gamer..." sorry I thought I was a GOD? This completely breaks the immersion of the game. Also there's generally too much text here. I have a big text box centre-stage and a little text box in the lower right corner telling me about my gem exchange and cool stuff I can get. This whole gem malarkey is quite disruptive to the atmosphere that was so nicely created early on.
- Quitting the game for now because it's late - it doesn't crash!

--- Overnight break. By the way, I didn't realise it at the time but I was really drunk when I did that first bit. It was late and I'd just got back from my friend's house. --

- Loaded back up. I had another look in the Menu and realised I can change the resolution - this helps address the problem I had last night with my mouse leaving the screen whilst scultping.
- Following reload, chests have confetti on them again. On my last playthrough they didn't. I assumed they had been deliberately removed. a bug maybe?
- In the Menu, I think the red X should be in the corner of all screens, not just the main screen (eg. the "Change resolution" options).
- Not really sure what I'm meant to be doing right now. I can see chest confetti so I go around opening them all. There's plenty of flat land next to my abodes but I haven't been offered any builders. Visiting the chests gives me a look around the homeworld, and I quite like it. It feels a lot more open than the last one. My only criticism is we seem to be on the edge on the map. I think it would be better to start in the middle, so you can truly expand in any direction. Also, we've got the clipping boxes again around the edges so we're only seeing our world in squares. Didn't that get removed?
- Looking properly at my timeline now. The biggest thing on the screen is the "Primitive Sticker Pack" card in the corner, inviting me to spend gems. I've just unlocked the "living on grass" card so I guess this will solve my what-do-I-do problem. I don't like the cards and stickers. I go from being a god in my world to looking at a bunch of crads and dragging-and-dropping 'stickers' onto them. Why are they called stickers in this context? Part of the fun of stickers IRL is the physical act of peeling them and sticking them. We don't have this in the game. They're just pictures. Stickers add another level of abstraction to the cards, which are already an unwelcome abstration.
- My new houses take 7m30s to build. At this point I tried quitting and reloading, which in previous builds used to jump the timers along.
- It didn't work.
- I spend gems to speed up my timers. Immediately a SECOND timer appears as my hut gets filled. Since I just spent some of my valuable gems to speed up this process, this is kind of obnoxious. I can also spend gems to complete this if I want, but even I can stand to wait 30 seconds.
- I'm now working towards the population target of 50, and my approach is to flatten land to make space for the houses. I speed up every timer using gems. I'm not doing a huge amount of scultping right now so belief is definitely not a problem. The critical resource right now is gems, which I'm burning through rapidly.
- I've just unlocked leashing and do the leashing tutorial. This is perfectly clear, easy to follow, except that it took me several attempts to leash the multiple followers to complete the shrine. The tutorial invites me to select them using the same click-and-drag motion I was using to collect belief earlier, but it keeps failing to register. Apparently I need to be much slower here and wait for the blue circles to appear over each follower. This is slightly over-egged; it's obvious enough how to do this leashing without expecting users to be doing it at a snail's pace. We've already been introduced to click-and-drag to achieve something.
- "You can also remove trees and rocks by Leashing - try it!" when I returned to my world I used a leash to direct my follower a rock but nothing happened.
- At this point I'm advised to use my followers to repair the Dock, which highlights the fact that all of my followers are shut up inside their abodes and only come out to build houses. I realise I can extract followers from their houses with the leash, but my instinct is to find available followers from the land first and it's a bit odd that they aren't wandering about and doing stuff.
- Night has fallen for the first time.
- I've unlocked a card so I go to the timeline to see what it is. Not sure, but I see I have a few things I can unlock with my stickers so I do it and now I have people walking around outside. It seems like every time I start noticing something is a bit weird, within a few minutes I reach the next stage of the game which addresses it. This is quite clever. My cards have been reasonably easy to unlock so far requiring just a few stickers each. but now I've got "bigger abodes" to unlock and this seems to require a bit more effort.
- I've now unlocked the Voyage of Discovery. With this, I only have 1 gem left (I haven't done anything to receive new gems yet, so this was all from my starting balance).
- Okay, my first voyage. The text on the first screen tells me this is my opportunity to win loads of stickers. Here we go again - I had just noticed that I was facing a sticker shortfall, and now I'm finding out how I can get more. I have to say though, the resource that felt the most pressing to me at this stage was gems rather than stickers. Cards and stickers are obviously necessary to advance in the game, but I'm still figuring out everything that they're doing for me and they're still new and fancy so I don't feel a lot of need to rapidly burn through and unlock them all just yet. Gems, on the other hand. have been necessary from the first time a 7m timer popped up. To be clear, if there are other things to do then it's fine, but if - I am ever put in a position where I literally have to wait 7 minutes to do the next thing, this is an insurmountable barrier to me and I will quit the game. My time is valuable and 7 minutes is a piss-take.
- Anyway, first voyage. I'm invited to choose how many followers to take. No idea what is sensible so I take 10 (twice as many as the minimum).
- Okay, that was easy. Obviously this was the practice voyage. Difficulty 'bronze'? In the Olympics, the bronze medal goes to the third best athelete in the world!
- I'll add here that I loved Lemmings, and while I'm not sure this type of mini-game makes sense or works particularly well in a god-game, I do actually enjoy the voyages.
- Next voyage. 10 followers again. A sculpting challenge. No trouble here with pathfinding or anything.
- Voyage 3. This was the first time I encountered a situation where followers appeared not to recognise a step I made, but maybe I hadn't made it big enough or something.
- Just noticed I've managed to earn 3 gems at some point from voyages. Ok, Voyage 4. Another easy one.
- I've not really been aware of my belief balance yet in the game. It has never drawn attention to itelf because it's never dropped low. I just mention it now because it occurred to me while I was sculpting a path for my followers that it might be relevant, but I didn't use even 50 of my balance of 700 to complete this voyage.
- Voyage 5. Introduction of a champion. That's cool. Again, no trouble.
- Voyage 6. My first move is to cut out access to the obviously too-long path, and immediately my followers start hurling themselves into the ocean and screaming for help. Suddenly this feels a bit TOO much like lemmings. Why on earth are they doing that? I realise I can't sculpt the deeper ocean but the next-shortest route is easily available. I don't seem to have lost any followers to their suicidal behaviour so this is also completed successfully.
- Voyage 7. Shrine of speed. "Click to activate" moves the card down one space on the left. I don't get what is going on here. Oh, my mouse now has a little circle so I see I am meant to place the shrine. I click in the blight but nothing happens. - - - Hm. Oh, I realise I have to click and hold or click really hard or something? I don't know why this would need to be the case. Anyway, two shrines and this is done. Sail on!
- Voyage 8. Granite blocks appear. Looks like some extra thought may be required for this one. I remember from a similar voyage in the last build that followers are a bit cavalier about charging into the path of the champions.
- Voyage 9. Wait, not voyage 9. I'm returned to my homeworld and congratulated to completing an event. There's now I timer on my dock - 6 days! The timer says this is "time remaining" which makes me think I have 6 days in which to complete the next voyage, except I can't access them anymore. So I guess it must actually mean 6 days until I can next attempt a voyage? I try leashing a follower to the dock but nothing happens.
- While I was on voyages a bunch of belief appeared so I collect it and send out a bunch of builders to get to work on some empty plots.
- Son of a bitch, what's this? A load of gremlin-like giggling and cackling has started. This is awful. Just as I start worrying that this is a noise my people now make following some voyage-related discovery, I notice some tribespeople on the nearby hill. They run off when I sculpt near them.
- I've got loads of extra stickers now from my voyage-ing so I go and unlock some cards. I'm now at the point where unlocking cards seriously drains the sticker reserves. Still, I'm able to unlock both of the available ones.
- Returning to my homeworld, I now see a 45 minute timer on an abode. I don't know where this came from, it doesn't look much different to my other 7-minute abodes. Clicking on it, I realise this is actually a 'fill' timer rather than a build timer. It costs me a whopping 8 gems to 'fill' this abode. It presently has 2 breeders in it, according to the info, and the next to arrive will be a builder.
- I just clicked on it again and the fill-cost has gone down to 7, so this obviously becomes cheaper as the timer decreases.
- I send a follower to the temple of doom and receive 1 gem from it. So sacrificing followers to gain gems to auto-fill abodes is clearly a horrible idea. [edit: I actually did this BEFORE I spotted the 45m timer, and having read some other comments I think the extended time was due to sacrificing a guy.]
- My gem balance is presently 10. I spend 5 to auto-complete the land expansion shrine, which had a timer remaining of 25 minutes.

At this point I stopped because I could see how the game is panning out, and I think it would be prudent for me to wait until after the Autumn PC sprint before going back to Godus. My approach to timers is to immediately complete them using gems, and this is obviously not sustainable. I had expected to receive more than 1 gem for sacrificing a follower, so in my mind my strategy was to continuously throw followers into the pit of doom to get gems and keep on blasting timers. I don't think this would actually work long-term, though.