YMMV / The Planet Crafter

• Cheese Strategy
  • One of the achievement is to have 100,000 terra tokens, a goal that takes a long time to reach when the most expensive item you can produce is worth 80 and you can only ship 25 at a time. But the achievement can be trivialized by selling fuses, which are worth thousands of tokens each. A shipment or two can get you over the threshold to earn the achievement, and then you can just buy back the fuses you just sold for the same price.
  • Things become much easier in the late game by adopting a simple strategy in the early game: avoid opening storage crates. The contents of storage crates found around the planet scale up as your terraforming index increases, so the later you open them the better their contents. By the time the planet's water cycle is forming, you can expect to regularly find rare ores (including refined rods of ore), rocket engines, biochemical products like fertilizer and mutagen, rare plant and food seeds, and even pulsar quartz, the rarest material in the game.
• Game-Breaker: There are many ways to send your terraforming index into orbit.
  • Golden seeds give a +600% oxygen production bonus to any object they're placed inside. Finding just one or two in the early game can rapidly progress your terraforming index and send your oxygen value twice as high or more than heat or pressure.
  • Fuses and machine optimizers. Fuses give a massive boost to the production of a particular terraforming value when placed inside an optimizer, which gives this boost to up to five machines in a decent radius. Suddenly a handful of machines become even more efficient than their higher-tier counterparts, and when placed properly fuses and optimizers can boost your terraforming rate for a particular value by a factor of ten or more. Then you unlock tier two optimizers which can have three fuses inserted in them and effect up to eight machines, and things rise exponentially. And don't worry about having to power it, because there are also fuses for increasing the energy production of generators, allowing a handful of reactors can produce enough energy to power a continent.
  • It's possible to enter the Lost Paradise before insects begin appearing, if you know where to go and what to do in order to get there. You'll find two golden butterfly larvae in a chest there, which gives the best boost of any insect in the game to that terraforming index. You won't need to even touch the incubator for a while, because the two golden butterflies will produce such a boost that there's no point trying to mutate other species.
• Good Bad Bugs: The game is full of them, owing to early access mode and the ease with which you can move about the planet.
  • Quickly moving your mouse cursor when constructing an object will let you build it somewhere you couldn't normally. This allows such exploits like clipping living quarters into walls and floors, building objects meant to be outside indoors and vice-versa, and squeezing objects closer together than intended. None of this particularly breaks the game balance though, so it isn't minded by the playerbase.
  • It's common for storage chests and other pre-placed objects found in the environment to respawn if you leave and return. At worst this is a nuisance since you can loose track of which crates you've already looted, at best it means you can come back to deconstruct them over and over for free resources, which can be quite helpful when playing with randomized ores.