I'm glad they're seeing success, what with Palworld stealing all the media attention. Enshrouded has one feature I detest, and another I love.
I detest that your effect on the world is ephemeral. One of the joys of survival games is your effect on the world, the paths you carve into the world, the havok you wreak. Having my mining, my pathmaking, even my looting reset as soon as I log out is frustrating. It feels like an unnecessary concession to multiplayer, some change they made because they had trouble implementing it technically not because they wanted it to reset. I have hope that they'll change their mind at some point and implement world permanence.
The part I love is how construction works, both personally and for the map designers. They have small (0.25m) voxels that you paint with in a variety of materials. It's honestly a lot like building in Minecraft, but with tinier blocks. They make it easy to build houses by making 'paintbrushes' shaped like walls, ceilings, stairs, etc, but you don't really need to pay attention to that if you feel creative. You can use a small part like a paintbrush, and 'spray' your shape into the world.
And the materials don't just change the texture of the blocks, they change their shape. This is the genius part... they blend the shapes together just like terrain artists have blended ground textures for years. Different materials have different shapes and different blending rules, so 'log' blocks have rough uneven edges with sticks poking out while 'plank' blocks are more even (but still interesting). No block is a boring cube, they all have ways they alter the outline of the shape to create wonderful variation.
Finally, the genius move is that the world builders use this unfettered freedom of shape to create interesting, unique geometry anywhere they like. They're world is decayed and run-down, and it's so easy for them to sell that because they build their world with voxels then they rip chunks out all over to simulate the damage of time. As a player, this means I'm not seeing distressed_bridge_03 over and over; they re-use architecture pretty frequently, but they don't re-use the alterations to it (that I've seen), so each location is unique without that copy-paste feel that many games have.
I spent way more words on the good part, but I want to stress... I
really hate that my effect on the world is transient. But others have already spoken about that, and nobody talked about how building/voxels work in the game, so I spent my wordcount there.
Ancient