Explore an alien archipelago, design, and automate a big base in Nova Lands

Nova Lands is an upcoming survival, exploration, and crafting game that looks like a mix of Satisfactory and Forager. It sticks you on an alien planet and has you explore ever-further along an archipelago while discovering new buildings, materials, and resources.

It's a promising-looking, lower-key take on the automation game. The automation is about telling little logistics bots how to maintain your production chains rather than setting up complex systems of belts, mergers, and inserters.

The description says that your island will be one of many, and that there are other denizens to meet—so you might get to scratch that Terraria or Core Keeper village-building itch in addition to your base-building one.

Nova Lands also has combat, allowing you to use your blaster to twin-stick shoot your way around the islands and defeat bosses. That sounds cool, but it sounds especially cool because the devs also promise that you can "go the full pacifist route and remain a kind guest to this planet—even when boss creatures are concerned." You will have to "offer valuables to make peace with them," if that's your strategy.

Developer Behemutt is a two-person shop based in Brazil. Their previous, and first, game was Mana Spark. You can check out an old demo of Nova Lands, from when the game was called Nova Islands, on itch.io. The full game will be published by HypeTrain Digital.

You can find Nova Lands on the Epic Games Store, Humble, and Steam. A prologue chapter called Nova Lands: Emilia's Mission will release on October 17th, and that already has both Epic Games Store and Steam pages.

Anyway! Nova Lands seems pretty cute. I will leave you with this critter, whatever it is, as an example.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.