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The Planet Crafter

You start on a hostile barren planet and slowly transform it into a green one by adjusting the atmosphere. It's basically an incremental game in disguise, but the progression system is well integrated that you don't notice. It's very Subnautica-esque in terms of resource gathering, exploring and base building. It's addictive to keep upgrading your gear and the base as you explore the planet and slowly see it start to change over time. It's janky and lacking some QoL features, but also very impressive for such a small team. I think there are a few issues with pacing (it's too long, and it's very drawn out towards the end), but definitely worth trying.

Pros

  • New blueprints are unlocked based on terraforming progress
  • Excellent atmosphere
  • Meteor storms leave new resources
  • New areas unlock as ice melts at certain temperatures
  • Very similar to Subnautica in terms of exploring wrecks, survival and building styles
  • You build machines which require power, which raise different attributes of the Terraforming Index. As the index rises, you unlock new technology
  • Chests have built-in labels
  • The building system generally works really well. There's a lot of snapping pieces together - although putting a base on foundations that line up is impossible because the buildings are larger than the foundation grid
  • As the landscape changes around you, new resources are uncovered. Plants bring up things from underground, and larva start appearing on the ground after you reach trees level
  • Eventually, once the terraforming index is high enough, you can breathe the air and drink lake water
  • Eventually, you unlock teleporters to get around faster, and there are no loading screens
  • Large variety in biomes, which change over time
  • Huge number of resources
  • A large tech tree
  • Actually has a story to find

Cons

  • REALLY needs a "sort items into nearby chests". Of all my playtime, dozens of hours was walking around my base, manually putting items into chests
  • You can build anything in mid-air with no support
  • Movement is quite janky
  • I find it very confusing that the oxygen meter isn't in seconds. The upgrades go from 100, 140, 200, 280 etc, but they don't last 100 seconds, 140 seconds etc, just roughly about that number.
  • It would be nicer to see the temperature in Celsius rather than "nK"
  • You can't hide beacons you place, so once you've built a few, the screen is really cluttered
  • There's a lull mid-game where you initially unlocked a whole bunch of stuff, then there are hours where you're not sure what to build next and just wait for plants/trees
  • The endgame takes way too long. I eventually gave up at about 90% terraforming because you're just either building more of the same thing, or waiting
  • Points of interest and areas of the map are a long way from each other, and your inventory is tiny. Hauling materials back and forth from home base and exploring takes ages, even with the faster jetpacks. Once you unlock teleporters, the problem is solved, but that's about 40 hours in
  • There are invisible walls all over the place
  • Once you've pinned a recipe, you can only unpin it from that specific crafting screen. So if you pinned a rocket recipe, you have to go back to the landing pad to get rid of it
  • When asteroids land, it's cool that they drop actual rock objects onto the ground. However, I can't get at the resources underneath them, so there's a Pulsar Quartz asteroid in front of me, and 5 pink quartz that are stuck under asteroid fragments that I can't reach
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