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  • Broken Base
    • The concept of a modern update has been extensively suggested by some parts of the community for years, however there is another part of the community who dislike the ideas of a modern update. Some argue that a modern update would add more depth and civilisation progression to the game, while some argue that adding a modern update ruins the medieval aesthetic the game has already built up.note  
    • Slavery as a feature has been a major controversial topic of debate within the Worldbox community mostly due to it's historically sensitive nature. Some argue against it as it would seem insensitive and unnecessary, or alternatively, that it would be hard to simulate slavery when the units of a kingdom will just simply work for whatever kingdom they are apart of. Those who wish to have this feature argue in the fact that this game allows the civilizations ingame to commit genocide against other kingdoms, not even counting what the player can do themselves, and that it can add more depth to the aftermath of wars and make conquests more interesting.
  • Catharsis Factor: For obvious reasons, a lot of players love to torture Elves, which even resulted in Beta 0.50 making Forbidden Knowledge accessible by sacrificing 500 of the knife-ears.
  • Cliché Storm: Due to the nature of the game being a fantasy civilisation simulator, many fantasy cliches as units appear in this game.
  • Come for the Game, Stay for the Mods: The game on its own provides nigh-endless possibilities but even it has its limits, which is where the game's modding community comes in. Most videos about the game feature mods in some form or other. Though with the advent of Beta 0.50 that might be changing.
  • Genius Bonus: A lot of the default culture traits of beta 0.50's new Uplifted Animal and Beast Man races reflect the behaviors of their real world counterparts. For example, Hyenas and their Beast Man counterparts, Lulclaws, are Matriarchal just like real hyenas and the ursine Grranths have the Solitude seekers like how real bears are largely solitary.
  • Guide Dang It!: The game does not come with a tutorial beyond basic controls, the player is left to figure out every mechanic on their own or rely on a wiki (and with Beta 0.50 being as new as it is, not even that is completely reliable).
    • Evolving creatures into new sapient races (ie. Fox into Slypaw). First you have to figure out that Monoliths can even do it in the first place, rather than "merely" uplifting them. Then, you have to make sure that all chromosomes have at least one mutagenic gene (and even then it still might not work).
    • Speaking of genetics, the Gene Editor itself is somewhat esoteric. Exactly how synergizing works is extremely unclear and its easy to get distracted by the meaningless sequences in the gene descriptions.
  • Memetic Mutation: "Greg"
    • "sacrifice elves to the volcano" Explanation
    • "Mobile vs PC" Explanation
    • "Hail Maxim/Maximism" Explanation
  • Remade and Improved: the Beta 0.50 update has reworked various elements of the game that it could probably be classified as an overhaul in general, meta objects that have been improved include:
    • Civilisations: They now have dedicated culture systems which dictate how that kingdom operates, down to how new leaders are chosen allowing for technically 'democratic monarchies' and changing how they treat other sapient species. Civilisations can now have languages and religions. While language serves only for making books which can slightly increase stats in those who read them, religions as of now are basically glorified magic systems that each civilisation can have. Depending on the aspects of the religion (that can be edited), kingdom leaders can use this magic for their own benifit, especially in war. Languages can also determine the naming systems of those who have this language and they are freely editable to the player.
    • Animals: What went from boring set-pieces that didn't serve much other then to populate biomes to not make them as empty, now are much more dymanic in nature. While for the most part they will still remain as an afterthought to many players, they are now much more dymanic in nature and can evolve. Each creature has a sub-species that can be edited, which will then carry on to all living members of that sub-species instantly
    • Races: Potentially one of the largest changes overall. Anything that has an editable sub-species can be made sapient and build their own custom civilisations. This does not apply to zombies/mush or assimilators though.
    • Biomes: While the majority of the new biomes don't do much other then having a different aesthetic, 2 new biomes have special functions. The Singularity Swamp can teleport creatures in and out of other existing swamp biomes that aren't connected in the world, serving as effective gateways between areas in the world. The Paradox biome has a chance of inflicting the 'Quick Aging' trait to anything that steps inside of it.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: The Fireworks of an achievement being obtained.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • While most of the hate towards it falls under They Changed It, So It Sucks, beta 0.50 makes it so that you have to unlock most traits, genes and creatures in order to use them by finding them naturally generating. It gets especially frustrating with the Fire Elementals and Ghosts, since they have incredibly specific spawning conditionsnote  that you are unlikely to come across yourself. Oh, and good luck finding every Phenotype subspecies trait.
      • Slightly remedied due to the fact that you can use the workshop to easily get back what you need, as well as that, when the main update comes out to the dedicated base version of Worldbox, everything you unlocked previously should remain there
    • The world sizes can are often limiting, especially with mobile versions as the platform is limited to only the titanic worldsize (7x7 world). While obviously due to performance reasons, some users want a choice to finer tweak their world sizes to whatever size they want if they got more then enough hardware to run it smoothly, while mobile users may have more powerful phones that are capable of handling larger maps. Slightly justified for mobile, as not everyone will have a powerful phone and there is a requirement to have the game be stable to be up on the appstore, though some still wish the option was there
    • Compared to it's more lethal and virulent cousin, the Zombie virus can be very underwhelming. In developed worlds, even large amounts of zombies can be dealt with minimal losses from a moderately sized kingdom. It is hard to get a zombie apocalypse going, even when sprinkling the virus around densely populated kingdoms. This can be an issue when players want a dangerous, but not world-ending virus that can't easily be squashed by a kingdom.
  • That One Achievement: Several of the game's achievements have extremely frustrating requirements, often requiring extremely specific or rare circumstances. This is especially frustrating, because several traits (known as Legendary Traits) are locked behind achievements:
    • Not On My Watch requires you to find a creature with the "Being Suspicious" status and smite them. The problem is, the "Being Suspicious" status is only gotten after a creature has stolen from another and only creatures with the thief trait can steal from each other. This on its own doesn't sound too bad but the only creature guaranteed to naturally spawn with the thief trait is the bandit, which are hostile to everyone else by default and are more likely to attack or be attacked than do any thieving. And you can't give another creature the thief trait either because in order to unlock the thief trait you need to complete this achievement.
    • Faith of the Masses and Tongue of the People aren't difficult per se but the amount of entities required to complete them (7777 and 5555 respectively) will slow your game to a crawl.
    • The Accomplished calls for a unit to naturally have Kingslayer, Veteran, Mageslayer, and Dragonslayer. As you can imagine, this is quite the tall order for a single little guy and will probably take a bit of frustrating finagling on your part to get.
    • The King of Kings requires a king to naturally have 20+ traits. This is very difficult to accomplish without the traits editor, as emphasized by the wiki's guide to it being a multi-step process.
    • The later tier trait discovery based achievements, since they require the completion of the aforementioned frustrating achievements.
    • Plot Explorer, which requires you to find 20+ plots. First, you have to catch a unit in the act of plotting, which you probably won't unless you're specifically paying attention, then you need to be quick enough to click the Plans and Plots button before the plot is complete (there is no way to view a plot once it is complete), and once you manage that, you have to hope that its one you don't already have. While it is possible to engineer situations to trigger specific plots, these conditions are currently unknown.
    • Ancient War of Geometry and Evil technically isn't hard or specific to do, since all you need to do is start a war between Angles and Demons, but what the game doesn't tell you is that you only get the achievement if you look at the war's info page when it's going on rather than just having a demon-angle war.
    • Likewise with Zoo. It's not exactly the hardest (it actually got easier, during the Beta the only way to have multi-species cities was for empires to conquer each other as well as having the right combination of Culture traits), just keep spamming humanoids in one place until you meet the requirement of 15 species in one town, but, like Ancient War of Geometry and Evil, the game doesn't tell you that you need to look at the info page for the town, rather than just having a town with 15 different humanoid species.
  • They Changed It, So It Sucks: While 0.50.5 was mostly well received, a lot of fans bemoaned the removal of tech progression. That said, Maxim has stated it will come back eventually.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: If there's any creature in the game that embodies this more, it's dragons. While most other creatures got subspecies and civilization creation capabilities in 0.50.5, dragons got.... nothing, no civilization building, no subspecies, no updates, which many players find a waste of them since they are already tricky to use but would fit great with the game's Medieval European Fantasy aesthetic. Maxim has stated the reason dragons can't create civilizations is because their arms are too short, but many find this explanation questionable since Gnapkins and Snoks come from armless animals, along with most other animals not having arms that could be used for tools yet still being able to have civilizations/have Funny Animal counterparts.

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