Came up on my list and I’m giving is a shot, Planet Crafter is a hybrid game in the survival/exploration/crafting genre. The “definitive game” of this genre is Subnautica, a rather impressive mish-mash of ambience and story, with crafting elements. Planet Crafter emulates this to a degree, but with the polish expected of an Early Access game.

Now, I generally avoid Early Access games unless it fits a certain set of criteria, typically focused on a small development team trying to iron out an idea. I really like Subnautica, and I like crafting games, so this hits the right marks. That said, if I am paying for Early Access, I will review it to a degree.

The concept here is that you are stranded on a deserted planet to serve out a prison sentence. You have some very basic tasks to complete in order to get a “foothold”, and the larger goal then turns to terraforming the planet. Now, planet in the general sense, as you’re really only given a single map to explore, which undergoes various points of transform over time. That map is quite large, even when you’ve got a ton of movement abilities available. It takes a long time to reach a point where you won’t starve/asphyxiate/dehydrate to death while crossing it.

There’s a very basic shelter that allows you to restore oxygen (which insanely always requires a door to be constructed), so that’s one part easy enough. Creating extra water requires a decent amount of progress, and frankly knowledge that it’s possible. Starvation requires growing food, which is simple enough. So with those pieces in hand, you can explore the world, collect minerals, build stuff to unlock more stuff to build and so on.

Progress is gated through a terraforming index, which is calculated through other milestones (heat, pressure, biomass, etc..), as well as random blueprints. The net effect is that it’s entirely possible to unlock the ability to craft items long before you have the material to do so. Further, these milestones are weighted so that progress is not linear, but more logarithmic. The game progresses quickly to begin, then there are wide swaths of frankly waiting for a number to go up. The balance of this progress is not necessarily broken, as much as it needs optimization.

The act of crafting requires things. Material does NOT stack, and there’s so much out there that you will end up with 2 dozen chests of things just to stay sane. This creates a back & forth process of collecting things, bringing them back to storage, and collecting more things. Movement and inventory improvements quickly become essential to your sanity. The lack of “world diversity” here also means that it feels, and is, time padding.

And creating things is what you will spend 90% of your time doing, in particular one mid-tier element that is used everywhere (super alloy). You’ll end up creating 5 or so of every item at any given tier (e.g. there are 5 tiers of heaters) in order to make those numbers move. There lacks some balance with regards to materials needed to construct, and energy requirements for said things to run. This becomes glaringly obvious as you enter the nuclear age and there simply isn’t any obvious renewable source of uranium. Again, balancing.

The thing I have not talked about is story, which frankly there simply isn’t much to discuss. There’s no discovery carrot, and exploration is driven by the need to find a specific material rather than the desire to see more. The risk of exploration remains relatively the same from start to finish, which diminishes any real reward as you’re always walking around with what feels like a sword over your head.

One piece I think that is important to mention is friction. These are design choices that impact systems and interfaces that are counter-intuitive. The flow between interfaces and menus is an example. The ability to easily understand information. The expectation here is that you start with a lot of friction and that you gradually reduce that over time. In that being proficient with the systems is based on player skill as much as the actual systems. The largest point of friction here is the system complexity/dependency and lack of tools to address. You need a scale of material to move forward, but inventory sizes are so small, and the near complete lack of logistics (drones come at end game, essentially after game completion) mean that you are stuck in minutiae rather than progress. Super Alloy Rods are important, and you need 9 ingredients to make it, and needs 49 base materials. Collecting that material takes about 20 minutes, no matter what point of the game you are in. Now, I realize that Planet Crafter is not a logistics simulator, but friction points such as these are not fun.

In the current state of the game, there are some rather interesting ideas, ideas that are not found in their totality in other games. However, split across multiple games, those ideas are significantly more refined elsewhere. It’s a bit like how a buffet is cool to try things, but if you want good Italian food, you go to an Italian restaurant. Increased content is certainly a big piece of this puzzle, but at the same time, there’s a balance/refinement pass required as well, in particular for the mid-game. It’s an interesting sandbox to play.