The Planet Crafter Review
What I’m playing: The Planet Crafter (But hey, I’ve gotten to Skeo now!)
What I’m reading: Silverborn: The mystery of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend
Planet Crafter is essentially an idle game with survival, exploration, story, and breathtaking graphics, making it unlike any other game I’ve played.
You are a prisoner, and to (partially) pay your debt to society, you’ve been stranded alone on an uninhabitable planet with the goal to terraform it to a liveable condition. Access the minerals scattered across the surface and craft what you can to make your condition easier, manage your health, thirst, and oxygen levels, and build machines to bring up the planet’s heat, pressure, and oxygen levels. Watch the energy levels, you’ll need to build more power producers to manage more machines. Build a base and make it organized, or beautiful, or neither.
As you successfully terraform the planet, you’ll periodically receive blueprints which allow you to build higher level machines. But, more importantly, the planet itself responds. Ice melts, revealing hidden passageways; moss grows; insects spawn. The planet, towards the end of the game, looks completely different to the barren wasteland you first encountered.
Scattered around the planet you’ll encounter the evidence of previous inhabitants. Crates with loot left lying around; crashed spaceships; abandoned bases. Along the way you’ll gather notes left behind. Did those who write them manage to escape the planet? Or did they die?
When I first played the game, it was still in early access, and while it was clear it was going to be amazing, the first world (Prime) wasn’t quite finished yet. Since then, the game has undergone regular updates, with both free updates to the base game and paid DLC. There are now multiple planets that you can start on, and you can also go on to terraform another planet or moon when you’ve completed the first one. You’ll need to return though; some of the smaller moons have less access to higher level resources, and you’ll want to automate imports from your previous home.
Each world has its own story to tell, and its own breathtaking scenery. Humble was the home to a previous failed terraforming attempt. Toxicity, like its name suggests, has been poisoned by a previous mining program. Skeo, the free moon, is littered with the fossils of extinct dinosaur-type creatures. Aqualis is largely covered by water and allows for no mining.
I’ve just completed the Toxicity planet and am now establishing a base on Skeo. I’m currently in that awkward stage players will come to know quickly. Ice is melting, and I’m not sure if my home base will soon find itself sitting at the bottom of a newly formed lake. But this morning I jetpacked through the fossilized spine of an extinct dinosaur, so I’ve got that going for me.
The Planet Crafter was created by Miju games and was fully released in 2024. It is currently on sale in the Steam store.
