Scrap Mechanic

Last updated
Scrap Mechanic
Scrap Mechanic (2016 video game).png
Promotional cover art
Developer(s) Axolot Games
Publisher(s) Axolot Games
Director(s) Kacper Antonius
Pontus Holmbom [1] [2]
Platform(s) Microsoft Windows
ReleaseJanuary 20, 2016 (early access)
Genre(s) Sandbox, survival
Mode(s) Single-player, multiplayer

Scrap Mechanic is a sandbox video game developed for Windows by Swedish [3] game studio and publisher Axolot Games, in which players can build machines, vehicles, and buildings, and share their creations online. The initial version of the game, released on January 20, 2016, was a creative mode with unlimited access to all available parts for building. On the day of its release, it was the top-selling game on Steam [4] and is estimated to have 1–2 million sales. [5] The survival mode update for the game, with new game mechanics including wildlife, scavenging, farming, and cooking, as well as an underwater biome, was released on May 7, 2020. [6] It was the third-best-selling game on Steam the week after the update. [7]

Contents

Gameplay

Players begin at the site of a crashed spaceship, with very few items. Inside the crashed spaceship the player must find a Master Battery—which is located in a ruin nearby—and place it into the Master Battery Socket located in the crashed spaceship, by doing this, the player activates the Mini Craftbot, and the Ship Terminal. The Mini Craftbot is a more simple and smaller version of the Craftbot with limited functionality, primarily focused on allowing players to build a basic vehicle to begin exploring the world. The Ship Terminal allows players to receive the Logbook which indicates the time of day, the day they're on, the beacons that players place down, and various important locations. Players must search for supplies and food in order to survive.

The Mechanic Station is the location where the various crafting stations can be made. This includes the Craftbot, the Dressbot, made for making cloths, the Refinebot for refining raw materials, and the Cookbot, for combining raw foods into recipes. In addition, a Resource Collector can crafted which is used for collecting and storing various resources and transferring them to Refinebot.

The Farmers Hideout is the location where trading is performed for items such as the spud guns, garment boxes, seeds and ammunition (potatoes).

Other locations include structures such as the Silo District or Ruin City filled with enemy, loot crates, and ruin chests; the Farmers Hideout, where items can be purchased; the Farmers Shacks that can be harvested for blocks, parts and other resources; and Warehouses, large buildings storing more advanced supplies. [8]

Creative mode

In creative mode, players start with full access to an unlimited supply of all items in the game, allowing for the creation of a variety of buildings, vehicles, and machines, none of which require energy or fuel to function. There are no enemies nor animals in the world naturally, but they can be spawned by the player with spawn capsules. In this mode, players cannot be injured or die. There are also harvestable crops from survival mode such as trees and stone as well as crafting stations, allowing for players to test all sorts of contraptions. Creations can be saved and shared via the Steam workshop. [9]

Challenge mode

In challenge mode, players will try and get through 50 levels by building or fixing contraptions using the limited materials they are given. A challenge builder is also available for players to build and share their own challenge levels through the Steam workshop. Challenge levels can be downloaded and published in the Steam workshop. Originally, challenge mode was a developer's experiment with encryption mechanics, not allowing buildings to be deleted, which has evolved into its whole separate game mode.

Plot

The survival backstory depicts the setting of the game. It portrays a robot maintenance mechanic that has been sent to an agricultural planet which supplies food to the metropolitan planets. The crew has been tasked to maintain fully autonomous farming robots which overrun the planet. However, as the spacecraft comes in for a landing it loses control and crashes. The mechanic survives the impact however becomes stranded and finds out the robots working in the fields have become hostile and start attacking the mechanics. The goal is now to survive on the planet, using the mechanics quick thinking, creativity and environment as an advantage to stay alive from the savage robots.

Development

Scrap Mechanic formerly used the OGRE rendering engine, which stands for Object-Oriented Graphics Rendering Engine. [10] It was used alongside a custom plugin named Bullet, which is an external physics engine responsible for all of the physics calculations. [11]

However, the engine was changed with the first major update. The new in-house rendering engine had been in development since August and was made to fix numerous bugs, mostly related to certain integrated Intel cards, which some players had issues with. [12]

Reception

Angus Morrison of PC Gamer compared the game to Minecraft , noting that in the context of the latter's lack of mechanical building conditions, the game might be attractive to players who like to build mechanics. [13]

Nathan Grayson of Kotaku said that the game "struck him as a game intrepid builders won't tire of anytime soon," and claimed that he was looking forward to seeing what comes of it, [4] Curtis Pyke of MGN called the game "a farming simulator meets tower defense game". [14]

Related Research Articles

Robot Arena is an action video game series focused on robot building and fighting. It is based on television shows such as Robot Wars and Battlebots. There are three games in the series, Robot Arena released in 2001, Robot Arena 2: Design and Destroy released in 2003, and Robot Arena 3 released in 2016.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Sandbox game</span> Type of video game encouraging creativity

A sandbox game is a video game with a gameplay element that provides players a great degree of creativity to interact with, usually without any predetermined goal, or alternatively with a goal that the players set for themselves. Such games may lack any objective, and are sometimes referred to as non-games or software toys. More often, sandbox games result from these creative elements being incorporated into other genres and allowing for emergent gameplay. Sandbox games are often associated with an open world concept which gives the players freedom of movement and progression in the game's world. The term "sandbox" derives from the nature of a sandbox that lets people create nearly anything they want within it.

<i>Garrys Mod</i> 2006 video game

Garry's Mod is a 2006 sandbox game developed by Facepunch Studios and published by Valve. The base game mode of Garry's Mod has no set objectives and provides the player with a world in which to freely manipulate objects. Other game modes, notably Trouble in Terrorist Town and Prop Hunt, are created by other developers as mods and are installed separately, by means such as the Steam Workshop. Garry's Mod was created by Garry Newman as a mod for Valve's Source game engine and released in December 2004, before being expanded into a standalone release that was published by Valve in November 2006. Ports of the original Windows version for Mac OS X and Linux followed in September 2010 and June 2013, respectively. As of September 2021, Garry's Mod has sold more than 20 million copies. A successor, Sandbox, has been in development since 2015.

<i>Terraria</i> 2011 video game

Terraria is a 2011 action-adventure sandbox game developed by Re-Logic. The game was first released for Windows and has since been ported to other PC and console platforms. The game features exploration, crafting, building, painting, and combat with a variety of creatures in a procedurally generated 2D world. Terraria is one of the best-selling video games of all time, selling 58.7 million copies as of 2024.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Keen Software House</span> Independent video game developer

Keen Software House is an independent video game developing company based in Prague, Czech Republic. The company was founded by Marek Rosa in 2010.

Space Engineers is a voxel-based sandbox game, developed and published by Czech independent developer Keen Software House. In 2013, the initial developmental release of the game joined the Steam early access program. During the following years of active development, Space Engineers sold over one million units. In total as of 2024 the game has sold over 5 million copies In May 2015, for approximately a year and a half, the game's source code was officially available and maintained by KSH to assist the modding community. On December 15, 2016, the game entered Beta and was later officially released on February 28, 2019.

<i>Unturned</i> 2017 video game

Unturned is a partly free to play game by Smartly Dressed Games, a studio consisting solely of Canadian game designer Nelson Sexton. It was released for Windows, macOS, and Linux in early access on July 7, 2014. The full game release three years later, on July 17, 2017. Unturned allows players to create custom maps using an in-game editor. Cosmetics and mods can also be created using the game's Unity engine, which allows them to publish creations on the Steam Workshop. A retail version of the game was released for the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One by 505 Games in November 2020. It was later ported to Nintendo Switch in March 2024.

<i>Planet Explorers</i> 2016 video game

Planet Explorers is an adventure role-playing video game developed and published by Pathea Games. Development began in January 2014, existing as an early access game. The game was released on 8 November 2016 for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux on the Steam digital distribution platform.

<i>Planet Coaster</i> 2016 video game published by Frontier Developments

Planet Coaster is a construction and management simulation video game developed and published by Frontier Developments for Windows. It was released worldwide on 17 November 2016. Frontier had previously worked in the amusement park construction and management genre with RollerCoaster Tycoon 3, Thrillville, Thrillville: Off the Rails, and Zoo Tycoon. A version for PlayStation 4, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, known as Planet Coaster: Console Edition, was released worldwide on 10 November 2020. The PlayStation 5 version was released in North America and Australia on 12 November 2020 and in Europe on 19 November 2020. A macOS version, developed by Aspyr, was later released on 17 November 2020 on both Steam and Mac App Store.

<i>Besiege</i> (video game) 2020 video game

Besiege is a vehicle-building sandbox video game based around medieval siege engines, developed and published by Spiderling Studios. The game was released for Windows, macOS and Linux in February 2020 at the conclusion of a five-year long early access phase that started in January 2015. A console version for Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S was released in February 2022, and an expansion pack titled The Splintered Sea was announced in April 2024. A version for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5 and Switch is expected to release on December 12, 2024. The game has received widespread praise, citing the wide range of experimentation available to players.

<i>SimplePlanes</i> Flight simulation video game

SimplePlanes is a simulation video game developed and published by the American indie studio Jundroo LLC. SimplePlanes followed the release of SimplePhysics and SimpleRockets and preceded Juno: New Origins and SimplePlanes VR. The game was first released on Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows and was ported to iOS and Android later. It was released onto Steam on 17 December 2015 after going through the Steam Greenlight process. The game received mixed reviews from users and video game reviewers, with the main downfalls mentioned the most being the "slippery controls" and the graphical design. However, it is known for its innovative, though sometimes complex, building mechanics. From 2014 until 2023, SimplePlanes has got 12 updates. The latest version, v1.12.200 beta, was released in September 2023.

<i>Medieval Engineers</i> 2020 video game

Medieval Engineers is a voxel-based sandbox computer game set on an unnamed Earth-like planetoid without water that can be explored, mined, manipulated, and deformed. It was developed and published by Czech developer Keen Software House. On February 19, 2015, Medieval Engineers was released as an early access game on the Steam platform, and the full version was released on March 17, 2020.

<i>Stormworks: Build and Rescue</i> First person life simulation video game

Stormworks: Build And Rescue is a simulation video game developed and published by the British studio Geometa. The game was released as an early access title in February 2018 for Windows and Mac and is receiving frequent updates through Steam. The game left early access on September 17, 2020.

<i>PC Building Simulator</i> 2019 video game

PC Building Simulator is a simulation-strategy video game produced by The Irregular Corporation and Romanian independent developer, Claudiu Kiss. The game is centered around owning and running a workshop which builds and maintains PCs, mainly gaming-oriented ones.

<i>Planet Zoo</i> 2019 video game

Planet Zoo is a 2019 construction and management simulation game by Frontier Developments for Windows. The game is a spiritual successor to Zoo Tycoon and Zoo Tycoon 2, with gameplay similar to the studio's theme park game, Planet Coaster. Ports for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S were released in 2024.

<i>Maximum Action</i> Video game

Maximum Action is a 2018 indie first-person shooter video game created by American developer George Mandell and self-published by Mandell under the name Balloon Moose Games. The game features gun fu, ragdoll physics, and player movement inspired by Hong Kong action cinema.

<i>Boneworks</i> 2019 video game

Boneworks is a 2019 first-person shooter game developed and published by Stress Level Zero. The game is designed to be entirely physics-based, with the player controlling a full virtual body that responds not just to the player's real-world input but also to obstructions in the game world.

<i>Cooking Simulator</i> 2019 video game

Cooking Simulator is a simulation cooking game developed by Polish team Big Cheese Studio and published by PlayWay S.A. on 6 June 2019 for Microsoft Windows. The Nintendo Switch version was released on 14 May 2020, published on the system by Forever Entertainment. The Xbox One version was released on 14 August 2020. A mobile port, titled Cooking Simulator Mobile, launched on Android devices on 20 October 2020. It is available on iOS in a few countries, and the worldwide release is available for pre-register by PlayWay S.A. The PlayStation 4 version released on 20 May 2021 exclusively in Europe and Australia, and on 8 June 2021 in North America.

<i>Teardown</i> (video game) 2022 video game

Teardown is a 2022 sandbox–puzzle video game developed and published by Tuxedo Labs. The game revolves around the owner of a financially stricken demolition company, who is caught undertaking a questionable job and becomes entangled between helping police investigations and taking on further dubious assignments. Teardown features levels made of destructible voxels, and the player follows the campaign through consecutive missions. In most missions, the player must collect or destroy objects connected to a security alarm that triggers a timer. The player has unlimited time to prepare and is given upgradable tools, vehicles, and explosives to create a path within the level that allows them to complete the objectives and reach a getaway vehicle before the timer runs out.

<i>Raft</i> (video game) 2018 survival video game

Raft is an open world survival-sandbox video game developed by Swedish developer Redbeet Interactive, and published by Axolot Games. The game was released as an early access title on 23 May 2018 on Steam, after initial release as a free download on indie platform Itch.io in 2016. On 20 June 2022 Raft was taken out of early access with the release of its final chapter. Taking place in a flooded apocalypse the player takes on the role of a forward scout, a survivor who ventures out into the open sea in search of habitable land and resources.

References

  1. ↑ Blixt, Tobias (May 3, 2021). "Axolot pitchade för Mojang och fick nobben – nu omsätter de 341 miljoner". Breakit (in Swedish). Retrieved August 8, 2023.
  2. ↑ "Scrap Mechanic (Video Game 2016) - Full Cast & Crew". IMDb . Retrieved August 8, 2023.
  3. ↑ "Info". Axolot Games. Archived from the original on July 28, 2021. Retrieved May 4, 2020.
  4. 1 2 Grayson, Nathan (January 20, 2016). "A Game About Building Crazy Cars Is Tearing Up Steam's Charts Right Now". Kotaku . Archived from the original on May 4, 2020.
  5. ↑ "Scrap Mechanic · AppID: 387990". SteamDB. Retrieved 2020-05-05.
  6. ↑ "Scrap Mechanic: Welcome to the machine-filled creative paradise of Scrap Mechanic, a multiplayer sandbox game with imagination and ingenuity at its core". Scrap Mechanic. Retrieved 2023-02-16.
  7. ↑ Partleton, Kayleigh (May 18, 2020). "CHARTS: Halo The Master Chief Collection shoots its way to the top". PC Games Insider. Retrieved July 2, 2024.
  8. ↑ Ackroyd, Luke (August 13, 2022). "8 Things We Wish We Knew Before Playing Scrap Mechanic". TheGamer. Archived from the original on August 15, 2022. Retrieved August 22, 2022.
  9. ↑ Sykes, Tom (July 17, 2016). "Scrap Mechanic gets Steam Workshop support". PC Gamer . Retrieved August 22, 2022.
  10. ↑ "12 graphics and rendering tools to make your game shine". MCV. 2014-06-20. ISSN   1469-4832 . Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  11. ↑ "Bullet is a professional free 3D Real-Time Multiphysics Library - Google Code Archive". code.google.com. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  12. ↑ "Scrap Mechanic: Welcome to the machine-filled creative paradise of Scrap Mechanic, a multiplayer sandbox game with imagination and ingenuity at its core". Scrap Mechanic. Retrieved 2023-03-23.
  13. ↑ Morrison, Angus (December 2, 2015). "Build your own Autobot with Scrap Mechanic's Controller". PC Gamer. Retrieved August 22, 2022.
  14. ↑ Pyke, Curtis (27 February 2021). "Scrap Mechanic – Game Review". mgn.gg. Retrieved 6 April 2023.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.