30+ hrs in, Alien Horizon is looking like what I wished Surviving Mars had been

It's a "free Alpha", it looks like a solo project that got started, stopped, started again. It's in colony-builder territory, it's on steam too.

The hope-and-expectation mechanic on top of well thought out logistics+growing-needs challenges makes this stand out for me, add in the terrain constraints and more stuff I haven't seen before, it's bringing something new to the territory.

Not an easy glide to glory, it's in deep-game-with-a-nice-side-hug-relation-with-sim territory. For difficulty it feels, I dunno, mistakes can be recovered with some cleverness and luck, straight-up failures of foresight, well, those can get painful. Hence my restarts as I stopped regarding it as a toy and started treating it as an engrossing challenge.

So, I'm posting because:

• while the UI feels rough and looks impenetrable especially at first impressions, I've come to appreciate that this is a dev adding tools to solve encountered gameplay problems, There's a few things I don't know why they're there yet, but I've acquired faith and confidence that I'll see why soon enough.

• I've just gotten to where I think I can reach self-sufficiency, food/water/air/maintenance/societal needs looking good enough that the population might start thinking about bringing chidren in to the mix, there's three(four?) full panels of milestones left

• The individual challenges and your solutions to them all interact with each other, when I've painted myself into a corner, even with new systems, hindsight has so far always told me "yeah, I could have seen that coming". And there aren't any redundant challenges so far, scaling up changes the flavor and new techs feel integrated.