Hey, criminal! You have been sentenced to the death penalty, but you have another choice: You can also… TERRAFORM A PLANET! What?! That was my reaction when I heard about Planet Crafter. A game about transforming a planet into a new world, a habitable place. The game is not something new because of this. Honestly, I wasn’t so intrigued until I read the story. It dragged me into this adventure. And now, I remade a planet that you can visit at any time (well, not actually, the game is still only single-player). Join me while I summarize my experience.
Planet Crafter is a space survival game where the player will terraform a planet for his sins. It has most of the features of a crafting-building game. The game was developed by Miju Games and released on the 24th of March this year. The game is in Early Access, which has a solid pathway and gets hotfixes and updates constantly. The developers have strong communication with their community through social media and Steam.
Planet Crafter Gameplay
You are a prisoner with two choices: death or TERRAFORMING A PLANET. A generous offer, right? You will need to clear the atmosphere, find resources, bloom the planet with many colors, and stay alive. The game is still in the early stages. As the game progresses, we hope to hear more about it. For example, The Forest had no story when it started. But now, The Forest is a fully released game with a big story.
The main gameplay is made up of three pieces: gathering, building, and relaxing (I’ll get to this). Gathering will be the most challenging part at the beginning. Because at the start, you land on a rough planet. The game has three main options to spawn. But you can also start your sentence in a random location, which I recommend for more experienced players. After looking around, the gathering process begins. Until a few hours into the game, you will grind constantly. The game will get much better after you automate some of your mining.
The building is the most fun part of Planet Crafter. Seeing your base become your home and flourishing the planet with your tech is something you need to experience. After all the exploration and hard work, your base will welcome you with your plants, complex buildings, and mining stations. Besides what the game has right now, as mentioned before, constant updates add new features and structure. Even if you finalized your home in one update, you can still build new things in another.
Last but not least, relaxing. Relaxing is one of the features that makes Planet Crafter unique. In many games, you can choose to play in either easy or hard mode. Planet Crafter allows you to play in a relaxing mode where there is no death penalty. All your materials and technology are still with you. Considering the planet has no biosphere (sorry for the spoilers), the only thing that hurts you is the lack of oxygen and lack of water. So, we can say the planet is peaceful on its own. But if you want to experience relaxing gameplay with no risks, the play mode is for you.
Planet Crafter also has a polar opposite hardcore mode with no mercy. Hardcore mode means when you, oh, you DIE (it deletes your save file). Yeah, relaxing, or quite terrifying. Choose your path.
Planet Crafter is a game we enjoyed at almost every step. It still has flaws, bugs, not-so-good graphics, and lacks some gameplay elements. But the game has solid gameplay and rich features for an EA with a good balance between complicated simulation and a casual game. We have high hopes for Miju Games. Overall, it has an 8/10.
You can find the game on Steam for 19,99$. There is also a demo and a prologue, which you can try out before buying the game. Change the planet from hell to paradise with Planet Crafter. When we (as humanity) went to Mars, you can say Just like the simulations.
