Lightyear Frontier is a chill farming sim with a mech twist

I wake up in the morning and immediately get into my mech; I never leave home without it. An unnecessarily cheery voice in my ear tells me that it’s a beautiful day and maybe I should water my crops. I attach a big hose to my mech’s arm and water my berries. Then, I walk out into the giant meadow where I’ve made my home, feed the local wildlife, and wander over to a huge, mysterious door. When I’m done, I go home, leave my mech, and crawl back into bed for a good night’s sleep. I think about the upgrades I need to collect resources for and the areas I have to explore, but I know I can take my time.

This is how most days go in Lightyear Frontier, developed by Frame Break and Amplifier Game Invest and just released in Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview. (It’s included with Game Pass on both console and PC.) It’s a sim in which you explore and take care of a pastoral, abandoned planet while using a mech. The idea of being inside a mech in a video game is already appealing regardless of genre, and by combining this with the ever-popular farming and crafting sim, Lightyear Frontier feels like a no-brainer for a lot of players.

But it appeals to another kind of player, too: the kind that just wants to vibe, man. A lot of farming and crafting games task you with some larger goal. Stardew Valley has you build a farm and use your charm to bring life back to a dying community, while others task you with building a successful business. Lightyear Frontier tasks you with bringing this planet (you name it at the start) back to life and unraveling mysteries involving some ancient ruins and PIP-3R, the upbeat and slightly annoying in-orbit probe that helps you along your journey. But to accomplish those tasks, you just need to chill out, farm, and explore. There’s not much else to it.

Despite the mech playing such a prominent part, Lightyear Frontier doesn’t have any combat to speak of, nor is there anything environmental that can cause damage. Your attachments are all nonviolent — except a spike you use to cut down trees and break rocks — and can’t be used on other organic beings. There are some “dangerous” things in the wild, like noxious spores that can create weeds, or goo that you have to wash away to save different areas, but stepping on them doesn’t harm your mech in any way. I spent the first couple of hours avoiding making contact, only to find it doesn’t matter at all.

Lightyear Frontier is a game that doesn’t require you to do much of anything, in fact. There’s a tutorial that walks you through some of the most important things you need to build, but by the time you’re done, you’ll have a few patches of land for growing crops, some basic machines to make materials, and a tent to sleep in. You’ll also get an Upgrade Depot that unlocks the skill tree for your mech, along with a landing pad for a merchant. It’s basically all you need to start roaming around the planet.

To find resources, you just need to explore more areas. The map is broken into multiple named locales that you need to clean up in different ways (pulling up weeds, getting rid of goo, etc.), and as you do that, you’ll find new flowers, seeds, crystals, and other resources that’ll automatically unlock crafting recipes in your menu. Because you already know the basics, it’s all easy to include in your day if you so choose.

Image: Frame Break/Amplifier Studios via Polygon

Even building out your settlement is simple. You’ll eventually upgrade your tent into a full-on home with a porch and a roof, but doing so doesn’t involve actually building the thing as you would in other games; you don’t even need all the required resources. You just need to select the recipe from the menu and mark where you want it to go. You can then feed materials into it, and it’ll eventually be completed when you get enough. Some buildings and machines help you craft more items or upgrade your mech, but you’ll unlock recipes like campfires or laundry lines that increase your Coziness level, which unlocks perks and bonuses. You read that right: This cozy game has a cozy mechanic.

There are some limitations to what you can do in Lightyear Frontier; you can’t just free roam forever. You start off with extremely small inventory space in your mech, so you’ll either have to go back to your homestead often to drop off supplies, or just discard them in the wild. (They’ll stay there over at least a couple days if you want to go back.) Even if you build storage chests on your farm, you still won’t get great storage; each chest holds about as much as your mech does. I ran out of storage very fast multiple times over my five hours with the game.

This is something the developers can fix as Lightyear Frontier improves during early access — but it also, maybe unintentionally, highlights the game’s whole philosophy. Sure, you’re on a far-off planet with nothing but your mech, some tools, and a probe, but the place isn’t too shabby. There aren’t a lot of threats, there are plenty of resources, and all you need to do is build a farm and clean some stuff up. Sounds relaxing.

Lightyear Frontier is out now in early access on Windows PC and Xbox Series X.