The Planet Crafter (Early Access) review

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The wish test from Christmas campaign top donor Kriesing: In the French indie title, you use terraforming to turn an entire planet inside out, creating clouds, lakes and plants.

All screenshots and video scenes are from GamersGlobal

The indie title The Planet Crafter started in Early Access in March 2022 and recently received the major update Caves & Craters. Behind the title is the French studio Miju Games, which consists of only one developer. In The Planet Crafter rotates similar to in subnautica or Satisfactory all about gathering materials, exploring and crafting bases and useful facilities – but not about creating autonomous production chains. The special thing about it: The world doesn’t just change because you plaster everything over with your buildings. You ensure that a desolate planet is transformed into a green, habitable world through terraforming.

In the following I will tell you why The Planet Crafter is already implementing the terraforming fantasy in a fun way in Early Access. It should not go unmentioned: You owe this article to the user Kriesing. He used his joker as one of the top donors of the 2021 Christmas campaign for a wish test of this title.

Meteor showers are always an event. It is worth investigating the impact sites.

Improve yourself and the world

In The Planet Crafter you are thrown as a convict in a space capsule on a hostile planet. If you want to get out of there again, you have to terraform your new home into an earth-like habitat. However, this does not degenerate into permanent survival stress. After all, “hostile to life” also means: There is nothing living on it that would want to eat you. The only dangers are hunger, thirst and lack of oxygen. For starters, you have astronaut food, ice melts easily into water, and you craft oxygen tanks or pause at your bases to catch your breath while exploring. If one of the three corresponding bars empties, you only lose a few items by default, which you can pick up again at the location of your misery. On the lowest difficulty, there is no penalty at all and the stats decrease more slowly.

But even on standard difficulty, it’s pretty relaxed as you make your mark on the barren environment. In the beginning you work towards blue skies, half a dozen hours later lakes are created thanks to you, even later you finally plant flowers and trees. In a future update you should even create animal life. But at the very beginning you don’t even think about the big picture, but use your all-purpose tool to pick up the minerals scattered everywhere, such as silicon, cobalt and iron, in order to craft your first backpack and an oxygen tank extension. This basic gathering work remains bread and butter of The Planet Crafter, as does managing inventory windows. But you not only improve the planet, you also create better backpacks and useful updates such as a compass or a jetpack, which is enormously beneficial to mobility. Not to mention that later you’ll bring advanced buildings like missile silos and bio-labs into operation. However, this also ensures that some later crafting recipes are only available at terminals of these special buildings and in the absence of a general overview list, it can sometimes be lost to see where a blueprint that has just been activated can now be used.

In general, the first steps are displayed at the edge of the screen at the beginning. Later, however, you always have to use computers that you set up in your bases for information. On the go, the available power surplus or the overview of all unlockable blueprints cannot be called up – at least not in my around eight hours of playtime. By reaching the first milestones in general terraforming progress, you unlock new recipes. With expanded air supply and inventory, you undertake larger expeditions to wrecks, some of which can be seen directly from the starting position of your landing capsule on the horizon. In addition to drills that release gas, you will soon be building heaters and oxygen-generating plant pods (the green stuff for which you loot in wrecks). Further parameters such as the biomass produced will be added later. You want all of these numbers to increase as quickly as possible, then the value of the terraforming index, which is displayed to you all the time, will also increase.

An unusual find in the mostly less exciting (but plentiful) shipwrecks: A fusion reactor! What do you think will happen if I insert a fusion cell? But I’m still a long way from being able to craft one.

Beautiful new world

It’s worth exploring for the materials found only in wrecks, as well as chips that unlock additional suit upgrades and more. However, the first discovery of the corridors, which always look quite similar, is interesting, but after that I usually had to go in two or three more times just to get the contents of all the boxes transported outside. Apart from that, further away from your landing point you will stumble onto terrain types in which certain resources are more common than at your starting position. Likewise, at a certain level of terraforming, the ice on the planet melts, revealing caves that contain minerals for advanced upgrades and buildings. By constantly unlocking new blueprints and opening up new materials naturally, The Planet Crafter creates a nice flow most of the time. A motivating element of The Planet Crafter is the escalation of my effectiveness: If I unlock level three of the heaters, they generate many times the heat of the previous models. Since dismantling objects gives me back all the building materials, I can stock up relatively quickly – but I mustn’t forget the electricity requirement, which is also increasing.

However, voyages of discovery are also rewarded in other ways: although the graphics of The Planet Crafter seem rather functional, there are beautiful views and also real wow effects. The first major goal is to create blue skies by boosting the terraforming index. When I had done that, the neighboring planets glowed at night as pale as our moon. Surprisingly, when water reservoirs were formed later on, I also discovered clouds and even patches of green on these neighboring worlds. That’s when I remembered reading about another Planet Crafter in the same sector. Every jubilee, a message arrives for me. At the beginning it seems as if a former acquaintance was building up a little story through contact with me, but it seemed to be just an additional tutorial. By the way, to read the news I need an antenna nearby. That’s why I only have a base with a message terminal.

Because The Planet Crafter breaks down terraforming to driving up key figures and also simplifies many other things, there are not too many annoying factors apart from the suffering of the constantly full inventory. There is no fall damage, generated electricity is available globally and nuclear reactors do not generate radiation. However, this also leads to certain immersion fractures. So you can build a solar system in the middle of the night and it will generate its nominal value of electricity on the spot. Also, it’s silly that I can still fully use my base after it’s been flooded by an emerging lake. On the other hand, I’m grateful for the lack of realism in this case. Since I can’t move objects, I can only tear them down and rebuild them, I didn’t feel like moving the whole base and several full cabinets.

Author: Hagen Gehritz (GamersGlobal)

Opinion: Hagen Gehritz

I think the basic idea of ​​The Planet Crafter is great. When do I ever change a game world in such a way that I explore it from the first-person perspective? The construction game creates a special fascination, as well as little magical moments every now and then: the first meteor shower, the first thunderstorm, the first puddle of water. Each leap in technology adds new important resources, and discovering a large deposit of them while exploring is always a reason to rejoice. Anyone who feels more drawn to the latter in terms of their inner “hunter-gatherer” will have fun with The Planet Crafter in Early Access and it will certainly take a good two-digit number of hours to reach the currently highest terraforming level.

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But even in advanced games, I still have to stop building the latest toy because a piece of aluminum or something is missing. Then I stick my eyes to the ground and dig in the dirt (which is my main occupation) or undertake half a trip around the world for some materials – you have to like that. In this regard, I also wish that certain raw materials such as iron and silicon could be distinguished even more clearly at first glance.

Especially at the beginning I always have a carrot in front of my nose and work so diligently towards the construction of a certain facility that I don’t even notice if in the meantime my devices have already cracked the next terraforming level. But when I then had cupboards in several bases that were spread across the expansive map, despite the fun jetpack, more and more time was spent lugging materials from A to B and trying to figure out where I needed what. Miju Games can still make adjustments so that the otherwise good pacing is not repeatedly broken up by such tough moments. More general information about a suit upgrade or the like can also be called up on the go. Overall, however, the Early Access version of The Planet Crafter (also technically) makes a good impression. I’m looking forward to the next updates!

THE PLANET CRAFTER personal computermacOS