The Last Starship

I played Prison Architect from the same studio before, so this game kept popping up in my notifications. Finally I bit the bullet and bought it. I must admit it was one of the best decisions I made.
Pros:
1- Very engaging gameplay
2- More than one way to play it; go wild and spend hours or days in creative mode to build the best ship ever, or just dive into the story. The choice is yours.
3- Regardless of which mode you play, you determine your play style. Either be a cargo boss and ship stuff all around, rescue people from dire situations, construct a factory of a ship, or jump onto the hostiles guns blazing. Alternatively, mix and match as you wish.
4- No two gameplays are alike. I restarted the game several times, and it evolved in a new direction based on my experience and knowledge each time.
5- You keep learning. There is always a better way to do something, so you need to keep planning for it, be it combat, manufacturing or shipment routes.
6- Industry tree is clear and satisfactory. You can figure out what you need for which material and where to find it in a few hours.
7- You can design your ships and publish them on Steam, or just subscribe to published ship designs to add variety to in-game ship types.
Cons:
1- Still in Alpha (Alpha 11 was recently release as of this writing), so lots of stuff is still incomplete, especially the stories.
2- Rotation mechanics of the equipment is primitive; I yearn for "flip" option in addition to "rotate" to align the outputs of my refineries and chem labs (pretty please?)
3- You can't go back to the previous sector, which is a big issue for me. Sometimes I jump to the next sector only to see that it contains little minerals and metreon, which was abundant in the previous system.
4- Contracts sometimes get assigned to systems that are not properly spawned. This seems to be somewhat fixed in Alpha 11 but the systems may still be off the sector map. However, this can be fixed by carefully editing the save file. Still a nuisance.
5- Habitation cannot be removed/reduced.
6- Editor needs a semi-transparency option so that I can see where I'm editing.
7- Science tree is underwhelming. In my opinion, there should be LOTS more to research and manufacture. Ability to discover/trade/steal industry recipes is a must.
8- My biggest pet peeve: you can't sell/fire crew! So if you hire a scientist and complete the rather short science tree, all he/she does is just hang around. Or if you decide to downsize and get rid of your guns, there's no simple way to fire your weapons officers. Same goes for crew if you decide to go for automation and suddenly have too much crew. This should be fixed.
9- Last but not least, a multiplayer mode can be very good. I'd be happy to exchange materials with a friend or fight the baddies as a team. Not sure how feasible this idea is, though.
All in all, a very original game that can keep you entertained if you like this type. Highly recommended, even though it's still in early access.
EDIT (after 630+ hours of total gameplay):
I'm impressed by the fact that the developer considers the feedback from the players!
As of Alpha 13, the game has been developed considerably so to be fair, I need to add the following:
1- Habitation can be edited to grow or shrink
2- Ship editor is much better now, so creating/editing your ship is much more enjoyable
3- Research tree has been improved and became a good investment to improve your ship. Capabilities include, but not limited to, faster smelters, faster drones, faster tracks, etc. See release notes for a full list.
4- Finally, crew can be "sold" (for 0 credits, so in effect you fire them, but good enough for me)
5- Storage crates (new item) is promising albeit a bit buggy (=crate contents cannot be used for contract/mission fulfillment but can be sold).
6- Deflectors is a very welcome addition to ship defenses and, if properly located, give you a real edge especially in close-quarters combat.
Other items in my Cons list still stand, but I believe that this list will shrink fast, given that the developers keep surprising us pleasantly. Kudos!

The game in it's current state reminds me of playing some of the alpha versions of rimworld. It's already fun, engrossing and a little bit addictive and you can see loads of directions for it to be fleshed out with more content. If you're wondering if it's for you. apparently they just remade the demo, so probably try that first.

I got the game day 1 because i loved their previous games, but although I could see there was stuff in here I would enjoy, I kept bouncing off the game after 10mins of playing. When alpha 11 launched a few months ago, which remade the intro sequence, I came back and was immediately hooked. If you're like me and tried it before then I recommend giving it another go, it has much better pacing of small objectives that ease you into what the game CAN BE, rather than the old tutorial which showed you how to do some unhelpful end-game content and then threw you off into space.

There are lots of individual parts of the game I enjoy, but a lot of the satisfaction is that they're all running simultaneously. I remember the early versions of their previous game prison architect struggling when it got to 30 prisoners, but in this game you can have multiple ships, each that you've fully designed from scratch, flying around doing different tasks in different places, each with crew walking about inside and some with production lines going on, and I haven't had any performance problems. I like the feeling of it all running at the same time, that as I'm in the middle of a space battle, using a ship that I designed to be small and fast, I'm dodging in all directions, while getting my huge ship to carefully angle it's gun battery at the targets, at the same time as my space station is refining a bunch of materials I just harvested and my mining ship is catching up with an asteroid to break it apart for water ice.

The game is good now, I imagine it might be great in the future if they're able to keep expanding on this foundation. There's 40-50 hours worth of stuff to enjoy already, not including if you just want to get creative and keep designing bigger and better ships after the main story missions. I haven't even tried the survival mode yet, although I don't think it's been the developers focus. If you only play early access games when they're basically finished but just need a bit of polish then this won't be for you, but otherwise give the new demo a go and see if you like it.

In its current unfinished state, it is already a lot of fun. I would suggest wishlisting it until release, because there is high risk of PA-burnout: Putting so much time in an Alpha, you're done with it by the time there is a full release (this happened to me with prison architect).

Jumping in on early access Alpha 11 so not a finished highly polished game yet but there is plenty to like already and I know it's going to be good coming from the same devs that made Prison Architect. The ship systems and mechanics are already nicely done but I'd like to see the ship crew get some more personalisation ala PA, perhaps having a named captain and some officers that go along with the general crew would add more crew personalisation so they feel more than just ship full of worker drones.

Very good game. I have a very long wishlist for new content and weapons and kinda just overall progression

Something to note. Precious metals price is super unbalanced. Make one mining run and get easy 3-6million dollars. Totally game breaking

the game is very very good it just a huge eceonomic rebalance and fresh content for those late game runs to be more fun

It's Space Haven meets Prison Architect, but with an emphasis on the ships not the characters. They seem to be driving this game toward ship layout and assembly line challenges. Currently combat is entirely between ships, but that's not a bad thing.

Tonnes of features added in early access. A fun game.