I was hoping for a fun, distracting challenge. This game is instead frustrating and unforgiving.

It has the elements of what could be a fun game and I hope they get there.

My frame of reference is Autonauts vs Piratebots. I ran into some of the same corner cases where I would chain together events without thinking through what might be in a bot's hands or I would find resources drying up because of a programming error. The difference is Autonauts had an endgame where you needed good chains in order to fight off assaults and build your army - but you could take your time early on and slowly work out bugs.

This game has very punishing batteries each bot needs to fill nearly constantly, expendable resources that add stress, AND incredibly quickly burning bonfires/furnaces/etc that need constant attention. Instead of being able to stop and consider what code broke my base, I often found myself stressed that my whole base would freeze and every bot would run out of batteries and I would have to manually bootstrap from the beginning. That isn't fun, that is stressful and frustrating.

I know this is early access, but there also isn't a reason to play. You push back the snow to get new parts to push back the snow to get new parts... to... be done. I hope they add some gamification to this game.