The Planet Crafter

Planet Crafter is a very peaceful, satisfying game worth dumping your hours into. It’s a game you play to relax after a hard day’s work, and what better way to show it than by turning a lifeless rock into somewhere you can call home?

Great, relaxing sandbox game with no serious weaknesses that is just as complex as it needs to be. Now also with multiplayer.

Whether you’re in it to build extensively and see how deep the research trees go, explore and uncover mysteries or chill out in a space setting, The Planet Crafter is worth checking out.

The graphics in the game are slightly cartoony, without being too childish to take away from the overall feeling of survival in the game. If anything, the lighter artstyle helps to keep the game from becoming too bleak early on, and gives the ability to have some incredible and cute alien animals later on. Uncovering the mystery of the narrative while watching a world transform before one's very eyes in The Planet Crafter is a rewarding and fun mechanic that draws players in and creates a captivating experience for everyone.

The Planet Crafter is a cool survival crafting game with lots of possibilities. It just would have had more of an impact with a good end-game goal or a story peppered in.

The low-key project finally got out of the Early Access phase and, as one of the few survivors, made it to a successful conclusion.

Planet Crafter's good ideas and a real sense of satisfaction when you succeed in the various objectives make it a particularly addictive title. However, it's impossible to forget all the aspects that can be improved.

Amazing game! Yeah... If you want AAA graphic with a 30$ game you live in a fantasy world... But if you want an addictive fun game like satisfactory or subnautica this one is for you!

Very little blood, a lot of sweat, a manageable amount of tears and a paradise playground as the final reward The place: A desolate planet of Mars make and model. A poor little human, having just crashed here in a dinky little capsule, stares gloomily through the dusty visor of his orange space suit at the desolate desert in front of him. All our little PC has to his name is a bargain bin version of the Star Trek replicator, a mining laser with infinite energy, and a dumb phone with a single message on it. So compared to an average human in our time he’s unimaginably rich, but it doesn’t quite feel like it, because, as the aforementioned message explains, he’s marooned here for some unmentioned crime and the only way he gets to leave this deadly wasteland if he terraforms THE ENTIRE PLANET. The task is just as breathtaking as the poisonous atmosphere around here. At least the place is beautiful in a desolate kind of way, if you don’t factor in the lack of food and water. In ambition, the game has a lot of its survival crafting sim peers beat. As for the primary gameplay loop, the day to day business of planet crafting feels a lot like the genre tropes, sci-fi variant: You shoot resources out of the ground, then materialize buildings out of thin air which produce resources and increase a meter, Said meter is called Terraformation Index and unlocks other buildings and more advanced equipment as it rises. The tech progression feels really satisfying for about three quarters of the game, the last quarter has too few consequential unlocks and thus feels like a thankless grind and in need of some patching. The difference is that most of these buildings don’t just serve your continued existence, they slowly transform your entire environment. It’s awesome! The first time I noticed that I had turned the sky blue during the day I got really choked up gazing at the beautiful color I had made. Once I reached the end game I didn’t even want to leave. Planet Crafter really really lets you do what it says on the tin. Another axis you’re progressing in is the slow unlocking of further game systems: Movement progresses from walking to running to really cool jetpack, systems to automate the production of resources are introduced that in the late game allow you to play a simplified version of Satisfactory, and, of course, quite a few decorative options for the mechanically useless yet so satisfying luxury loft you’ll inevitably be building for yourself in one of the most idyllic landscapes terraforming has ever produced. What the Planet Crafter doesn’t have is any kind of combat. This is more of a relaxed interpretation of the genre, and you’ll be busy enough keeping your water, food and oxygen meters topped, while mining, building and exploring. Yes, you’ll be exploring quite a bit, too: Certain resources you can at first only find in the wrecks of quite a few crashed space ships and the abandoned bases of other unfortunate souls who died attempting the very thing you’re trying to do. It is a bit of a slog because the floor plan of the the wrecks and bases look like they were designed by a mad man, or a procedural generation algorithm, and navigating them has been known to engender headaches later in the game, when the really big ships show up. That is one of the few areas where the treasured player might encounter an instance of wonk, but not the only one. I got stuck in the floor once or twice and accidentally deconstructed quite a few of my buildings. The elfin sprinklings of story one stumbles across through thorough exploration could have used a bit more effort, too, even though I appreciate the capitalism critique wrapped in biting gallows humor hidden in the bitter posthumous rants of an earlier Planet Crafter. These sometimes quite sizable problems don’t manage to detract much from the magnificence of what The Planet Crafter asks of and allows you to do, and that’s mostly due to the wonderful art and beautiful score presenting the results of your effort. The landscape is as enchantingly handcrafted as the haunting melodies that accompany them. The animals that show up in the end game could use a redesign, maybe, but everything else is just wonderful. All in all, Planet Crafter is a competently designed survival crafting sim with a bit of wonk elevated by its central conceit and it’s beautiful presentation, elevated all the way to being an excellent time at the controller. Oh, did I mention it has flawless co-op? TLDR: Alone or in co-op, Planet Crafter will let you craft an entire planet. What fan of survival, crafting and simulation could resist?

Overall a fun and entertaining game to play. There are still too many issues for a top rating (glitching through the environment being the biggest) and could use more QoL improvements (unpinning a recipe from the UI, redesigning parts of the UI to prevent opening a menu unnecessarily, abilities to remove an option selected in a crafting/depositing list without having to remove/re-add everything, increasing the size of some of the UI). Try out the demo and see if it catches your interest. If you're going to buy, I suggest waiting for a half off discount.

This game is a joke. It is for the most part, a multi-cloning of both excellent Subnautica and NoManSky. But, few years later those games, this one is so poor. The graphics are outdated. The environment is cheap, empty, the level design is non-existent. The overall feeling is very bad. The materials you need to pick up are just randomly sprinkled with no consistency or objective. I'm sorry for those who love the game, but in my mind, it doesn't deserve at all the general rating it actually has on steam. (I don't even talk about menu or ost, I have no word for it).

I've played about it for about 14 to 16 hours reaching insects, I'm going to be blunt, I wish I was scrolling tiktok or reading twitter or binge watched the Sopranos or smth. Cause this game is absolutely mind numbing and a huge waste of time. The only redeaming quality about it is that you get to see terraforming of the planet. Everything else detracts from it. Gather, craft, store, drink, heal, repeat. The cycle is just way too basic and it does not help that automation in this game is very limited and requires expensive components from the get-go. At least take a few things out of automation games such as Satisfactory. Also add something to increase travel speed, something that is not a car, as there are simply to many spaces you can't squeeze it in. See Zip-Lines from Death stranding. Perhaps add enemy rogue terraforming bots or grey goo. Something to make it more interesting. In addition to that, all inventories in this game are miniscule, for example 35 slots for my inventory in basically endgame and about 72 for my upgarded car, my whole base is packed with storage boxes as there is about 50 slots in each. This is nothing, considering how much you need, (E.G a single solar panel is 6 items), BioDome T2 is 24 raw items, so you're forced to do the loop a hellavulot of times. Something needs to be done about that inventory management, it is simply too annoying.