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Gryphonadmin
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Nov-01-22, 06:45 PM (EDT)
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"The Planet Crafter"
 
   This is yet another one in a seemingly inexhausible series of outer space walking sims, in which you, the player character, find yourself stranded alone on a hostile planet armed with nothing more than some futuristic camping equipment with suspiciously miraculous matter rearrangement capabilities. Much like chore simulators, I like these dumb games almost in spite of myself, even though the premise is silly and the games are often moderately-to-severely janktastic. They rarely ever seem to get out of Early Access (but then, I think that's true of games across the board) and they usually don't have endings to speak of, but I find something in their core gameplay loops oddly compelling.

The Planet Crafter is a little different in that the goal isn't simply to survive and/or escape the planet; you're trying to terraform it. You start out on an unnamed planet bearing an eerie similarity to Mars and your goal is to make it Earthlike.

Alone.

Yeah, it's preposterous, but it's also pretty fun if you're into that kind of thing, because your efforts actually affect the setting. As you wander around improving your survival prospects and building things, first you turn the sky blue, then you make it rain, and so forth. The progress metrics the game tracks for you (once you've built the appropriate piece of equipment) are as ludicrous as the rest of the science in the game—for instance, you get liquid water at what the screen claims is an ambient temperature of a few dozen millikelvin—but if you ignore the units and just assume that the climbing numbers on the readout Must Mean Something, the sense of progression is real.

What I mean by "the rest of the science" is the usual stuff you find in games like this, that have vague pretensions of being hard-ish scifi but were clearly written by people who only took science in high school. :) For instance, the resources you collect are just lying around in lumps on the surface. Pure silicon, chunks of iron, things that just don't exist in nature in those forms. The devs think iridium is a red glowing metal that generates heat, uranium in its natural state glows bright green, and osmium is a blue glowing crystal that makes things more durable. The recipe for crafting a refill for your breathable air supply is... two blocks of elemental cobalt. Eh???? That kind of silliness. You just have to live with it in this kind of game, because (as is usually the case with scifi games) making it scientificially realistic would also make it absolutely unplayable.

Especially at the beginning, the gameplay is a fair bit like Subnautica, except not underwater, in that your principal concern is running out of air. Until you've progressed to the larger oxygen tanks and increased your inventory space to the point where you can afford to carry several recharge canisters, your air supply limits how far you dare to explore. You spend a lot of your time making calculations of the "If I go into this cave, how far into it can I go before I have to turn back or build an outpost?" variety. As you get farther along, this becomes less constraining, and ultimately it's possible to arrive at a point where the planet has a breathable atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that's pretty much where the gameplay ends at the moment. It took me about 40 hours to get to that stage, and the progress meter to the next is proceeding agonizingly slowly, I think deliberately on the devs' part because the next stage isn't actually in the game yet. The flavor text early on suggests that it is intended to have an ending at some point, but that point has not yet arrived, so once you get that far in, it looks like further play in that save is just puttering around.

Still, it's good times while it lasts if you're into that kind of thing.

Oh, I forgot to mention one of the key differences between TPC and games like Subnautica: there's no combat. You don't get the usual twist where it turns out the planet isn't as uninhabited as you thought when something comes out of the darkness while you're exploring a cave and eats you. The only life on this planet will be what you put there, which, to the extent that it's actually implemented so far, doesn't go beyond plants and some very pretty butterflies. Which is nice. The combat in these games always feels fairly gratuitous and tacked-on, like someone spoke up in a pre-launch meeting and said, "Where's the THREAT? There has to be a THREAT." (Looking at you, No Man's Sky.)

You can get hit by a meteor, though. There's even an achievement for that. It's called "Not the face!" :)

TLDR: Another silly space survival game with bad science and oddly engrossing gameplay, with a twist that makes it feel unusually rewarding. Recommended if you're into that kind of game, definitely not if you aren't. Currently 20 bucks on Steam, with a free demo available.

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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  Subject     Author     Message Date     ID  
  RE: The Planet Crafter Moonsword Nov-03-22 1
  RE: The Planet Crafter Proginoskes Nov-23-22 2
  RE: The Planet Crafter Gryphonadmin Mar-01-23 3
  RE: The Planet Crafter Gryphonadmin Feb-25-24 4
  RE: The Planet Crafter ImpulsiveAlexia Feb-28-24 5
  RE: The Planet Crafter Spectrum Jun-21-24 6
     RE: The Planet Crafter Spectrum Jul-02-24 10
  RE: The Planet Crafter Gryphonadmin Jun-24-24 7
     RE: The Planet Crafter Kendra Kirai Jun-24-24 8
     RE: The Planet Crafter Nova Floresca Jun-24-24 9

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Moonsword
Member since Mar-15-22
31 posts
Nov-03-22, 09:20 AM (EDT)
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1. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   Now I'm picturing this as some hapless dimensional misadventure of Gryphon's. When he gets back, he's griping to Meiling or somebody about how loopy the whole thing was while he's eating his first burger or shyam in forever.

Why Meiling? Their vibe just seems about right to be the one he's complaining about some bizarre trip in an alien universe where he's banging crazy space rocks together periodically to make O2 to sate his oxygen addiction.


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Proginoskes
Member since Dec-3-09
235 posts
Nov-23-22, 11:02 PM (EDT)
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2. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   The gameplay is very different, but the title reminds me of the old Maxis game SimEarth. It was an incredibly ambitious title, in part a sincere attempt at as complete a simulation of an entire planet (geology, climate, biosphere, and civilization) as could be managed on a 386 running Windows 3.1. In "game" mode (as opposed to "experimental" mode), making changes costs "energy", which you regain at a limited rate. Two of the seven preset scenarios are terraforming Mars and terraforming Venus.


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Gryphonadmin
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22567 posts
Mar-01-23, 05:59 PM (EDT)
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3. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   A sizeable update dropped today; based on a quick reading of the patch notes, it looks like they've implemented the next "phase" of terraforming, aquatic life. There's also a new logistics system that automates moving resources around the map, which I'm gonna guess is why they've called this the "Fish & Drones" update. :)

I haven't played it yet, and there are big downloads ahead of it in the queue, so it'll probably be a while, but from the notes, it looks promising. The only thing I see in there that I don't like is that they nerfed Tier 3 ore extractors. It used to be that the T3 extractor was the goal, because it could get any material anywhere you put it (as opposed to the previous ones, which had to be someplace where the target resource existed naturally--e.g., you could only mine iridum in the Iridium Cave and so on). Now I guess they're going to be site-dependent like the lower tiers, so the only advantage they retain is that you can configure them to only get certain things.

I get why they did that--it's more logically linked to the way resources are distributed on the map, and it's meant to force people to build the logistics system so that the stuff from their far-flung network of site-dependent extractors comes back to base automatically--but still, that's slightly annoying. Even if the "get anything anywhere" version was kind of nonsensically OP. :)

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Gryphonadmin
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22567 posts
Feb-25-24, 09:37 PM (EDT)
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4. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   Just saw a news post on the game's Steam page that they're planning to come out of Early Access shortly. Since that's planned to come with a price increase, they've put it on sale beforehand - 15 bucks US at the moment. Just in case anyone's been intrigued but not 20 bucks' worth of intrigued.

I haven't actually played since the fish update in early '22. Uncertain whether I should give the current build a go or wait for 1.0...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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ImpulsiveAlexia
Member since Oct-22-20
123 posts
Feb-28-24, 10:43 PM (EDT)
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5. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   >For instance, the resources you collect are just lying
>around in lumps on the surface. Pure silicon, chunks of iron, things
>that just don't exist in nature in those forms.

Sounds like an Atelier game. ;)

Up to a certain point, your description sounded like something that could be paired up to a motion control system and a music player to make a modernized SF-flavored Walk It Out. Not sure that'd work after reading further, but...

Well I just want a modernized Walk It Out, is that so wrong?

-IA.

(received information not interpretable)


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Spectrum
Member since Dec-25-13
200 posts
Jun-21-24, 02:45 AM (EDT)
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6. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   I started this the other day looking for something comfy and was hooked on the demo.

It's enjoyable, though I'm running into occasional resource bottlenecks that make me grumble. :) (Aluminum pleeeeease...)


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Spectrum
Member since Dec-25-13
200 posts
Jul-02-24, 03:25 AM (EDT)
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10. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #6
 
   Okay, powered through and escaped the planet.

Fun game, though it seems to have turned into Factorio somehow by the end.


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Gryphonadmin
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22567 posts
Jun-24-24, 00:17 AM (EDT)
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7. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #0
 
   Frogs! My planet now has colorful frogs!

And I'm somehow launching space rockets that are seeding the planet from orbit with... bees?!

40-something percent of the way to mammals...

--G.
-><-
Benjamin D. Hutchins, Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief, & Forum Mod
Eyrie Productions, Unlimited http://www.eyrie-productions.com/
zgryphon at that email service Google has
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem esse delendam.


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Kendra Kirai
Member since May-22-16
649 posts
Jun-24-24, 03:25 AM (EDT)
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8. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #7
 
   Orbital drop bees. My god.
-- Batman, probably.


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Nova Floresca
Member since Sep-13-13
627 posts
Jun-24-24, 10:12 AM (EDT)
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9. "RE: The Planet Crafter"
In response to message #7
 
   >And I'm somehow launching space rockets that are seeding the planet
>from orbit with... bees?!

All I can think of is this.

Clip from "The Terrible Thunderlizards", a very 90s Saturday morning cartoon.
"This is probably a stupid question, but . . ."


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