History VideoGame / ThePlanetCrafter

* HumansAreBastards: According to the multiple tablets containing game lore left behind by the Wardens, after Humans made first contact with the Wardens, they quickly tried to enslave the Wardens' homeworld. The Wardens then all quietly left their homeworld behind and ended up on the planet that the player is now on. Upon learning that humans are once again closing in on them, they created what amounted to an energy jammer to keep humans away. As you can tell from the other lore on the planet, it didn't really work, although the Wardens were largely already wiped out by a giant meteor and a splinter group did escape again and left for an unspecified corner of space, and aeons have passed when humanity began setting foot on the planet.

''The Planet Crafter'' is a SurvivalSandbox PC game by Miju Games. The game was planned to release in 2022, but remains in open access as of 2023 with plans for a 1.0 release in 2024, a year which will also see the addition of co-op play and completion of the terraforming process with the arrival of mammals.

* AmbiguousSituation: [[spoiler:One of the Warden caves contains a massive spaceship that the player cannot approach, but it's easy to make out enough details to tell it has the same kind of design as other wrecks on the planet. If this is a Warden ship that is simply reusing assets, evidence of previous planet crafters exploring the Warden ruins and someone building a ship to escape, or something else, is currently unknown.]]

** The pre-set resources on the planet don't respawn, but all resources have a dedicated ore vein somewhere where ore extractors can mine them infinitely. This also applies to common resources which normally can be mined anywhere, but on a game with randomized resources can be more rare. Before you can build ore extractors, meteor showers will randomly occur that sprinkle handfuls of resources around, and once you pass a certain terraforming threshold rarer resources can arrive by meteor showers too, because some of them can't be mined by tier one ore extractors. The only resource you can't mine is pulsar quartz, but it can be crafted and can also arrive by meteor shower.
** As the planet gains a water cycle, certain areas will slowly flood and become permanently underwater. Anything you built that gets consumed by the rising tide will not be destroyed, though it'll likely stop functioning. As least you can scrap it to get back the resources.
** Even while there's a power outage, you can still use crafting stations and teleporters, ensuring you can get back to your base and craft components for improving your power grid.

* ChangingGameplayPriorities: Your immediate priority will be ensuring your own survival; you can only venture outside your pod briefly before you'll have to come back for oxygen, you'll regularly need to scavenge ice to melt for water, and while your food meter depletes slowest of the three, you'll still need to find food seeds to grow crops before you use up all your rations and starve. Once you've gotten stabilized and upgraded your gear, you'll be able to spend more time outside gathering resources, building more terraforming objects, and going on prolonged expeditions to explore the planet, which will be necessary to find the rarer resources required by higher tier objects. Most terraforming objects around this time can be placed outdoors or don't need much space inside, but when you transition to the biomass stage you'll need to expand your base infrastructure considerably to begin the cultivation of raw materials necessary to craft fertilizer, mutagen, and other biochemical items. You'll then shift into the insects stage and beyond, which means its time to cultivate the growth of life forms in incubators to begin building up your new terraforming indexes for them. you'll also unlock the space trading rocket, giving you the chance to mine and craft items to export for profit so you can buy back powerful but expensive items to really give your infrastructure a boost.

* CommonplaceRare: Fabric. Until you unlock the biolab and can craft it yourself, fabric is an uncommon item to find in storage containers and otherwise has no set spawn points in the world, so it's entirely plausible you'll find several chunks of iridium and uranium inside crates but not one bundle of fabric.
* ConvectionSchmonvection: The south-east biome is a volcanic region with active lava flows, and you can walk around without any difficulty. Slightly subverted in that there ''are'' spots of heated ground that damage you if you touch them.

** Once you unlock the advanced crafting station, you can craft a jetpack, provided you either find rocket engines around or gather enough iridium to refine into rods, neither of which is too difficult if you know where to look. The jetpack drastically increases your movement speed, allows you to make longer jumps between gaps, and lets you ascend high-angle slopes more easily. Exploration begins a ''lot'' easier from then on, and you've only just begun your second stage of terraforming.

** It's possible for your terraforming stage to reach insect, fish, and amphibious life, and you'll start to find lifeforms in the wild, but your progress screen will stay at zero unless you build an incubator and start mutating life yourself. May again be justified by Sentinel Corps' monitoring, and one could HandWave that these lifeforms only count towards your terraforming index if you actively help them proliferate. Downplayed with the Procedural Wrecks update; while wildlife will proliferate around the planet on its own, the species you're placing in your incubators and habitats will grow particularly numerous, demonstrating your impact on the ecosystem.

* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Ikhlas' logs speak of their desire to build a rocket and leave the planet, but as they continue they ponder if it would be better to give up and live out their life in lonely but comfortably solitude. They also say that the longer they spend on the planet, the more attached to it they feel. It may just be that they're getting used to their environment and seriously weighing their options, but the context of the message implies that there may be some sort of mysterious power compelling them not to want to leave. [[spoiler:As you learn about the Wardens, the latter option becomes more and more feasible.]]

* PowerGlows: Higher-tier resources (uranium, iridium, osmium, zeolite, pulsar quartz) emit light, which makes it easier to take notice of them since they're in limited supply and necessary to craft a lot of important objects.

* SceneryPorn: Even when the planet is a lifeless rock, there's a natural beauty to it -- vast deserts, massive caverns full of gleaming crystals, a volcanic region with waterfalls of lava, an aluminum field with glittering silver rock formations, and so forth. As you continue your terraforming work, the sky turns blue and cloudy, barren regions fill with water and form rivers and lakes, and the rocky ground will slowly turn a vibrant green as plantlife begins to proliferate.

* SurvivalistStash: Supply crates are littered around the planet and contain a number of supplies that'll certainly be useful, including seeds to grow food, blueprints for new items to craft, and possibly food, water, and oxygen supplies. There are also Golden Crates, which are exactly what they sound; they contain higher-tier loot including the higher-tier "rod" type of resources, rocket engines, and golden seeds that give the largest oxygen bonus of any plant. [[spoiler:There's also the crate found in the concealed cave with Xiaoden's remains, which contains loot even better than golden crates and more of it, too.]]

* TechTree: An atypical variant. Each aspect of the Terraforming index -- O2, heat, pressure, and biomass (which further breaks down into plants, insects, and animals) -- has a list of objects you can unlock by increasing that value, as well as a list for the Terraforming index itself. Each tree is independent of the others, so if you rush to crank up your planet's oxygen levels without paying attention to heat or pressure, you'll still unlock items in the oxygen tech path. In-universe, the tech tree is explained by Sentinel Corps monitoring your progress on terraforming the planet, and as your efforts show results they'll authorize you to receive blueprints for new objects to help you further.

* UnintentionallyUnwinnable: It's possible, though difficult, to trap yourself inside a structure with no doorway and no resources to build one. You can't demolish a structure while you're inside it, so you're doomed to die a slow death of starvation or thirst, and since you respawn in the nearest structure when you die, you're trapped forever. Fortunately there's the "Unstuck" key.

** It's possible for your terraforming stage to reach insect, fish, and amphibious life, and you'll start to find lifeforms in the wild, but your progress screen will stay at zero unless you build an incubator and start mutating life yourself. May again be justified by Sentinel Corps' monitoring, and one could HandWave that these lifeforms only count towards your terraforming index if you actively help them proliferate.

** Some items can only be acquired by looting storage crates. One random meteor event has shipping container impact the planet releasing a handful of storage crates, so even if you loot all the pre-placed ones, there's still a chance you can get these exclusive items randomly.

* GoldColoredSuperiority: Across the board, golden items are the rarest and most effective items -- golden seeds, golden butterfly larvae, golden fish eggs, and golden frog eggs, all provide the highest bonus of their type. There's also golden crates, rare supply crates that always carry high-tier items, including a guaranteed golden seed and a golden effigy, a display item that acts as a trophy.

* GreenRocks: Pulsar quartz, glowing purple crystals that are the rarest naturally-occurring resource in the game, and require other rare materials to synthesize at a crafting station, including uranium, iridium, and methane. Whatever it is, its a component of fusion generators and teleporters.