Rusty's Retirement
Originally Posted 12/14/24
Brief Overview
- Price (Steam): $6.99
- Time Played at Time of Review: 95 Hours
- Overall Rating:10/10; This game is exactly what I wanted from it
Quick Overview
I want to mention up front I'm playing on version 1.0.17 which I believe was recently added. I had thought I had unlocked everything but then there was suddenly a lot more stuff. So I'll be talking about the game how it exists in version 1.0.17, so things might not be accurate depending on when you read this review.
With that out of the way, Rusty's Retirement is an idle game that sits at the bottom of your screen. It is also a farming simulator, so a lot of what you're watching happen is Rusty watering or harvesting crops, and then turning those crops into biofuel. As you progress through the game, you unlock more crops to plant, more robots, and a handful of other things.
In Depth Review
I was initially a bit skeptical if I'd like this type of game or not. Having something eat up the bottom part of my screen seemed like a big ask. But I had heard about Rusty's Retirement from this YouTube video by Shar, where they spoke about their own idle game they were making. I downloaded their idle game, realized I did like this genre, and so tried out Rusty's Retirement. The idea of a passive farming simulator game seemed really intersting to me.
And yeah I've really liked it! I put it on one of my secondary monitors (I have 3 total) and it's been working fine there. I've slowly built up my farm, unlocked more characters, and yeah it's been really nice. The play time for this game is kind of funny though given I sort of just leave it running whenever my computer is on. So even though at time of writing it says I've put 95 hours into it, most of that has been just letting the computer run while I'm at work or playing other games. It's nice to just look over, see how it's doing, and get back to whatever else I was working on.
I don't really have anything negative to say about this game. I think if this is the type of game you're looking for, then this does it perfectly. The only things I found myself getting somewhat frustrated at were how slow some things went. But, that's sort of the point of this type of game, so I think that just fits with the genre, and I should be a bit more patient.
Spreadsheet
So, as I was getting towards the end of unlocking everything, my priority was to try and maximize biofuel production. To do this, I wanted to understand which crops produced the most biofuel or cash per second as possible. There is a wiki for the game that will give you all of the crop stats, however I wanted to go a bit more in depth. Also the Wiki doesn't seem to include the new crops from the update at time of writing.
Each crop has the following stats:
- Seed Cost - the cost to plant each seed
- Growth Time - how long it takes the seed to grow
- Water Needs - how much water is needed for the seed to grow
- Regrow Cycle - how many times the seed will regrow before it needs to be planted again
- Biofuel - how much Biofuel the crop makes when converted to biofuel
- Crop Value - that's what the Wiki calls it, but in my spreadsheet I call it "Sale Price". How many Spare Parts (in game currency) you receive when a crop is picked
On the spreadsheet I made (which you can find here), I put a column for each of those stats above (changing "Crop Value" to "Sale Price"). I also added the following columns:
- Value - Sale Price times the Regrowth amount minus Cost to plant the crop (so, Value=(Sales Price x Regrowth)-Cost). This to me is the value of each crop - how much money am I making total from planting the crop once.
- Value per Second - Value divided by Growth Time
- Total Biofuel - this is similar to Value, but with biofuel. So Total Biofuel= (Biofuel x Regrowth).
- Biofuel per Second - Total Biofuel divided by Growth Time
- Water per Second - Water Needs divided by Growth Time
- Overall Value - I didn't really have a good name for this, so I just put in the equation as the title in the spreadsheet. Overall Value=(Value per Second + Biofuel per Second)/ Water per Second. The goal with this equation was to somehow sum up which crop was the best overall. I had it divided by Water Needs because, for my farm at least, the water bots seem to constantly be busy. So I wanted crops that did not require too much water, to hopefully give the water bots a bit of a break, and to sort of remove that bottleneck.
On the second page of the sheet, you can see a pivot table that helps me visually tell what has the highest Value Per Second, Biofuel per second, Water per Second, and highest Overall Value. You may also notice there are some listing that say (chip) after them. In the late game, you can unlock chips that modify your crops, and so any crop with (chip) next to it is the chip version, and not the base version of the crop. You'll also notice some notes I made on the side about top 3 best Overall Value crops. This is sort of always changing, so was the best I had at time of writing. But the reason I wanted top 3 was because in the game to make biofuel, you need to use 3 different crops.
One note I'll make about the chips - you can only have 1 per crop! I accidentally got a worse chip for a crop and didn't realize you couldn't have two, and it replaced the better chip. So beware!
Wrap Up
As I write this, I've pretty mucch unlocked everything in the game. I'm not sure how much I'll keep playing after this, but I think it was fun and nice to have!