Earth is a great place, the perfect world for humans to inhabit. Unfortunately that’s a literal statement, in that life evolved to excel in this one specific environment, and because of that living in space is hard and inhabiting a different planet will be almost impossible. The trick is to find a rocky world just far enough from its star to get the right amount of radiation, with a mass close enough to Earth’s that the people settling there can be comfortable. A chemical composition not overly abundant in radioactive materials or poisonous elements would also be a big help, and once that’s found, the rest is down to engineering. Terraforming a planet is the best bet towards finding a new home in space, but it seems like the kind of job that should be too big for the single astronaut ofPlanet Crafter.
It’s a planetary fixer-upper
Having been exiled to a frozen dirt-ball that’s hostile to all life, survival is dependent on turning an entire planet into a world completely unlike how it was on arrival. The atmosphere is far too thin to breathe even if there was any oxygen in it, and water is just another one of the solid minerals littering the surface in the form of ice chunks. The starter space suit you arrive in is just this side of utter garbage, highly protective from the environment but with a laughably tiny inventory and an oxygen capacity that’s measured in seconds. Home base is a tiny little capsule with a chest containing a few packs of food plus a mini crafting device that’s only good for the most basic needs, but somehow despite all these handicaps, it’s still enough to work with.
Getting Started Building a New Earth in The Planet Crafter: Prologue
Minerals are plentiful and the remains of those who have tried to settle the planet are easily found, so a bit of scavenging is enough to earn the first couple of upgrades. An expanded oxygen tank means you may explore further from the capsule, and ice is plentiful so at least you won’t easily die of thirst. The capsule’s crafter has a number of suit upgrades it can build and gives the mineral composition of each, so it’s not too long before you can stop worrying about moment-to-moment survival and start building a proper base. The trick at the start is to focus only on the elements you need, but like any good crafting-survival adventure, that’s not going to stay true for long. The best trickPlanet Crafterpulls off, in fact, is how completely different the latter part of the game is from the beginning as everything changes and more and more systems get introduced.
Planet Crafteris a first-person survival game set in a hand-built world that’s got a long, steady transformation ahead of it. The barren surface is covered in mineral deposits, with each one of a type being identical to the others. A chunk of iron in one biome is idential to a chunk of iron elsewhere, as is silicon, titanium, cobalt, etc. Each mineral takes up one inventory slot, no stacking, but once you’ve built a home base a couple of chests will take care of the storage problem. Construction is no more complicated than having the right elements to build whatever you need in inventory then choosing it from the build menu, whether that be a windmill, solar panel or modular building cube. That last one, though, is only part of a structure and absolutely useless without also creating a door, but once the cube can be entered, it acts as an endless supply of oxygen if you can make it back before the tanks run out.
First a planetary foothold, then the world
With a comfortable home base it’s time to start proper terraforming, which won’t really work without exploring the planet as well. The starting valley only has the simplest elements, and building heaters to warm the planet, drills to release gases from the earth and increase atmospheric pressure, and plant pods to start oxygenating the air requires more than the basics, not to mention power plants to keep it all running. There’s a big obvious wrecked spaceship on the hill on the other side of the valley, though, and it makes a tempting target for a scavenger who’d very much like to not die frozen, foodless and asphyxiated. And after that comes bringing a small world with multiple biomes and a secret history slowly but relentlessly to life.
One of the most impressive aspects ofPlanet Crafteris the feeling of progress you get as it advances, with the work you do having a clear and permanent effect that never stops building. An early victory is realizing that the sky has turned from a dead orange to lively blue, and the first time it rains feels like a special victory. As you complete terraforming goals new tech opens up for bigger and more advanced machinery, not just for waking up the planet, but also containing useful items like a jetpack or decorative blueprints to give the base comfy living quarters. The blue skies and rain bring with them plant life, which slowly takes hold as the planet wakes up, sand and rock getting covered by green moss that gives way to grass, flowers and eventually trees. Before the trees come insects, though, and they need to be bred by catching larva and following the recipe in the genetic splicer to turn them into bees and butterflies. Meanwhile the water level has risen from its nonexistent starting point, adding lakes and streams to the environments where there just used to be depressions in the dirt.
And even with this,Planet Crafterstill keeps growing and changing. Picking up elements from the ground seems like a lot of work that’s better suited to an automatic miner, pulling up a random but infinite selection from those available in the biome. All that crafting at different stations for different types of items is time best spent doing other things, so an auto-crafter can pull materials from containers in its vicinity and pump out almost any product you’d like. A late-game tech even introduces drones, which have a map-wide area of activity, so setting up an obsidian miner several minutes walk away from home base (or a quick teleport if you build one) can be just as practical as a common ore miner right beside the front door. With drones, proper storage distribution and auto-crafters, you can set up a good supply of even the most complicated items, and then ship the more valuable ones to the space market for trading credits.
While it can be a lot to keep track of, the complete lack of any time pressure outside of food/water/air (the last of which eventually goes away as the atmosphere turns breathable) means you can takePlanet Crafterat your own speed. A good day’s play can be tossing larva and other goodies into the genetic splicer to see what kind of butterflies it throws out, and then building a small pile of nests to distribute through a field of flowers you created earlier. Or maybe an open area would look better as a forest, so choosing types of trees and putting up a number of tree spreaders is the way to go. Alternately there’s exploring, tracking down hints of the people who failed at terraforming the planet before your arrival and even ancient history from before the current wave of space exploration.Planet Crafterwill move at your own pace, and if that’s “hyperactive rabbit”, then a high-tier jetpack will let you do that too.
But, however, and major disclaimers
There is, however, a gigantic major “but…” involved with this, and the reason it’s just getting this one lonely paragraph rather than being endlessly harped on is becausePlanet Crafteris so relaxing, enjoyable and overall satisfying that overlooking its flaws quickly becomes a reflex action. There’s a lot of ambition inPlanet Crafter’s design, and while the game mostly lives up to its goals, there’s no question it’s only just barely holding on by its fingernails. The map geometry, for example, has endless places where rocks can be clipped through, giving you a great view of the world’s underside. The crafting recipe for drones showed up in the auto-crafter hours before they were available to actually use, and I only found out I wasn’t able to do anything with them after I gave up and checked a guide. Plants float in the air rather than attach to hills, scaffolding may or may not let you place it over rocky outcroppings depending on if you wiggle it a bit and get lucky, lighting effects pop in jarringly during a transition from one biome to the next, etc. There’s a ton of polish left undone, and yetPlanet Crafterworks so well in all the important ways that it’s easier to turn a blind eye than get too worried about it.
Closing Comments:
Planet Crafteris one of those rare games where you could spend all day listing off its problems and still have things to talk about, but that’s time that could be better spent playing, so why bother? On the one hand it’s practically a poster-child for jank, but on the other each new accomplishment in the game comes with a reward that’s likely to change the way it plays again, or at least take a major step towards it. The simple “pick up rocks, make stuff” beginning slowly turns into an automation adventure through a lush green world that hardly feels like the planet you started on, despite being present for every moment of its awakening. Scavenging, crafting, base-building, automation, tinkering with the genetic modifier to find undiscovered bugs and plants, and even a mode where you can endlessly explore procedurally-generated spaceship wrecks for rare loot all show up along the way, and the game you play at the end bears little resemblance to the one that it starts as. It would have been nice ifPlanet Crafterhad gotten the AAA budget and polish, but the game as it exists nails all the important parts in ways that can make multi-hour gaming sessions fly on by in minutes. It’s a dead cold rocky ball without a hint of life when you get there, but each new crafted item is another step closer to the terraformed paradise it can become.
The Planet Crafter
Version Reviewed: PC
