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Stranded: Alien Dawn on Steam - User reviews, Price & Information
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Brave a new world in Stranded: Alien Dawn, a planet survival sim placing the fate of a small marooned group in your hands. Forge your story through compelling and immersive strategic gameplay as you make vital decisions to protect your survivors.
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a survival, base-building and simulation game
developed by Haemimont Games
and published by Paradox Interactive.
Released on April 25th 2023 is available only on Windows
in 10 languages: English, French, German, Spanish - Spain, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese - Brazil, Russian and Simplified Chinese.
It has received 10,014 reviews of which 8,504 were positive and 1,510 were negative resulting in a rating of 8.3 out of 10. 😎
The game is currently priced at 34.99€ on Steam, but you can find it for 17.20€ on Gamivo.
The Steam community has classified Stranded: Alien Dawn into these genres:
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System requirements
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Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 10 64bit
- Processor: Intel i7-6700 or AMD FX 8370
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Radeon RX 480 or GeForce GTX 1050 Ti
- DirectX: Version 12
- Storage: 15 GB available space
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User reviews & Ratings
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This is another game I'm quite torn on recommending. It has some good, enjoyable elements. It also has a bunch of half-baked or broken mechanics which almost entirely trash the enjoyability of the game. I only played the crash landing scenario, which seems like the default, OG experience. I really like the visuals and the world building - it's an attractive bit of alien landscape with some great wildlife. I like the concept of studying the bits and bobs around where you land to unlock technology to exploit what is available. The potential survivors are not just randomly selected bunches of stats, skills, traits, but are a curated group with some thought put into them by the developer, with nice touches like detailed portrait art etc, which I found did make me feel more and care more about these characters as individuals than say, the dupes in Oxygen Not Included. You can only really have a fairly small roster of survivors anyway which fits well into the atmosphere of the scenario. Where things fell down for me was in the mechanics. Coming from Rimworld and, particularly, Oxygen Not Included, which I loved, the mechanics seem recognisable, but are all missing crucial functionality, if not just being outright buggy. It's simply not possible to get the level of control to make your camp run smoothly with the tools as provided, and that only levaes fiddly micromanagement to try to bend the systems into kinda doing what you want them to do. It's not challenging in a good way, but in a continually frustrating way. Some examples: * There is no explicit 'eating time' activity in the daily schedule to control when the survivors go for their meals - they just go whenever they are hungry (kind of - they'll also inexplicably at times stick with an activity way past being ravenously hungry), and they'll eat a lot and often unfortunately. If you're not paying attention they'll get up, head off to scavenge on something a ways from camp, spend hours walking there and then decide they're hungry and walk back again without achieving anything because they didn't eat breakfast before they set off. Just annoying, and micromanagement is required to head this kind of thing off if you want to have stuff done any distance form camp. They did put in a survival kit tool you can equip your survivors with to, in theory, eat and sleep independently while they're out and about, but it is so frustrating to use. It takes emergency rations only, and that's fine, except I set all my survivors to not automatically eat emergency rations (they're for emergencies duh!), and so I'd have to explicitly change the eating restrictions if I wanted my travelling survivor to not starve themselves, and then remember to change it back when they got back to camp or they'd happily start eating through the stock of emergency rations that I didn't want to spend time making more of if they had other things to eat, which they did. Micromanagement. Annoying. Just making a priority for the different food types would have made things so much better rather than a yes/no permission system. * activities have only the crudest/simplest priority system with an activity table for each survivor, and a production priority order on each device. Within the categories they provide there is no prioritization so you can't finesse which sub-activities (and where) you want to prioritize. So, for example, crafting at a worktable can be used to produce all sorts of things, from weapons to healing consumables to essential components. You can get survivors to prioritize crafting in general, but not adjust priorities of what to produce beyond the production order on the tables. It just doesn't work for some really common, not unreasonable, scenarios. I want crafting focused survivors to prioritize making CPU cores to a certain stock limit so I can build defense turrets when I need to. I also want survivors who don't have anything else to do to turn poop into fuel. But since both are classified as 'crafting' they will both be prioritized the same - the survivor will make CPU cores until there are enough, and then see a poop-to-fuel order and do that indefinitely without checking if there are animals to feed or scavenging to be done. It's just basic, annoying, unnecessary, broken mechanics that could and should have been fixed by some early feedback on how their implementation was working or not. * speaking of feeding animals, the activity to fill feeding troughs is just buggy in my opinion. If you set a trough to have a particular food the survivors will attempt to deliver it (drones won't do this even though it is clearly just a delivery job), but once the survivor picks up the stack of food to exactly fill the slot in the food trough they'll set out on the journey to the trough to deliver it. In the meanwhile if any animals take a small nibble from the trough while the survivor is on the way then what happens is that the survivor gets to the trough, puts their load in and then apparently goes "oh no I was supposed to fill this, but there are only 97 out of 100 bits of hay in this trough now, I must go right now to get those 3 bits of hay or else my task is not complete and I can't even consider doing anything else", and so does another trip back and forth to deliver 3 pieces of hay, and if the animal has nibbled some more, the survivor will insist on making another trip for 2 more pieces of hay. It is absolutely infuriating to watch as the most precious resource you have is the time that your survivors are doing something productive. There are many ways to fix this - eg set a simple threshold on the feed troughs so if it's 75% full the survivors will consider their job done - the issue comes down to the fact that I just don't understand how basic testing and/or getting feedback wouldn't have made clear there was a problem with keeping animals fed. The only workaround I could find was, again, annoying unnecessary micromanagement. Anyway, all this is to say there were quite a few occasions where I found the mechanics needlessly frustrating, and this unfortunately made me very frustrated with what would otherwise be a decent game. To an extent what saved this review was that when I worked out what the ending for the crash-landing scenario was going to be and worked through that I found the resolution actually fairly satisfying.
I keep coming back to Stranded: Alien Dawn the same way I used to with Banished. There is something about games with a simple core structure that let you explore different scenarios in your own way. I have played through each scenario to completion and still want more, which makes it genuinely disappointing to hear the game has been abandoned. To the developers, please come back. This game has so much potential in the survival and city building space. It could easily earn a place among the greats. The music is also fantastic. What I love most is the flexibility. You can build exactly how you want in a top down colony style world, and the progression feels slow in the best way, earned rather than given. Small mistakes actually matter and can cost lives, which raises the stakes in a meaningful way. Balancing survival, happiness, and defense while building a functioning community is where the game really shines. I highly recommend this game to anyone who enjoys challenging progression paired with creative freedom. One tip, choose your team wisely and pay attention to who is vegetarian.
I enjoyed my time playing Stranded: Alien Dawn. It gets labeled as '3D Rimworld', and the comparison is made for a reason - the UI and gameplay is too close to be a coincidence. There are subtle differences between the games that lean into different strengths. Rimworld is more geared towards generating stories with your colony in a more freeform manner. Stranded can have some of that too, but it's not the primary focus - Stranded is more focused on completing scenario goals while defending your colony. Some of the differences/changes in question: - Instead of having raiding parties occasionally attack your colony like in Rimworld, in Stranded you will have groups of insects of different species ramp up to attack your colony (or robots in the DLC). It plays out more like a tower defense, and can encourage some fun defense design decisions. I like this change, although it provides for less potential story narrative than Rimworld. - Since you crash land on an alien planet, a lot of flora and fauna need to be observed and researched to figure out what things are and how they can be used. I also really like this change (and makes it feel like more of a realistic crash landing experience), although it does nothing for replayability once you've played through a couple different environments. - Caravans and world travel is replaced with a much simpler system of having a hot air balloon where you send off a team member on individual excursions. This is another change where it makes things easier and simpler, but removes that potential for organic storytelling. - A lot of the potential weird stuff (war crimes, drug addiction, cannibalism) is gone, which makes things easier and simpler in Stranded, but again removes some of that storytelling potential. - The building system is more complex, however it's disappointing that it gives you the ability to build multiple floors and have sprawling malls and complexes, but then makes it impossible to have interior stairs (for whatever reason, you cannot place a ceiling above stairs, which means no roofs). I feel like there was some incurable interior stairs bug where the developers gave up and gave every colonist a pocket ladder they whip out to climb up a story whenever they want. - The standard walk and carry speed in this game is much slower compared to Rimworld. This means that maximizing the efficiency of your colonists is much more at the forefront in Stranded. It also means that you need your crafting stations very close to the material stockpiles they use, and that doing anything far away from camp is almost never worth it (observing a critical plant you need for a specific food type, cloth, leather, etc. is the only exception). You can get delivery drones later to greatly relax the logistics needs, but it is frustrating that a game so critically reliant on production chains does not give you the tools to adequately manage multiple chains using a single resource. For instance, if you want to set up a huge grain farm in a far patch of fertile soil, and produce both moonshine on site and food in the main camp from the grain - you will inevitably end up with people carrying grain from far away to deliver to the cooking station for each individual meal and waste a ton of time, or take grain from the kitchen to walk far away to put into a distiller. You can assign different work areas, but now you're forced to designate workers to different areas, and then lose out on those colonists covering other chores in other work areas, or constantly reassigning them. Tools to designate priority and quantity of storage of certain materials (you get a "fill this storage unit first", but that's it), lock specific storage units that crafting stations can use, etc. would go a long way here. So those are the big notes. From the above it sounds like I didn't enjoy playing the game, but I really did enjoy it! I got about 90 hours out of it to play through each of the scenarios, and there were definitely some fun times and organic storytelling that occurred (my favorite was a bug raid interrupting a wedding, then after killing all the bugs, the colonists went right back to the wedding with guts all over their clothes, and then right after getting married, a notification of "Groom lectured bride on critical thinking" appeared above their heads). But after playing through each scenario, there wasn't really a whole of replayability to come back to. Still worth playing through, and for much cheaper than Rimworld. TL,DR - A fun 3D take on Rimworld, that lacks the replayability, but makes up for it with more streamlined and scenario focused gameplay, and a much cheaper price tag.
I've sunk a great deal of time into this game, and I'll say that I very much enjoy it. I legitimately don't get tired of building up new colonies, cranking up the difficulty, and seeing how I can weather various raids. Many lob the critique of it being "3D RimWorld," and I think that is warranted. The game has much of the same UI as RimWorld, similar concepts, and similar mechanics, including periodic raids that scale in power. I do enjoy the added depth of the 3D space, and being able to build tall as you unlock additional technologies is a nice touch. However, there are parts of this game that strike me as half-baked, and I've listed some of them below: -There are remarkably few options for weapons and clothing, with late-game weapons being one that shoots far, one that shoots close, and one that stuns. The late game clothing could do with a bit more variety, perhaps with set bonuses that enhance certain abilities beyond just cold resistance and defense. -The characters move with agonizing slowness. Playing the game in real-time is a nightmare, as it takes between five and ten seconds for characters to do actions as simple as get out of bed or disengage from a task. Their movement speed is also horrendous, and they often end up slowly jogging to a distance objective, taking one whack at it, then running back to eat a meal. I recognize that the developers implemented the "fast feet" modifier that you can optionally implement, but doing something as simple as allowing settlers to stock meals in their inventory or just making them move faster at baseline would be big improvement. -The late game drags for all but the Robots and Guardians DLC. You will find yourself spending hours upon hours just waiting for an in-game event to pop, with little variation in interstitial events through the rather thin exploration mechanic. -Crafting of mid- and high-tier components, like electronics and AI cores, takes forever. There is one research that allows you to use 3D printers to manufacture some mid-tier components via 3D printers, and I think that should be standard for all playthroughs. -Certain quality of life improvements, like automating colonist actions during raids (such as setting battlestations that all colonists report to in the event of an attack) would make it less of a chore to fight back enemies and make it a legitimate test of your defenses. As it stands, it feels like herding cats to get everybody back to base without getting rocked by your colonists' own stupid pathing. -More variation in player skills. Some of the modded characters do a nice job of this, with significant and noted advantages for certain skillsets among chosen colonists. If somebody is going to be a designated crafter, make them crank through crafting projects in half the time of others with a corresponding debuff to balance it out. -Certain bugs still need fixing. As much as I love the ability to build vertically, this game is just not built to optimize that mechanic. You can't make a three-level stairwell without the game bugging out on you and making certain roof or wall segments impossible to build. The elevator would benefit from a setting where you can manually cap how many floors it goes up, as opposed to continuing upward infinitely (unless you move it over a tile, construct the ceiling and roof on the top floor, and then move it back). For all of my noted problems, this game has great bones. I know Paradox recently purchased this game, and I sincerely hope they give it some love. Even straightforward (albeit significant) changes like quest variety and progression pacing would go a long way.
Elevator Pitch: 3D Rimworld, but with less overall development time, so it's both less crazy and more approachable. Longer version, you can definitely see the same ancestry/inspiration as Rimworld. But whereas Rimworld's lore makes it so everything and everyone you see is in some form derived from Humanity and Earth, S:AD's planet is actually Alien. That means you need to actually Observe flora and fauna to know what to do with them, and the attack waves are usually hostile insects of various size. There is no human attackers, and you certainly won't be gaslighting them in a prison to join your colony. Your humans are going to be the ones you start your scenario with, with maybe 1 or 2 random-event granted random-picks. As such, all the humans in this game are actually named and have distinct likes and dislikes. If you like Jack the military commander, you can bring him with you on future runs. As of this review (with Robots and Guardians being the only DLC), there are 4 scenarios: Crash Landing, where you need to tech up and eventually get your people off planet. Trade Outpost, where a small group of people want to grow stuff, make money, and eventually buy the rights to the whole planet. Military Outpost, where you need to tech up, build, and defend a giant communications relay that will generate constant alien attacks. And finally, the Guardians scenario of the DLC, where some humans steal a developing robot intelligence and you need to protect it from robot attackers while it grows in intelligence until it maxes out. side note, Guardians is the only scenario with robot enemies, so it's a nice combat change to hordes of bugs. There's 3 biomes, each with their own challenges and benefits. Sobrius is a high altitude mountain biome, where grasslands are plenty, the seasons actually get cold and hot, plentiful friendly wildlife, and those darn Shrieker enemies (for reference, they are the scorpion looking things in the images, except the larger ones shoot their tail spikes). Desertum is a desert. Fairly dry, lots of cactus and weather resistant but slow growing plants, camel-equivalents, and plenty of sand you can use the terraforming plants to gradually convert to rich soil, if you want a longer term challenge. Saltu is the 3rd and final region, and it's a Jungle. No winter season to worry about, so plants grow great year round, and there's the coconut and meat-palm (no really, it's a growable meat substitute) trees. However, you have an increased risk of respiratory diseases for your people, the occasionally xeno-blight that will kill some of your crops occasionally, and the local nesting insects are the mantis-like Scissorhands, except their nests are made of far-more common silicon. At least Shrieker nests were made from carbon nanotubes, so when you wiped them out you had a decent payday. The research system of this game is pretty nice and simple, in my opinion. For reference, if you've played Haemimont's game Surviving Mars, the research tree is visually similar. As you discover resources, whether from natural sources or scavenged from ship wrecks that will occasionally spawn around the map, you'll unlock the ability to research that item, or things requiring it. For example, recover a Energy Cell, and you'll get to research the ability to make more of them as well as the ability to farm Energy Crystals which you need to make the Cells. Lastly, let's talk mods. The game's last patch was April 3rd, 2024. I'll get to that part in a moment. But as a result, the game has been very stable for the modding community, and there's some impressive projects. If you want to add elements of water consumption and gathering, there's a mod for that (henceforth abbreviated as TAMFT). Fishing or milking animals? TAMFT. Want custom OP humans that trivialize the game? So, so many mods. There's total overhaul mods, even a mod or two that attempt to make their own biomes. My personal favorite is the mods released by either the Haemimont account itself, or Haemimont devs themselves. When the mod tools first launched, they released a few sample mods of how to use the mod editor, and they are still up to this date. The Meat Plant mod is canon, fite me. If I've got your interest so far, give the game a try. It's well worth it, and since Paradox is now the publisher as opposed to Frontier Foundry, Haemimont might actually be able to continue development. This is the part where I give my guess on why exactly this game wasn't given enough/more dev time. This is entirely impressions I've gotten over time, and nothing directly from the devs, so take everything next with a grain of salt. When this game launched, Haemimont's publisher was Frontier Foundry , which was a subsidiary of Frontier Developments. As a customer, I didn't notice any particularly issues with S:AD's development or release or post-launch support. We got a DLC launch and even patches to that DLC, with the last patch being on April 3rd, 2024. But in June of 2023, Frontier Developments decided to shut down Frontier Foundry in order to focus on their own IPs, and thus I don't think Haemimont had the ability and/or funding to continue development further. The Haemimont devs still seemed to be doing their best to support the game. They still seemed to have access to bug-report tools, and their people were actually fairly active in the steam mod section, adding mods with new features, still talking to folks in mod comments. But that was essentially the limit of what they could do. And then we get to April 16th, 2025. Good News Everyone! Haemimont has gotten Paradox to become their publisher now, who they've worked with in the past. I dearly sincerely hope this means Paradox might let Haemimont put some more dev time into this game as either updates or DLC or something. Heck, if you still think of S:AD as 3D Rimworld, just look at how successful Rimworld's Oddyssey DLC has been, and consider how much S:AD could possibly grow. Now, to be fair, early today (literally, I got the email announcing it this mornign) Haemimont and Paradox announced a Remastered version of their other game Surviving Mars. Even as much as I love that game, we'll see how that goes. And the remaster will probably take time and attention from any potential S:AD development. But I still have hope that Paradox will help this game fly further than it has, to develop its own identity as more than just "3D Rimworld". After all, Paradox want sto make money, and they stepped in as publisher very late. a DLC would be great way to bring attention back to this game, make new sales. Paradox, glad to see you onboard. Haemimont, keep being awesome. Here's hoping this review becomes outdated in the future, cause we'll have more DLC that means I'll have to come back and update it.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Stranded: Alien Dawn is currently priced at 34.99€ on Steam.
No, Stranded: Alien Dawn is currently not on sale. You can purchase it for 34.99€ on Steam.
Yes, Stranded: Alien Dawn received 8,504 positive votes out of a total of 10,014 achieving a rating of 8.27.
😎
Stranded: Alien Dawn was developed by Haemimont Games and published by Paradox Interactive.
Yes, Stranded: Alien Dawn is playable and fully supported on Windows.
No, Stranded: Alien Dawn is not playable on MacOS.
No, Stranded: Alien Dawn is not playable on Linux.
Stranded: Alien Dawn is a single-player game.
Yes, there are 2 DLCs available for Stranded: Alien Dawn. Explore additional content available for Stranded: Alien Dawn on Steam.
Yes, Stranded: Alien Dawn is fully integrated with Steam Workshop. Visit Steam Workshop.
No, Stranded: Alien Dawn does not support Steam Remote Play.
Yes, Stranded: Alien Dawn is enabled for Steam Family Sharing. This means you can share the game with authorized users from your Steam Library, allowing them to play it on their own accounts. For more details on how the feature works, you can read the original Steam Family Sharing announcement or visit the Steam Family Sharing user guide and FAQ page.
You can find solutions or submit a support ticket by visiting the Steam Support page for Stranded: Alien Dawn.
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Additionally, we incorporate data from the SteamSpy API, which offers insights into game sales and player statistics. This helps us present a comprehensive view of each game's popularity and performance within the gaming community.
Last Updates| Steam data | 11 August 2026 04:06 UTC |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 16 August 2026 10:31 UTC |
| Steam price | 20 August 2026 18:36 UTC |
| Steam reviews | 18 August 2026 13:52 UTC |
If you'd like to dive deeper into the details about Stranded: Alien Dawn, we invite you to check out a few dedicated websites that offer extensive information and insights. These platforms provide valuable data, analysis, and user-generated reports to enhance your understanding of the game and its performance.
- SteamDB - A comprehensive database of everything on Steam about Stranded: Alien Dawn
- SteamCharts - Analysis of Stranded: Alien Dawn concurrent players on Steam
- ProtonDB - Crowdsourced reports on Linux and Steam Deck Stranded: Alien Dawn compatibility
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Features
Online players
797
Developer
Haemimont Games
Publisher
Paradox Interactive
Release
25 Apr 2023
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