While The Planet Crafter is a new-to-me game (it hit Xbox and Xbox Game Pass last month) it came out on Steam a long time ago (April 2024) and it’s popular enough that plenty has been written about it. In fact Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob has been playing and writing about it just recently. I stopped reading those posts since he and his buddy are way ahead of me and part of the fun of these games is in seeing what comes next, but I think it is safe to say he knows more about the title than I do.
That said, I am still playing and since I’ve mentioned it in the past I wanted to share that it’s still in active rotation. I’m finding the game to be quite good but at times a little slow; because of this I tend to play short sessions which is part of why my progress has been so slow. In the past (real-time) week or so I’ve researched jets boots and a rover, both of which have sped up the pace of the game quite a bit. In the early game you have to walk everywhere and build a string of mini-bases where you can replenish your oxygen which made exploring feel a bit tedious. Now I drive and jet all over the place and about 4 of every 5 ‘top up on O2’ bases have been scrapped since my range is so much greater now.
In terms of progress.. my skies are blue (mostly) and I have puddles and ponds of standing water on the ground, though I haven’t gotten to the “Lakes” phase of terraforming. I just started growing algae and grass. I’ve heated the planet enough to melt some of the ice that was cutting me off from the advanced minerals I needed. If I were to do another playthrough (and I might, some day) I’d get started on heating things up way sooner. I was just concerned about flooding areas before they were thoroughly explored but now I don’t think that’s a problem as your space suit works fine as a diving suit anyway.
Wind and solar power has more or less given way to nuclear fission and I’ve peered at the tech tree and know we’ll get to fusion eventually. I’ve torn down most of my windmills just to reclaim the materials since they’re quite ineffective. Solar I’ve been leaving in place for now. But it takes a LOT of solar power installations to make up for one nuclear power plant.
I’ve built a rocket launch pad and fired off a few rockets. One to give me a map with satellite imagery and a couple to aid in the terraforming itself. I am a little leery of using too many resources on rockets though. On the other hand they lead to some spectacular meteor showers as the rockets somehow ‘lure in’ an asteroid which then shatters and rains down on the planet. So far neither I nor any of my bases have been hit by one of these fragments. [knock on wood]
Generally speaking I find The Planet Crafter a relaxing game. So far the only danger is from running out of water, food or oxygen but the death penalty is pretty light so even those deaths aren’t really stressful. I have ample food and water now and the only time oxygen gets to be too much of an issue is when I get engrossed in something and lose track of time. Hopefully I won’t create any wildlife that can eat me.
If I have one complaint it is around the building of structures and even there it’s kind of minor. When building up off the ground it’s tough to get a nice clean stairway to a door or something. My main base is on a raised slab of rock. I build stairs that kind of float in space to get up to it. which works fine but looks really fake. I tried to build towers of foundations to place the stairs on but they wouldn’t snap correctly. Likewise, my nuclear power plants can’t be placed on rock, but when I try to place them on a foundation they clip through it rather than sitting neatly on top of the foundation. These are all 100% aesthetic issues but given that the game lets you research decorative items it’d be nice if the build system better supported making nice neat structures.
But yeah, that’s all pretty nit-picky (and I believe there are mods to help with some of these issues if you’re playing the Steam version).
Generally, I’m finding it to be a solid game. I have about 17 hours into it so far and, I expect, many more ahead of me if I play to the end. If there even is an end. But there’s a whole biology/ecology tech tree that I haven’t really even touched yet.
