The Planet Crafter is yet another survival-box game that happened to hit Xbox Game Pass just as my Solarpunk infatuation was starting to wane. (Solarpunk was a great game. I’d just done pretty much everything there was to do.) Crafting a whole planet, though? That sounded like a serious challenge so I took it for a spin.

This time out, you’ve crash-landed on a barren planet. First order of business? Oxygen. You have a suit that only holds a very small amount of oxygen. You dash out of your escape pod, harvest some minerals, then head back into the pod to craft things and replenish your O2. One of your first goals will probably be crafting better O2 tanks so you can travel further. You also have food and hydration meters; but what is there to eat or drink on a barren planet?

One of the trickiest bits in survival-box games is the survival part. If one goal is to survive then the fail state has to be not surviving. So what happens when you die? How do you making dying a fail state that penalizes the player enough that they want to avoid failing, but not so much that your average gamer gets frustrated and quits. These games tend to be about exploring and figuring things out and if the death penalty is too harsh then players aren’t going to want to take too many chances. In this regard Planet Crafters plays it pretty safe. When you die you drop some items in a nice neat storage chest, then you respawn in a base or your Pod (I THINK it respawns you in the last place that held oxygen but I’m not too sure) and run back out and pick the stuff up again.

Considering your limited range (at least in the early game) due to O2 concerns, your dropped stuff is never very far away. In fact maximum efficiency might come from just ignoring the food and water stuff completely and accepting that every so often you’ll respawn and have to collect your stuff. I don’t play this way because I’m a fan of the I word (immersion) and I tend to ‘roleplay’ in games like this, so I try my best not to die of starvation, asphyxiation, or dehydration.

I actually prefer an easier death penalty that I can make more difficult via self-imposed rules (even ones as simple as “Try your best to stay alive even if the death penalty is quite light”) than one that is unforgiving, so while I do think they erred on “too little” of a death penalty I MUCH prefer that to having a severe death penalty.

Honestly The Planet Crafter didn’t make a great first impresion on me. It was just SO bleak and exploration was tough due to the O2 limitations. What I did, and I assume most people do, is build a string of tiny bases that you can duck into to refill your oxygen tanks. You CAN also craft O2 Refill Tanks but those use resources, take up precious inventory space, and vanish when used. A 1×1 base gets created once and it always there when you need oxygen.

In fact after my first session I was ready to put the game aside, but fortunately for me Wilhelm at The Ancient Gaming Noob was also playing. I read one of his posts about the game and it finally hit me that we’re here to terraform and as we do, things look less bleak. The game did try to tell me this; the “getting started” goal is called Blue Skies or something like that.

You terraform the planet by building machines that add O2 to the atmosphere (via plants), add pressure to the atmosphere (by drilling into the crust… not sure how that would work in real life but it’s how it works here) and by heating the atmosphere (via heaters). All these require resources and power. Power comes from windmills and solar cells which of course also require resources. This is all fairly abstract but it works. As the planet’s terraform rating increases new tech automagically unlocks. Power seems to be universal; there are no cables and aparently no distance limits. If you put up a solar panel on one end of the map it seems to happily power stuff on the other end of the map, via magic. That sounds odd but within the context of the game it works fine. I think having to run power cables across this rather large map would be a headache.

I’m definitely enjoying the game now, but I’m still not sure it’ll be a long-term title for me. I’m playing solo, or course, and I feel like there’s a LOT to do for one person. Most of my time has been spent building bases to expand the area I can explore. And you do need to explore. While you can harvest a lot of materials from mineral deposits on the ground (deposits that get replenished via some pretty cool meteor impacts), some of what you need has to be scavenged from crashed space ships (food, for example. You can ‘craft’ water from ice, but for your first hours of playing the only source of food is scavenging packets of “space food” from chests and ships), and these tend to be relatively far flung. At my point in the game I don’t have a vehicle so there’s a LOT of running back and forth which is what generally causes me to end a session; knowing I have item X in a storage chest in the base I built next to the wrecked ship that is barely in view and that’ll take me a ton of running to get to. Yeah, that feels like a good time to take a break. 🙂

Mind you, I still haven’t finished the ‘intro’ section of the game called First Steps or something. But the sky above my base is lightening and starting to turn blue, which is pretty neat. Seems local though since if I push out into the wilderness the world turns bleak again. So we’ll see.

Over on Steam Planet Crafter has an Overwhelmingly Positive rating with over 36,000 reviews as I’m typing this. There’s also a demo available in case you want to check it out, but I hope the demo isn’t just the start of the game because that really does feel grim. Also I thought it was a new game since it just hit Game Pass/consoles but it looks like it released in April of 2024. Huh. “Recent Reviews” are still Overwhelmingly Positive, though!