One of the things to keep in mind about Early Access is that “early” isn’t a defined variable. Some games come out a month or so before release, looking for a little feedback and bug-squishing; others are in a flexible beta state, mostly ready but with more content on the way and maybe room for a new idea or two if enough users are asking for it. The most common status is alpha, an experimental phase where the ideas are there but implementation is a work in progress and new features are more than welcome. Trashed released in a pre-alpha state, and what that means is it’s a blob of a game hanging together with duct tape and wishful thinking, ready to fall over at a moment’s notice but also showing a promising setup that would be nice to see grow into the thing it could be.
The basic idea of Trashed is that you’re the new guy at the waste station, which is little more than an industrial concrete building on a section of planet used as a dumping ground. Every few hours a ship shows up and drops more garbage onto the pile, and with the former manager having been fired, it’s now you’re problem to deal with. As one person there’s far too much to handle so that’s where the joys of automation come in.
The computer terminal in the office is a blueprint dispenser, selling plans for the necessary structures to run the place. The handful of credits in the bank just about covers a few cheap basics, such as the solar panel, battery, wiring, the ever-useful conveyor belt and incinerator plans. It’s not enough, by any stretch of the imagination, but it’s a start. Trashed’s lack of tutorial meant I had to figure out how it all worked, and eventually got completely overwhelmed by an endless torrent of garbage in my first attempt, but round two went a lot better and showed a hint what the game could eventually turn into.
First up, it’s important to have enough power. At the moment money is only good for buying blueprints and the inventory system isn’t ready, so there’s no cost for building anything yet. I ended up covering almost the entire back wall of Dumping Ground A (there’s two areas on either side of the main base) with incinerators and tossing down a load of conveyor belts to feed them. A good dozen solar panels and several batteries went into an open area away from the dump, and wires connected everything so that the conveyor belts would actually run when they sensed trash on the line. Home base comes with a truck complete with plow, so driving it through the trash pile eventually shoved enough junk into the incinerator to afford new toys. At only a single credit per incinerated piece of trash it seems like it could take a while, but there’s enough dropping from the garbage-supply ship that it only takes a couple of in-game days for the next set of upgrades.
Trash comes in two categories at the moment, large and small. The incinerator takes small trash, and one of the first upgrades to buy is the grinder to trim big trash down to size. Small trash will someday yield resources, although not from the incinerator because all that’s good for is burning. The recycler, on the other hand, will eventually extract basic materials like rubber, cement, metal, plastic, glass, etc, all of which will be necessary to build the devices required to manage the pile. Do a good job handling the planet and eventually it may actually change from a garbage-strewn wasteland back into a decent place again.
In the meantime it’s not all factory work, because the native wildlife isn’t particularly thrilled to be sharing its space. Electro-critters possess and animate garbage to attack as a junk-golem, while giant red crabs wander about promising to be threatening someday, once the game has had an update or three. A cave in the back area has a table filled with guns, overseen by someone who will probably eventually be a black market dealer charging for their wares, but is currently just giving them away. Nothing is much of a threat right now, honestly, which is for the best seeing as aiming is barely functional, so confronting or avoiding the enemies is down to whether they’re in the way or not.
The big problem with Trashed is that, in its current state, so much of it is promise and little is delivery. “It’s going to” and “this will be” are nice, and the pre-alpha version is an excellent proof-of-concept, but there’s a huge amount of work ahead to turn Trashed into the thing it could be. Garbage gets everywhere, not just in the junk pile, and the plow on the truck is nowhere near precise enough to get the job done. Will there be robo-helpers to pick up and shepherd stray trash where it needs to go? Large trash doesn’t burn but it does get caught on conveyor belts, blocking the entrance to the incinerator, and it’s too heavy for the mega-mulletted protagonist to lug out of the way. Bashing into it with the plow is about the only way to clear it, but it’s not a reliable method. Conveyor belts are efficient but don’t cover the entire square they’re on, causing trash to get trapped between the lanes. Structures can only be built one at a time, making laying down wiring and conveyor belts a chore. I’m honestly not sure how much energy a solar panel generates or a grinder uses, and see no way to find out. There’s a huge amount to be done to knock Trashed into shape, and that’s before taking into account that it’s going to need a serious asset upgrade to look decent.
But that’s the thing about any game in a pre-alpha state – it’s not there yet. The game simply isn’t ready for prime-time and if you know that going in it’s OK. The current plans for Trashed involve building everything, expanding what’s there and adding new content in every possible place it can go, and in general turning a seed of an idea into a fully functioning game. The basic idea is a solid one, in that you’ve got a factory planning, run & gun action, and a goal of restoring a series of planets back to their natural beauty, making for an incredibly appealing package. There’s a long road ahead to get Trashed where it needs to be, but if it can complete its journey then there’s a lot to look forward to here.
