Planet Crafter just came out of Early Access last week, and is on sale for 30% off until the 24th.
It’s a first person perspective survival base building game that now supports a controller (yay!) and multiplayer if you’re into that kind of thing. In addition to building your base, you also build terraforming equipment to transform the planet from a barren lifeless husk into a vibrant world teeming with life. The look and feel are reminiscent of Subnautica, though of course without water (at least to start?) and I have no idea what kind of story elements there are.
I started playing it on Thursday once I realized it now has controller support, and I am loving it to death. One minor tip I was spoiled about I will share here, as it seems like a fair spoiler to know going in: Build your first base somewhat elevated because the water will come. I still have no idea how high, though.
There is a creative mode where you can plan out your perfect base, but I’m holding off on that until I get this first playthrough far enough where I understand what would make a good base.
In terms of just starting out, the first thing that struck me is that you can’t grow your own food. (Yet.) So right at the start exploration is at a premium so you can find little blue chests around the map which usually have some food in them.
On the plus side, death is not punishing. You drop some of the stuff from your inventory, but it gets dropped into a temporary chest where you die, and you can just run back to pick it up without losing anything. Similar to Grounded, now that I think about it.
So what I ended up doing once I ran out of food is just going back to my base and emptying my inventory right before I starve to death. Die from starvation and immediately respawn right there, no harm no foul. You can continue on that way indefinitely, meaning there isn’t a huge time pressure to advance enough to be able to grow food. But it is definitely motivation to get there because it is kind of annoying.
I keep vacillating between exploring shipwrecks/progressing up the tech tree versus taking a time out to play around with base building. My starter base is still kind of slapdash at this point.
One thing I’ve become fond of is bringing enough materials with me to craft one living compartment and a door instead of carrying oxygen tanks. As I run low on oxygen, I just toss up an outpost and step inside to refill my oxygen, then go back out and deconstruct it to get all the materials back. This technically lets me traverse an unlimited distance in terms of oxygen, though of course I am still limited by thirst and hunger. But those bars take much longer to deplete than oxygen.
In the beginning the very first milestone is getting to Blue Sky. I have progressed a couple hours beyond that, through clouds and then rain, and I’m now about to reach water. I am so excited for water I can’t stand it. Sure hope I built my base high enough that it doesn’t get flooded! Right now I’m right around 10 hours into the game.
The ground is so densely packed with resources that whether they are randomized or not amounts to the same thing. The blue chests sprinkled around may or may not be randomized, and that would be a meaningful distinction in terms of trying to do a speed run or just an efficient start.
The densely packed resources do not respawn, so the longer you live in an area the more barren the ground gets. However: (minor spoiler I figured out within a couple hours of play): There are meteor storms that hit the ground around your current location in a dozen or so places per storm, and these are randomized. They can actually kill you if they hit you, I can say from experience. Those meteor impacts leave resources behind, and the quality of those meteor resources gets better the more terraformed the planet is.
Note that I have only just barely started working with higher tier resources, so I can’t offer a definitive answer. I did find one cave that seemed to be full of a specific resource, and I have a feeling that same cave will have that same resource in every playthrough, though the specific locations may be randomized. But again, densely packed so it’s the same either way.
EDIT: The last thing I did just now was to create my very first ore miner. No matter where I put it around my base it only mined Tier 1 resources. Writing this post has given me the idea of trying to build one in that cave with that specific higher tier resource to see if maybe I can farm those more reliably. It would appear that the miners offer unlimited resources, but the tier level is determined by where you place them.
I started playing it once I reinstalled it (I bought it during early access) and immediately got frustrated because I kept running out of breath while looking for whatever it was I needed for the next thing to build. I could only find so much Cobalt to craft oxygen thingies, then it occurred to me … as long as I have enough to build a living space, I can just plop one down and catch my breath and carry on. Right? That works, right?
Yes, exactly. Carry 3 iron, 2 titanium and 1 silicon. That way you can place a living compartment with a door so you can enter and refill your oxygen, then exit and deconstruct. This essentially gives you infinite oxygen at the cost of 6 inventory space. Note that you need both a construction and a deconstruction chip in order for this to work!
It’s more effective when you upgrade your backpack to have more inventory space, of course. I’m still doing this, even with a tier 4 oxygen tank that lasts a really long time. My tier 4 backpack can afford the 6 spaces with ease.
I did reach the terraforming stage liquid water. I was expecting a massive flood, but nothing seemed to happen. Then I saw that the next stage is “lakes”, so I figured I’d have to wait. Unfortunately my progress has slowed to a brutal crawl, but I’m too busy with exploring right now to bother to try and fix that. (I needed greens to build more nuclear reactors in order to power more terraforming equipment, and greens have proven tough to find.) However, as time passes I’m noticing water starting to pool in the lowlands around the starting lifepod. It’s filling me with a sense of dread every time it rains and I see more and more land being covered. So good.
Oh, and also, what I consider to be a pretty big resource-related spoiler: Now that I’m in the stage of liquid water, it’s warm enough that (apparently) ALL the ice melted!!! I had to scramble to toss up a water collector so I don’t die of thirst. I have around a dozen ice in my base’s “water” chest, but now I worry that it will be tough to find any more, and some recipes use ice. Granted, I don’t think I use those recipes anymore, but still. If I had known the ice was going to just disappear I would have stockpiled a large locker full.
I am now 50% through the liquid water stage. The first half of this stage crawled for me at like 5 seconds per 0.01%. I just kicked that up a notch so now it’s more like one second per 0.01%.
Turns out the trick to speed this part up is to launch rockets, which I did once I finally scraped together enough greens (uranium). Fortunately one of the rockets triggers a meteor shower of uranium, which ended up being 25 greens. Woohoo! That let me build the rest of the rockets plus a jetpack while also upgrading from four tier 1 nuclear reactors to two tier 2, so power is all taken care of as well. (Four t1 = 346, two t2 = 663.)
I am also now starting to get a picture of what my perfect base will look like. The first hurdle was figuring out storage, which I managed fairly well with 18 large lockers. Next was where to put the screens, but I finally had a eureka moment. And then I realized how I could work in the special purpose large rooms that keep unlocking. Think of them like the scanner room in subnautica: big and awkward and tough to fit into a base designed with basic pieces. But now I think I have it to the point where I want to start playing around in creative mode to come up with my perfect base. Unfortunately, once I do that I will be helpless to resist the urge to tear apart my entire base and rebuild it to match whatever I come up with in creative mode. That will no doubt be a massive, time-consuming construction project.
My original lifepod is now almost completely underwater. I think my current base location is high enough, but of course I still don’t actually know yet.
Decided to take your advice and pick it up. Quick way to lose five hours of time. I’ve just treated it as a loop - get materials for power, make power, get materials for terraforming equipment, make terraforming equipment. Things tend to bootstrap pretty quickly.
A great thing I figured out after way too long - power is omnipresent. Got the stuff for a solar generator or wind turbine? Drop it right there instead of hauling a backpack of materials back to a “base”. My bases also tend to be haphazard - pretty much just throwing up a tiny one in front of each wreck, and expanding as needed for
I’m noticing the ice starting to melt, but no water on the ground yet. Just finished the “rain” stage, however. My current decision is whether to head into the sandstorm for the visible wreck, wander the other direction towards some gray pillars, or wait to see what the melting ice in the cave will uncover.
I should probably take some time to find a good place for a more permanent base. I get the feeling my disorganized approach has an upper limit to effectiveness. Fortunately, new tiers are usually an order of magnitude more effective. Aside from maybe seeds for oxygen and food, I’ll probably just leave everything else in situ.
On your recommendation, I picked this up, and am mostly loving it.
The terraforming progression is different from other such games: instead of researching recipes, you get the recipes by making your planet better. I mostly like that. Pretty often, though, I find a new material and don’t have a use for it yet. I much prefer the other way around: it’s more fun to have a recipe and look for ingredients than to have ingredients and wait for a recipe. I also miss Subnautica’s “Found an ingredient? Here are recipes for it!” which is how most other such a games work as well. But I do like watching my percentage toward the next stage.
Are there vehicles? Like, dune buggies and such? This game really feels like it needs vehicles, but so far (rain stage) I haven’t got any. Just like Subnautica benefited from getting the seamoth, and Satisfactory benefited from the buggy, this game’s play would definitely benefit.
I’m torn on the “it doesn’t matter where you build terraforming/power stuff.” It means I pile everything into one ugly corner, because why not? but then it’s ugly. I wish there were some sort of proximity measure, either that it should be build near or on a base, or else near one another (like, every power supply station multiplies output by 105% for every other power station it’s near), so that I’d be incentivized to have solar panel fields and the like.
And my base right now is an ugly mess, next to the shipwreck on the hill near the starting base. Knowing that you should build high up is a mixed blessing, because I don’t know how high up, and I don’t want to build a second base until I know, but I also don’t want to be spoiled. So I’m just dealing with my ugly base, figuring that once I know where to build a permanent one, I’ll spend an hour deconstructing and reconstructing in the new location.
That’s a lot of quibbles. But I really do like the slow-and-steady terraforming feeling, and I love the artwork, and I love the upgrade gameplay loop.
Vehicles? I don’t think so. But there are jetpacks!
Also the boot things that make you move faster are really helpful. And I think I was over an hour in before I realized there was a run button. Running is much better than walking.
Yeah I have built four outposts so far, but have dismantled two of them because they were pointless after clearing out the wrecks I built them next to.
I came up with an outpost design I like a lot a couple days ago: Single living compartment with two doors on opposite sides, two large lockers on each door for a total of four. On the non-door walls, on one side I have the basic crafting station and a blueprint screen, on the other I have a food grower growing beans. Outside on the ground I have a beacon, water collector and ore miner. I’m now down to two outposts: one mining reds, one mining aluminum. I wish I could mine greens but I still haven’t found any on the planet other than in chests.
Multiple times I have had doors blocked by meteor shower rubble. Having two doors is a must.
I’m on my second engagement, having played a dozen hours when it first came out.
Both times I’ve built my base at the mouth of the big cave with iridium, that has the dust tumbling from on high.
Is it high enough?
You’re just a bit further along than I; pools are forming, but my spacecraft isn’t flooded yet. I did scrounge all the most valuable ores from the depression before the water started collecting.
As you say I’m a little further than you but not by a huge amount. Your spot is still dry in my game, and there’s no pooled water near it.
Based on how the water is coming in, I’m hoping that the best place to build ends up being between the starting spot and the iridium caves. Mainly because it’s flat(ish). At least I think it is. My main base is up the hill by the ship near the starting location, but the angle is just so harsh to build on.
Did my creative mode tangent to come up with my ideal base design. I didn’t focus too much on the interior “ploppables” that I haven’t unlocked in the main game yet; I was trying to minimize spoilers. The design has easy vertical expansion baked in if I need more floor space.
So I did end up building terraforming buildings in my creative run and let it run for a bit. At some point, milestones stop becoming about water and then the water seems to stop rising from then on. I did not confirm this by advancing super far, but with the creative run now two milestones past water stuff, I am pretty confident about it.
I will spoiler the locations I found, but first, how to read coordinates. They are in the bottom left of the screen and are always on; they don’t need to be unlocked or researched. They are in the format xxx:zz:yyy. xxx is the dimension going from the starting lifepod toward the iridium (red) cave. yyy is the dimension going from the starting lifepod toward the first wreck up the hill where I and many of you built our first base. zz is altitude.
So, drum-roll, the water advances toward the iridium caves as far as 776:zz:yyy. That’s where you can start building and stay dry, at least for a very long time. The center of the center piece in the bottom floor of my base design is at 826:30:725. Lots and lots of flat land to build on. Also, the wide open space is so much better for collecting meteor shower materials.
Now my only decision is this: Do I move my fairly substantial starter base over to this new location, or do I start a fresh game from scratch and see how quickly I can build it up? Haven’t decided yet…
Thanks for the recommendation. It’s no Subnautica (yet), but scratches much the same itch.
My strategy so far has been to plop down lots of small bases but never deconstruct them. Resources are easy to come by, so why bother? I can easily pop into a shelter no matter where I am.
The food situation was getting dicey (running out of nearby chests to scavenge) but I finally unlocked the food grower module. So that no longer seems to be an issue.
Thanks; I’ve built on the incline just about 50-100 yards further towards the mouth of the cave, but nice to know that building on that flat area adjacent (where I currently have my flower spreaders) is “safe”, as it is indeed much flatter.
~3 hours later, yes, this is what I ended up doing. All finished now and loving the new location. Unfortunately I did it as stupidly as possible: I moved everything over, then I spent 10 minutes upgrading and/or adding more terraforming equipment when I was finished. Good thing I didn’t do that before the big move because then I would have gotten 3 hours worth of significantly improved progress…Doh!
EDIT: On the plus side, I got very comfortable with the jetpack. I found it very awkward to use at first, and for longer than I was expecting. But once I got the hang of it I was zipping around nicely.
It’s good to know that that location is buildable; I wasn’t sure if it’d flood. It’s not too far from my current location, and I figure I can leave all the hot-mess-infrastructure stuff there (the rooms full of heaters, the hillside full of drills and power sources, etc.), just moving things that I’ll access a lot. That might be my mission tonight, to make that move.