The Planet Crafter

I honestly don’t know how I missed this. Planet Crafter turned out to be one of the most enjoyable games I’ve played in the last five years. It’s one of those titles that sneaks up on you and suddenly takes over your evenings. And mornings. And whenever you have time. The Planet Crafter is an open-world crafting survival game where your mission is to turn a dry, dead rock of a planet into a place humans could actually live. You’re juggling oxygen, food, water, power while also building machines, exploring wrecks, mining resources, and slowly pushing nature back into existence. There's something deeply satisfying about watching this once-hostile world bloom into something beautiful, all because of your efforts. The game has this really addictive loop. Every time you think you’ve got things under control, it throws a new system or milestone your way. You're always working toward something, but somehow, you keep getting sidetracked. You just log in to do a certain thing and then suddenly it’s three hours later and you’ve built a biodome, unlocked jet boots, and discovered a new canyon. What really stands out is how the environment changes with your progress. It’s not just cosmetic either. New paths open up, lakes form, weather shifts—it makes exploration feel dynamic. If I have to nitpick then... Music here is great—really atmospheric—but there's just not enough of it. After a while it starts to feel like you’re hearing the same couple of tracks on loop, which can get a little repetitive, especially during long play sessions. Also, the game is janky. But in a charming way. There’s clipping, weird physics moments, random graphical bugs—but they don’t ruin anything. In fact, there’s a dedicated button to unstick yourself, and another if your vehicle decides gravity isn’t a thing today. In the end, it just works. Despite the rough edges, or maybe even because of them, Planet Crafter delivers a kind of scrappy magic. You can feel the love that went into it. Highly re

You realize relatively quickly that this game comes from a small indie team and was only recently released from Early Access. There are still small rough edges everywhere. Nevertheless, the developers' vision is visible the whole time: to develop a game that really gives you the feeling of changing a world. The highlight is therefore undoubtedly the terraforming - and here the game shows absolutely no weakness. It is incredibly impressive what the developers have achieved here! Watching the changes everywhere - it's all incredibly satisfying. The world is crammed full of secrets and invites you to explore at every turn. Here, however, I find the narrative style of titles such as Subnautica much more captivating. The map is hand-built and therefore limited. This is good because the world doesn't feel so generic. On the other hand, however, it is finite and feels relatively small. However, the developer is reportedly planning to expand it further in the future. Of course, this type of game also contains a certain amount of grind. And this leads me to the biggest weakness (in my opinion): As with any game of this type, you spend a huge amount of time in your inventory. Its capacity is in short supply, especially at the beginning, as items cannot be stacked. In most cases, some of the valuable space is also blocked by supplies such as oxygen and water. As a player, you therefore have to be prepared to spend a lot of time in your inventory. Some automation is introduced in the late game to alleviate this a bit. I wish that the developers (in general, not just those of Planet Crafter) would finally find the courage to try something new here. The technical framework is very solid: In over 50 hours of playing time, I have actually had NOT A SINGLE crash! TL;DR: Very entertaining creative base building and extremely satisfying planetary terraforming, all wrapped up in a very charming game with a reliable technical foundation.

Really enjoyable and cool little indie game. Crafting, exploring, survival ... in Space. Subnautica on land if you will. As for some unfair ratings here, especially in regard to a Linux experience: - runs perfectly fine on Linux - this game does not support Linux directly and doesn't offer binaries to run native under Linux, so you will take the translation-layer road with Wine/Proton (as is often the case nowadays). It is a Windows-game that does Windows-things. - On Steam, Valve takes care of the set-up and tweaking. How do you do it with GOG when GOG Galaxy is not available for Linux? I bet Heroic Games launcher (as I do)? Here you have to sometimes do a bit of the tweaking yourself. You need to know if a game e.g. requires some VC++ libraries and which ones to enable in Wine-tricks and so on (like for Horizon Zero Dawn). There can also be other obstacles in file-naming syntax or other tweaks necessary. - Usually, when a game gives me trouble on my first try through Heroic, I just go and install it through Lutris (like I had with Dorfromantik or Lego Pirates of the Caribbean). On Lutris, the community takes care of the tweaking and install process set-up and has written install skripts to tune the game. @ObscureDelight: This game runs perfectly fine, if you know what you are doing and what your problem is. White Screen and missing fonts? Not the games fault! Try Lutris or run to Steam - your choice. But don't blame the game and give unfair reviews

I wanted to like this game more than I did, but it doesn't have enough to hold my interest. I'm ~9 hours in and the gameplay loop doesn't have much more to it than I encountered in the first couple of hours. Pick up resources from nodes on the ground, run back to the base, craft something to increase the tick rate of the terraforming level, repeat

Like subnautica, but on a barren planet. Suitable for casual gamers as well.