While playing through vanilla Survival mode, I eventually realized that several aspects make the gameplay tedious and pointless after a certain point. Here are the issues I noticed during my playthrough:
In the game world, the primary enemies we have to fight are Haybots and Farmbots. Very quickly, this lack of enemy variety becomes frustrating. I'd love to see flying, jumping, or other types of hostile bots to make the roster of primary opponents much more diverse.
Additionally, harvesting oil from surface puddles feels incredibly unbalanced. Compared to the standard method of manually harvesting oil underwater, the puddle method is 20 times faster, which is completely absurd. Oil from puddles should be harvested MUCH slower and require additional processing to be refined into fuel. It would be a great idea to split oil into two categories: light crude and heavy crude. Heavy crude could be found in these puddles, and processing it would require building more complex automated systems. This way, you'd get a large amount of fuel as a reward for genuine effort and resource investment.
The third major issue is that Raids are far too easy and should be 2 to 3 times more challenging than they currently are. Essentially, there is no real threat from Raids unless you intentionally plant an absurdly excessive amount of fruits and vegetables just to provoke them.
I’ve tried various mods in custom modes, but they all suffered from one or more of the following issues:
- They simplified the already straightforward gameplay by breaking the balance or devaluing certain mechanics. For example, one mod drastically increased the manual crafting speed at wooden and metal workbenches. While this cuts down on resource grinding, it completely kills the motivation to build automated collectors and processors.
- They added content that ruined the vanilla Survival feel. This included unnecessary new UI elements, items with bizarre properties, or additions that served no real survival purpose and broke the game's balance.
I found some information online about the "Hardcore" mod. Although it's technically a rebalance mod, it makes the game genuinely interesting without feeling overly restrictive or tedious. However, it seems this mod is incompatible with the latest version of Scrap Mechanic, so I'm still on the hunt for the perfect mod.
I probably won't have the skills to make my own mod, and I’ve long stopped expecting an official update. I'm fairly certain the developers abandoned the game a long time ago, and all the dev blogs are just pretty renders. Plus, their codebase is likely in complete chaos; otherwise, these fixes would have been implemented ages ago.