Video Game / The Planet Crafter

The Planet Crafter is a Survival Sandbox PC game by Miju Games released in April 2024.

The premise is simple - the Player Character is a criminal who agreed to have their sentence commuted in exchange for becoming a "planet crafter" for the Sentinel Corps. You're dropped down on an unnamed planet in a small capsule pod barely the size of a car, with nothing but a Magic Tool you can use to excavate resources and build structures. Your goal is to terraform this barren, lifeless rock into a lush, habitable planet, and if you succeed you'll be set free. Easy, right?

Planet Crafter is notable for a couple things, the most important of which is that there is no combat element to the gameplay whatsoever: there's no weapons and no enemies to use them on, and the developers have made it clear that won't change. The "survival" aspect is that the planet is inhospitable and you regularly need to retreat to the safety of a shelter to literally catch your breath, and also have to scrounge up food from wrecks and supply crates until you get the means to grow crops. If you die, don't worry, Death Is Cheap, you'll respawn inside the nearest habitable structure with some of your inventory gone (how much and if you can get it back depends on the difficulty). Aside from survival, the game's emphasis is on terraforming the planet by building machines that produce oxygen, heat, and increase atmospheric pressure; later you'll also monitor the growth of plants and animals. As your terraforming indexes increase, Sentinel Corps will take recognition of your budding success by authorizing new blueprints to help you further, and you'll see the planet around you slowly transform into a blue-skied, grassy paradise.

There is also a story element to the game. You're not the first planet crafter that's been sent to this planet, and while clearly they didn't succeed in their mission, what happened to them is for you to discover. Also, Sentinel Corps has a particular interest in the planet because many spacecraft and satellites have crashed here and an attempt to build a Portal Network on the planet went catastrophically wrong. Yet in each instance no one has been able to escape the planet or mount a rescue. Even sending transmissions to the planet is difficult due to radio interference. Clearly there's something strange about this planet, but if you'll survive and explore long enough to find out remains to be seen.

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This game contains examples of:

• Action Survivor: The mysterious Ikhlas was not a planet crafter, they were the lone survivor of a shuttle crash and decided to do their best to survive and eventually build a rocket to get off the planet. They didn't have a multi-tool like you do, they had to build everything by hand, but they still managed to live at least five years on the planet, built multiple bunkers around the area, and were able to achieve something resembling comfort with a steady supply of food, water, and heat. It's ambiguous what happened to Ikhlas in the end, but they were clearly very determined to survive no matter the odds.
• Always Check Behind the Chair: Golden supply crates are often well-hidden in the environment and you'll have to poke into every tiny crevice and look behind every rock to even get a glimpse of some of them.
• And Your Reward Is Clothes: The base features you can build include a bed, sofa, and desk chair, which are entirely aesthetical and serve no practical purpose (the desk and/or table are at least required to build monitors on). Once you unlock the space trading rocket, you can buy variants of these items that let you customize their colors (the default ones are always blue). The most expensive items available for purchase are blueprints for 3x3 rooms, which are only useful for making cool base designs at this stage, as their high price coupled with when you get the trading rocket means you surely have a well-established base already.
• Anti-Frustration Features
  • Due to the game's small development team, there's a lot of issues with clipping into environment objects, and getting trapped while you're low on supplies can be fatal. The developers give players an assist, an "unstuck" key that shifts you up and back a bit, and mashing it can let you get out of wherever you were trapped. It can also be used to bypass intended obstacles, but players are expected to adhere to the honor system.
  • Your landing pod cannot be deconstructed, nor can the crafting station inside it. This ensures you'll never be put in an Unintentionally Unwinnable scenario, because you'll always have a place to catch your breath and start making items from scratch again. You're further unable to build anything within the pod or in its immediate vicinity so you can't accidentally cut yourself off from the interior.
  • 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.
  • 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, it'll just stop functioning, and you can salvage it no problem. An early message from Riley even warns you that it may be a good idea to build at a higher altitude, so players hopefully don't build too much of their infrastructure in areas that get flooded.
  • 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 to improve your power grid.
  • With procedural wrecks, nothing is permanently missable or in limited supply; there's always a chance to find whatever it is you want inside crates in those new places, and you can do so forever.
• Apocalyptic Log: All wrecks you can explore have at least one terminal left functional that contains a message giving you an idea of what kind of ship it was and if anyone survived. You can also find the bunkers of previous planet crafters containing their journal entries as they tried to survive.
• Artistic License – Physics: As even the Fandom Wiki notes, the values given for things like oxygen, heat, and atmospheric pressure do not match Earth's by the time you're growing grass and seeing insects begin to pop up. Nevermind that even with you helping out by spreading around seeds and actively speeding up the terraforming process, there's no way it would go as fast as it does in the game, where you're liable to reach this point in a matter of weeks, depending on how fast you work. Don't overthink it too much.
• Black Box: Given that the game is set in the 31st century, some of the technology is so fantastical as to be undefinable.
  • The recycling machine can break down any object into its base components. While this is feasible some of the time, it falls apart when you start putting biological items into it — somehow the machine can convert an insect larva into a different type of larva, a tray of mutagenic goo, and a bag of fertilizer. The mutagen can further be broken down into a bacteria tray, a cannister of compressed gas, and a chunk of sulfur. It can even break down spare oxygen tanks into cobalt and act as a refrigerator by converting bottled water into ice.
  • Machine optimizers and fuses. Somehow by building optimizers and putting fuses in them, the output of nearby machines can be improved multiple times over without any drawback or increasing the machine's energy consumption (not counting the energy to run the optimizer).
• Boring Yet Practical: Lower-tier objects are of course less efficient than their higher-tier variants, but as a trade-off are easier to craft and so may be preferable in the early game when you can't reliably farm rarer resources yet. It also means you can plop them down most anywhere when you want to free up some inventory space and have the resources to craft a few solar panels or drilling machines.
• Broken Bridge: When you begin exploring the planet at the start of the game, you'll find several caves that are inaccessible due to a build-up of ice. You have to raise the planet's temperature to a certain threshold for the ice to begin to melt, and over time it will and you can go deeper. The caves actually have multiple types of ice within them, and the ones deeper underground need the overall temperature raised higher for them to melt.
• Changing Gameplay Priorities: Your immediate priority will be ensuring your own survival; you can only venture outside your pod briefly before you'll have to come back inside to replenish your oxygen supply, you'll need to scavenge ice to melt for water, and while your food meter depletes slowest of your three attributes, you'll still have to find food seeds to grow crops and have to terraform high enough to be able to build growers before you use up the rations you start with. Once you've had time to start establishing a base and upgrade your gear, you'll be able to more comfortably spend longer periods outside and can go exploring the planet for rarer resources necessary to build more complex devices. Terraforming at this stage is a matter of build-and-forget-it, but once you get into biomass you'll need to start building a stronger infrastructure for mass production of biochemical products like fertilizer, bacteria, and mutagen, which are crucial to making proper progress on insects and animals. Along the way you'll also unlock the space trading rocket, allowing you to start producing items to sell for profit, and later the portal generator, allowing you to visit procedurally generated wrecks around the planet. Both of these things get you resources to boost your terraforming efficiency without just scaling up to more machines, as you close in on your final terraforming goal to complete the game.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • While exploring wrecks, you'll find some of them have a fusion reactor deep inside them, but there's nothing you can do with it. Much later into the game, you'll be able to craft energy cells to reactivate them, restoring power to the wreck and opening doors for you to explore further.
  • One of the most inhospitable places you'll explore is the Meteor Crater, which is covered in a thick blanket of (presumably toxic) gas, and the massive meteor in the center is still giving off heat. When you get to the last of their cities, you'll learn that the meteor's impact wiped out the Wardens.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: While basic resources tend to be dull in color, higher-tier resources are color-coded and glow for easy recognition, and objects that use them as a primary component tend to glow the same color: iridium is red, uranium is green, osmium is blue, zeolite is white, and pulsar quartz is purple.
• Commonplace Rare: 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 go through the game looting dozens of chunks of rare ores and plant and food seeds, but find not one scrap of fabric.
• Convection, Schmonvection: 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, and you take a lot of damage if you actually go into the lava.
• Death World: While there's no hostile lifeforms on the planet, it's prone to frequent meteor showers and sandstorms and lacks a breathable atmosphere. Message logs and the bunkers you find inform you that you're not the first planet crafter sent here, and the others are all assumed dead. This is an Enforced Trope by the Wardens, who set up a shield around the planet to disable any human electronics that neared it, to try and keep you away from it and make sure anyone who survived to the surface couldn't leave.
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Golden crates contain random but high-quality items. One possible spoil from them is a super alloy rod, which can't be crafted until late in the game when the planet is lush and grassy. Super alloy rods are used in the crafting of higher-tier rockets, so you can launch a tier three or four GPS rockets to map out the planet long before you'd be able to otherwise.
  • 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 becomes a lot easier from then on, and you've only just begun your second stage of terraforming.
• Dramatic Irony: Xiaodan's log from 3055 has him note that it's toxic outside and plants refuse to grow underground, and he estimates it'll be two years before the planet is in a position where it could be successfully terraformed. He just has to survive until then. He didn't, and that time period is about when the game starts and you'll find much more success than he did, as he expected.
• Due to the Dead: Of one craft that crashed on the planet, the survivors buried their dead and marked them with makeshift gravemarkers from the wreckage.
• Easter Egg: You can find the corpse of Xiaodan, the planet crafter who was sent here a few years before you and didn't survive, behind a destructible rock wall near the center of the map. A crate nearby contains a random assortment of high-quality items.
• Easy Logistics: The power grid is entirely wireless, all objects will be provided with power and all generators will add to the total power available, no matter their proximity to each other or your base structures.
• Everything Is An I Pod In The Future: Most objects and structures you build are white with curved designs and black and blue highlights.
• Foreshadowing: In a message from Riley, a friend of yours, they mention that a piece of advice they dug up for planet crafters is to build their base somewhere higher up, but they're not sure why. In the default spawning position (and potentially several others), your starting location will eventually be flooded as the planet gains a water cycle; if you built your base on lower ground, you'll have to pack up and move.
• Gameplay and Story Integration
  • As the planet becomes more habitable, natural ice deposits vanish because the planet is warming up. Though you can still store ice in unrefrigerated containers, carry it around with you, and if you drop it on the ground it won't de-spawn.
  • Once the atmosphere gets to a point it's breathable, you don't need an oxygen tank to venture outside anymore and can move about freely. As you close in on that threshold you can craft an oxygen mask that lets you breathe the air to an extent, represented by slowing the rate your oxygen depletes, and as the oxygen levels keep rising the efficiency of the oxygen mask improves until its obsolete. Similarly, you can craft a water filtration mask to let you drink water from the lakes that spring up.
  • Enforced in the endgame. Although you can get to a point you can finally escape the planet, to actually do so you must disable the Warden device that emits the interference field that causes ships to crash. This assumes players have been heeding the nudges that they should really explore the Warden ruins more and read the tablets in them to understand why they can't leave yet and what they have to do to make it possible.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Being too close to an impact site during a meteor shower will damage you, but it's possible to survive it if your food (HP) is high enough. That's right, you can tank a direct hit from a meteorite. But it's only the meteorite that hurts you, the large rocks sent flying by its impact won't.
  • Your multi-tool is only able to deconstruct specific objects, even when other aspects of the environment are of the same materials - you can use it to gather ice but not on the large chunks of ice blocking caves, and it can remove fallen debris in wrecks but not deconstruct any part of the wreck freely. May be justified since your progress is being monitored by Sentinel Corps, and they may have configured it to only function on authorized materials.
  • It's possible for your terraforming stage to reach insect, fish, and animal 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 Hand Wave 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.
• Gold-Colored Superiority: 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. The Procedural Wrecks update added new varieties of quartzes, the rarest of which (and the only one that can be synthesized at the bio-lab) is the gold-colored Solar Quartz.
• Guide Dang It!: Numerous objects can only be built in certain terrain — outside on open ground, indoors, indoors or outdoors as long as it's on an artificial surface, or in water. While some of these are fairly intuitive, others are not, and you'll have to figure out where they can be built by moving the ghost object around and waiting for it to turn green.
• Green Rocks: 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. The Procedural Wrecks update adds more colored varieties that are used to power the long-range portal to visit distant wrecks.
• Heart Container: You can craft oxygen tanks to increase the maximum amount of oxygen you're carrying with you, which is the determining factor in how long you can stay outside before suffocating.
• Magic Tool: The small hand-tool you begin with is all you're given and all you need. It's used to gather resources by seeming disintegrating them into a portable form with some kind of beam, and then reconstitutes them into objects and structures at your command. It can even demolish structures instantly once it's given an upgrade chip for that.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: 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. As you learn more about the Wardens, the latter option starts looking more feasible.
• Not the Intended Use: The recycling machine breaks down objects put inside it into their base components. It's a handy way to repurpose excess items you know longer need or crafted too much of, but it can also be used to break down items you found around the planet to get their components back, which may include items you can make wider use of but aren't able to craft yourself yet. You can also exploit it to free up inventory space while exploring; use what you've found to craft something, then break it back down once you're home.
• Peninsula of Power Leveling: The Lost Paradise. Once you reach the insects stage, butterfly larva spawn here very frequently, and they're high-tier ones including golden butterflies. This not only makes the most potent larvae in the game farmable, but excess larva can be broken down in the recycling machine into other valuable resources including tier two fertilizer and mutagen. It's possible to build a scaffolding around the area (to avoid navigating the terrain) and a teleporter for easy access, and the player can just walk in a circle for five-ten minutes filling up their pockets with larva.
• Power Glows: Higher-tier resources (uranium, iridium, osmium, zeolite, quartzes) 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.
• Power Nullifier: The Wardens set up a barrier around the planet that drains the energy of electronic devices that approach the planet. This is why the jump portal catastrophically failed when it was powered up, why so many spacecraft crash here, and why sending and receiving transmissions is so difficult.
• Precursors: The mysterious "Wardens" lived on this planet before you, and remnants of their structures can still be found deep underground. Played with in that this isn't their home planet, they left their home planet of Treha and came here to get away from humans in the first place.
• Room Full of Crazy: Xiaodan was a planet crafter who came to the planet before you. One of his bunkers contains a room plastered with computer screens, all of which display the standard welcoming tutorial message from Sentinel Corps. It's unclear if Xiaodan built all these screens himself or scavenged them from other planet crafter landing pods he found.
• Scenery Porn: 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, the rocky ground will slowly turn a vibrant green with grass and trees growing, and insect and animal life proliferate.
• Schizo Tech: The Wardens lived in underground cities with buildings carved from stone and connected by wooden scaffolding, but had technology so advanced they put a Power Nullifier field around the planet that interferes with human technology. Their messages indicate they adopted a low-tech lifestyle to try and avoid notice.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: The Wardens were not only capable of interstellar travel, but somehow put a field around the planet that disrupts human electronics. It's strongly implied that the source of this field is a mysterious large, glowing yellow orb you find in the Ancient City.
• Survivalist Stash: 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 contain higher-tier loot including the refined rods of ore, rocket engines, and golden seeds that give the largest oxygen bonus of any plant. 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.
• Techno Wreckage: The planet is littered with crashed spacecraft and satellites you can explore. Some of them are implicitly passenger vessels, others were for shipping, and still others are small and possibly private craft.
• Tech Tree: 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 and the Terraforming tech path, though the latter will be much slower since 2/3rds of the individual indexes are doing far less work. 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.
• Uncertain Doom:
  • The Warden messages write that they will not flee the planet to escape the meteor impact and accept their civilization will be lost. However, messages found elsewhere indicate that at least a few of them decided to break off and leave. If they succeeded, and if the Wardens who remained behind were totally wiped out, is unclear.
  • Ikhlas' final journal entry is dated almost 20 years before your arrival, and since there's no sign of them being alive anymore, it's likely they died. But their final bunker is located in a cave leading to a Warden settlement, so who knows what may have happened to them when they found the site.
• Unintentionally Unwinnable: 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 which can shift you out of the structure.
• Unobtainium: "Super alloy", a mysterious material that is required for most late-game objects and structures. It's unclear exactly what it is; the player can craft it for one each iron, titanium, magnesium, cobalt, silicon, and aluminum, and it occurs naturally on the planet and in meteor showers, but the material is a lump of multi-colored metal that looks nothing like any existing alloy of the mentioned elements.
• Video Game Randomizer: The player can set a game to randomize the position of pre-placed ores and the veins where ores can be mined. Needing to scrounge to find otherwise common ores while rare ores dot the landscape everywhere has a huge impact on how freely you can craft certain objects and where you'll want to set up your base.
• Wham Shot:
  • The sight of the giant stone doors will surely be this for most players, and an achievement pops up just for finding it to underscore you've found something very important. It's likely the first indication you'll get of the existence of the Wardens.
  • The discovery of the Mushroom River: long before the planet even has a water cycle, you can find a large underground cave with water and massive fungi growing it in. The cave also contains artificial structures and the first Warden Key.
• Where It All Began: The default starting position is a valley near the center of the map. After you've explored the planet a bit and found Xiaoden's bunkers built across its surface, you may be wondering what happened to them. Their corpse is only a few dozen meters from your pod, hidden behind a destructible rock wall.
• The World Is Just Awesome: A planet that was once orange rock and yellow sand will become a thriving ecosystem with a breathable atmosphere, a water cycle, and plant and animal life. And it will all have been by your own hard-working hands.