Stranded: Alien Dawn’s new DLC, Robots And Guardians, comes in two parts: the paid DLC with a new scenario, unique character, and enemies, and a free update for the base game. In the new scenario, you must help a robot named Hope regain sentience. Starting off as little more than a simple robot capable of carrying bits and pieces and using that robot brain for research, by the end of my scenario, she was walking around in a mechanized suit blasting robots to pieces.
We didn’t make it there on the first attempt, or the second. Raising Hope is difficult. She requires gel or silicone to keep running, and I wasn’t sure how to get either of those things without getting lucky with some scavenging from nearby crashed spaceships. On my third attempt, however, we got some early fuel from our crashed ship, and I was able to research what I needed to keep my new robot survivor alive.
But there are others out there in the universe that want Hope dead. Raiding parties of robots drop from space and attack your base fairly early in the scenario - these new enemies are equipped with synthetic crossbows and spears to begin with, but as you progress, they become more and more difficult to deal with. As a reward for dealing with them, you’ll get your hands on AI cores and various electronics, which will come in handy as you get stuck into the next part of the DLC: automated robots for managing your settlement.
When Stranded Dawn first released, a friend explained it to me as a 3DRimworld- that’s pretty accurate, although this new DLC pushes the game in a slightly different direction. Rather than have your entire population build a spaceship to escape, or be picked up by a passing friendly space cruiser, in Stranded Dawn you basically become more and more automated until your entire base is run by robots and defended by robots, while your citizens are picked up one by one. As it worked out in my scenario, the new robots meant that harvesting, transporting, and pretty much anything else the humans could do, was all automated. One by one my citizens were rescued, just leaving Hope alone, in a mech suit, armored to the absolute robotic teeth with powerful weapons, cleaving her way through waves of robots…just waiting for that ship to arrive, or for her to get that last little bit of sentience to win the scenario.
While all of this was super fun, I was a bit annoyed that I couldn’t then use Hope in an ordinary scenario, or get any of the robot enemies in a normal run either. Hope is also a pain to manage, with or without the fuel she needs to survive. She gets an almost constant “Not Enough Tasks” debuff which is frustrating to micromanage, requiring you to control her specifically. The scenario also takes a long time to complete: even with everything running automatically in my base, Hope took hours to reach full sentience. I imagine this is the sort of thing that will be fixed in a future patch.
Overall, the Robot and Guardians DLC is a small but impactful DLC scenario that is fun to play with many hours of new content and a unique win condition. But even if you don’t want to splash the cash on the new DLC, the free update - with the introduction of trading in every scenario and new automated robots, as well as a lot of quality of life fixes - is reason enough to revisit Stranded: Alien Dawn if you’ve been distracted by 2023’s unbelievable wealth of games.
