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My description of Rusty's Retirement has an unfortunate tendency to strike fear into the hearts of the people who I think would love this game most. "It's like an idle Stardew Valley!", I tell them. "It sits at the bottom of your screen and plays itself." What I didn't realize when I was espousing the virtues of this charming life sim, however, is just how quickly I'd try to hyper-optimize my cozy farm into an arable dystopia swarmed by mecha-farmers - or just how quickly the game would turn against me.
Rusty starts from humble beginnings. Your growing options are limited to cheap wheat, radishes, or carrots. A shed, a pond, and a patch of dirt is all this unlikely hero has to his name. Except, that is, for the bioconverter behind that shed - selling crops generates cash, but a collection of three different veggies can be turned into biofuel, which in turn is used to power and upgrade the little robots you can build that help harvest and water crops, speeding up Rusty's particularly sedentary agricultural pace.
I think they're supposed to be cute little additions that allow you to steepen the game's extremely gentle curve, but I've seen Stardew Valley's most hardcore players hyper-optimizing their farms, and it wasn't that long ago that Palworld's creatures were automating the grind of an entire survival game. These robots were soon to be the foot soldiers in my new agricultural empire, and Rusty to become little more than a puppet emperor.
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Things start slow, obviously, but that's ok, because I already had my plan in place. Rusty would get me started with my first few harvests, and I'd use the money from that to build a house for Haiku, a bug-shaped friend who could help out with planting and watering crops, and building. His house takes up valuable growing space, but he earns his keep, and helps speed up the rate at which money starts coming in. With those profits, I bought my first couple of robots - one to water crops, and another to harvest them.
The drip of profits became a trickle, and I buy another of each robot, but for now I ignore the third option. A Biofuel bot can use that aforementioned converter, but at the moment all I need is funds - later, Biofuel will become more of a limiting factor, but right now I'm saving up for something else. Echo is another recruitable friend, who uses his workshop to upgrade the robots. Over the next few hours, I gather what I need to start boosting the speed and carrying capacity of my fleet, which has already grown to eight bots.
The problem is, with each upgrade, the cost of boosting the rest of my cadre of bots increases. I need more cash - I settle on the eggplant as the most efficient cash crop at my disposal, but I need space to grow it, so I set Haiku to work on clearing out a new area, allowing me to build more fields, more robot stations, and another biofuel converter.
Harvest screen
The trickle of incoming cash is starting to become a stream, and I'm starting to lose track of Rusty beneath his array of companions. Echo's upgrade costs are starting to spiral, so I finally bite the bullet and purchase one of those Biofuel bots, expanding the fields even further towards the edge of the farm. I refuse to allow a single wasted pixel of space, so I even throw a plant pot into a gap between bot rechargers to maximize output. I unlock increasingly lucrative crops, replacing my eggplants with red chillies to maintain the flow of cash I need for even more expansion, watching as my water bots irrigate three full fields in less time than it takes to write this sentence.
But as my farm expands, so too does the cost of everything. I leave the farm idling for hours just to build up some cash reserves, but even the cost of a single new field is more than 10% of the money I've got on hand. Not that I can fit any more growing space in anyway - another expansion will cost triple what I paid Haiku to clear out the first new areas. I keep unlocking new crops, but the seeds are so expensive. A single artichoke sets me back more than three times what a chili cost, and quadruple the price of an eggplant. It'll earn me more in the long-term, but it also takes twice as long to grow. Worst of all, my upgrade costs are spiraling - with 21 robots now scurrying back and forth across the farm, I'm pouring money into Echo's pockets. Even bumping one squad of six bots up a level threatens to burn through the entirety of my cash reserves. I feel paralyzed, unable to make even the simplest decisions about what crop to plant next.
I can't help but feel this was Rusty's plan all along. Some might say that I shouldn't have attempted to brute-force a cozy, idle game inside two days, and that Rusty's Retirement is actually perfectly balanced to ensure that the intended experience can't be hyper-mechanized in direct contravention of the intended experience. But I know what I've seen - far more often than I'd like, I glance at my farm, only to spot Rusty sitting quietly on the bench outside Haiku's house, staring up at me with a smug look on his face. He knew from the start that he'd already beaten me, and that nothing - not even an army of robots or a hyper-efficient growth chart - could depose him from his cozy throne.
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