The Crust Leaves Early Access With 10x Its Steam Player Count
After two years and two months in early access, The Crust shows that a finished campaign and a stack of quality-of-life systems can multiply a small simulation audience rather than merely hold it.
Reporting from 1 source: Automaton.
Publisher Crytivo released VEOM Studio's The Crust on September 11 for PC via Steam. Peak concurrent players on Steam rose from 405 in August to 4,205 after the full release, roughly ten times higher. Version 1.0 adds a Plan Mode for base layout, roads and cargo truck parking, a finished story campaign with multiple endings, new sandbox starting points, meteor strikes, anti-meteor laser cannons, solar flares and epidemics.
The 1.0 build does more than finish the campaign. Plan Mode lets players lay out modules and conveyors before committing resources, copy modules together with their recipes, and check required materials in advance, which matters once a base spans a large production chain.
Cargo trucks and roads were added, with trucks picking the shortest route. Sandbox Mode now lets players choose a starting point based on the resource composition of each location, and new terrain maps and seed settings were added alongside it. Settlers also got showers and toilets, making sanitation part of colony management.
Optimization work covered logistics algorithms, inter-warehouse calculations, rendering and power calculations. Crytivo and VEOM Studio report FPS gains of 30 to 50 percent on some optimizations, and 100 to 200 percent on large bases where several improvements stack.
Synthesized by Yomimono from the 1 cited source below, including Japanese-language reporting where cited, then editorially reviewed before publishing.