YMMV / My Time at Sandrock

• Alternate Character Interpretation: The Anti-Nia section of the fandom likes to take Nia as an overly clingy, toxic best friend who followed the Builder to Sandrock, much to the Builder's dismay as they took the contract to escape Nia.
• Angst? What Angst?: Wei is shockingly well-adjusted and pleasant despite having just gone through the trauma of his twin brother Yan leaving him for dead in the desert and crawling his way back to civilization through the heat, the lack of water, and the dangerous monsters. He's perfectly pleasant to the townsfolk, is very reasonable when he's initially mistaken for Yan having escaped and removed his mustache, and takes to his new job excellently while providing plenty of emotional support and positive professionalism to his new subordinates, despite him being an emergency replacement during a tumultuous period.
• Anvilicious:
  • The game is not even remotely subtle about its Green Aesop and how the greedy recklessness of people flooding into Sandrock for its valuable Ruins caused it to turn from prosperous mining town into a Dying Town barely hanging on to surviving another week.
  • Justice has one sidequest where he teaches you how to wield a gun. He gives a very serious lesson on how to fire it and on gun safety like trigger discipline and how you should never, ever, point it at something you don't intend to shoot. The message is pretty clear: guns are NOT toys.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Nia. Is she a fun addition to the game, a best friend that talks about your Builder's past in their letters and helps flesh them out more than just a blank-slate avatar, and a great addition to the town when she permanently moves to Sandrock? Or is she the developer's pet, a "best friend" shoved and forced into the player's game and damages their immersion and roleplaying by giving their character a definite history without the player's agency or input, and who acts overly familiar and intimate with the Builder without having any of the organic interactions and time in-game like the other characters that will endear them to the player controlling them?
  • Arvio. An endearing, overly idealistic, but overall goodhearted man who's a little too eager to jump into his ill-thought-out plans? Or an annoying, immature, and, if you romance him, too clingy man-child who messes up more times than he's ever worth, forcing his sister to keep cleaning up after him well into adulthood?
  • Catori. Does she just have a lot of bad luck with her business ventures, a good-faith partner who wants you to mutually succeed and has a bad habit of overpromising the success rates of her ventures? Or is she a terrible businesswoman who keeps preying on and manipulating the Builder into helping her out with free labor and materials, because unlike Heidi and City Hall, she can get away with not paying the Builder in gols but in Golden Goose tokens that she produces herself? Not to mention her situation with her son, who she left in the care of her grandmother so he can study in the opportunity-rich Atara, after her messy divorce. Before the "New Year, Better Me" update, some players were vocally upset that after all the effort of building Catori World, none of its rides were actually usable yet.
• Fandom-Specific Plot:
  • Related to Nia being a Base-Breaking Character above, some players like to write stories or backgrounds to their character involving them having taken the Sandrock contract specifically to get away from Nia, and being none too pleased when moves into Sandrock and barges into their new life, too.
  • During the Duvos Occupation, some players have taken delight in wondering what would happen if the Builder was tempted to the dark side by Duvos' ridiculously ludicrous war-time contracts, or could be convinced to betray the Free Cities Alliance by Pen (romance may or may not be included).
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Any hostile monster in Sandrock's outskirts is a real pest if you're just aiming to collect and gather materials. They're usually not difficult to deal with as long as you're properly equipped, but they'll make you waste your already limited, and difficult to recover, Stamina.
  • The laser turrets in the spacecraft ruins dungeon, which are a constant annoyance. They chip away at your health and don't even provide XP when destroyed.
• He Really Can Act:
  • Miguel's VA Bradley Gareth is especially notable for his strong performance, especially in later quests.
  • Mike Ciporkin voices Yan and Logan. Quite a few people were shocked when learning of this given how different they sound from each other. He also voices, Wei, Yan's twin brother, who has the a similar voice tone of Yan, but keeps it different enough that you can tell the two of them apart just by hearing it.
• Obvious Beta: While most game breakers have been squashed, the number of minor bugs is staggering, a result of the sheer amount of content and the priority of the developers to continue releasing free updates with even more content rather than fix what already exists. They tend to accumulate over time, so after you play a year a simple walk from your workshop will have you pass your glitchy fence that clips through itself, a dozen items levitating ten feet in the air, and broken mission markers that are permanently stuck to your minimap and impossible to remove.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Fishing has issues due to the first sandtrap not being able to catch a lot of fish at a time and the game doesn't let you know until you've thrown the sandtrap. This usually results in you wasting Stamina, time and bait only to find out you can't even catch said fish.
• That One Achievement: "Strong Arms" which is earned by defeating Pen in a spar. Pen is by far the toughest and strongest townsfolk to fight. His starting level is 30, he hits like a freight train full of bricks and his special attack, the "Space Punch" can be a One-Hit Kill until you get better equipment. You must be either very good at spars or you'll have to wait until much later to beat him.
• That One Sidequest: Commissions of items that require a lot of Rubber Rings and Rubber Tubes. Rubber is a material that you can only get from Rubber Scraps, which takes a fairly high amount of Stamina to scavenge, and then throwing it inside a Recycler to process (then subjecting yourself to random drops). Another issue is that Rubber is a material that you cannot buy from any store.
  • This is generally mitigated once you have access to the bus frame in the scrapyard: the bus frame takes about 75 points of stamina to fully scavenge, but provides plenty of salvage in the form of iron, mechanical, copper and rubber. It's possible to build up massive stocks of rubber quickly as a results.
  • Any project that requires chromium ore. Chromium ore is only available in the last three levels of second abandoned ruin, and everything high-end needs either chromium steel, chromium titanium alloy, or magnesium-chromium bricks. You will never have enough chromium ore for all your needs, and the production time for chromium products is horrendously long, particularly when it's multi-stage (chromium bearings, for example, require that you get a chromium steel bar, which takes about an hour and a half, and throw it in your grinder, which takes another two hours, and you'll need at least two bearings for any project).