The Planet Crafter Review: Terraforming Dust Into A Paradise

In The Planet Crafter, you take on the role of an astronaut. Your mission is restoring the atmosphere and biodiversity of a barren and lonely planet. To achieve a more liveable world, you gather resources, build your space station and various production chains, research, explore, expand, and automate. All this while managing the three survival mechanics: food, water, and oxygen levels. With the right strategy and a little patience, your planet transforms into a beautiful, lush paradise filled with plants, insects, and animals. Nothing feels more rewarding and motivating than the sight of your planet slowly being populated with life.

The Planet Crafter first entered Early Access on 24 March 2022 and had its 1.0 release on Steam on April 10, 2024, and is available for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. With a price of around 25 €/$ outside of sales, the game is rather inexpensive for the content and playtime it provides. Multiplayer co-op is available for up to 10 players per game world, of which everyone needs to own the game.

On 2 September 2024, the developer Miju Games released the free update Rover, which brought a buggy-like vehicle, two new biomes, additional creatures, and more. On top of that, an upcoming DLC called ‘Planet: Humble’ was announced!

But for now, let’s get into the gameplay and how co-op works and feels in The Planet Crafter. At the end of this review, you can find our verdict, a final score, and our recommendation for who this game is most suited for and who is better off exploring other spaces.

On the barren planet that you were dropped onto in a space capsule, you find no signs of life. Besides sand and mineral resources, the planet has little to offer. That is where you and your terraforming team come in. You set out to gather ore and minerals that are scattered on the ground with your mining tool. Always keeping your food, water, and especially oxygen levels in mind, you return to the safety of your stranded capsule to recharge your oxygen tank and store your loot in a chest.

Those are the first steps, and from there, you will walk a path that feels positively familiar to any fans of the survival-crafting genre yet refreshingly different as soon as you start building your space station. To transform ‘your’ planet into something worth living on, you have to restore an atmosphere with high enough oxygen levels and atmospheric pressure to enable breathing and temperatures that allow for ice to melt into lakes and plants to grow.

The further you progress in these three planetary features, the more advanced facilities you unlock. These are more efficient and provide new gameplay features. New buildings and equipment can additionally be unlocked by researching microchips on your base’s computer. Chips are most commonly found in space shuttle wrecks scattered around the world.

At the start of the game, you will feel very restricted by the amount of oxygen your suit can hold. You have to keep trips short, bring lots of oxygen capsules in your backpack, or build simple base structures underway to keep you from passing out. But the more you progress your planet’s atmospheric levels and your own equipment, the longer you can stay outside.

The evolution and the part we players take in it feel extremely satisfying to watch and motivating to keep you playing. Seldomly any terraforming felt as rewarding as looking back at minute-1-screenshots while watching the lake water slowly coming back or while standing amidst flower fields that are buzzing with bees and butterflies.

One of the goals will be completely restoring the atmosphere and repopulating it with plants, insects, and mammals. Another will be exploring every inch of the planet, uncovering riddles and environmental storytelling as well as diary entries and relics that tell you about this planet’s past and its inhabitants fate.

You find yourself in an open-world with parts that are handcrafted and parts that are procedurally generated to mix things up. In a more progressed game, you also unlock the Portal Generator, which acts as a type of expedition for your group. These special zones harbor rare quartz minerals and crates filled with more valuable loot than those on the overworld.

Managing your growing space station is a challenge of its own, yet we found it to be entertaining. The further you progress, the more items you will need to gather, store, and process. Part of this can be automated, which in turn is best done with the right setup and placement of storage containers and processing units. A challenging aspect for some players might be finding a way to organize everything and not lose overview.

The technology trees that grant you new buildings, tools, and machines might look impossible when just starting out. But as said before, the further you advance, the better and more efficient the machines that produce heat, oxygen, and pressure get. So by the time one heat advancement in the tech tree requires a number of 1 million, you will have the machinery to reach this goal in under 30 minutes (or even way, way less). Unlocking a new building, tool, or machine and their related recipes and mechanics is exciting and regularly gives your crew a sense of challenge and progression. Some of the advancements your character can unlock feel like a game changer, especially the jetpack.

Although we still hope for an upgrade to a "real" jetpack. As it stands now, your flight height is calculated above ground level, which means that if you jump over a ledge, you will find yourself in the depths of the divide - what a letdown!

All these gameplay mechanics might be part of why the co-op in The Planet Crafter feels so good. Up to 10 players can join one host’s planet and cooperate on its progress. You can divide tasks depending on each player’s preferences or do everything together. Every player can be assigned the same rights as the host and therefore freely place and destroy buildings as well as gather, store, and use resources.

Oftentimes we picked our next goal to focus on together, then assigned tasks to each one of us and carried them out individually. Some challenges we tackled together (like exploring shipwrecks, caves, and new biomes). This sped up our progression immensely.

Playing together felt so fluent and natural: helping each other out with rations, dividing tasks to drive progression and prepare for exploration goals, or assisting each other during explorations (there always has to be this one person that just can’t find their way back to the entrance of the shipwreck…)
One important thing to keep in mind: Your character and their progress will be bound to the host’s world. That means, you will not be able to play solo one day and jump back in with your friend(s) the next while keeping your inventory, equipment and progress from before (this might be obvious to some in a game of this genre, but might be problematic for others). Your progress will be shared on the host's world, though.

If you prefer coordinating with your team via text chat, there is a built-in chat system. If you prefer voice chat, you will have to fall back to using Steam’s built-in voice chat or Discord. We found it quite difficult at times to find each other and the other’s position on the map. There are no indicators, not even after unlocking a map-plug-in. This requires you to repetitively communicate your position or ask about the other’s, or you will run into trouble to even find out where they are and what they are doing right now.

And a word about how it feels playing together: The Planet Crafter is very beginner friendly. It feels approachable and the mechanics are easy to understand. Although there are the above mentioned survival mechanics, they do not feel too punishing. Even fainting when running out of oxygen will have your character drop their backpack and have you respawn in your base. Losses are kept minimal, which makes this game also accessible for playing with kids or people new to gaming. Playing in co-op offers little room for conflict, either. There is no reason for competition, feelings of being unequal or unfair mechanics.

While some might describe the overall graphical style as minimalistic during the first few hours of game time (and we can see why), this is definitely subject to change thanks to the terraforming core mechanic of Planet Crafter. We also came to love the cartoony, bright colors and design of buildings, plants, and animals. Some of the scenery is outright gorgeous, like the huge celestial bodies that illuminate the night sky. Lighting and coloring are really well done and add to each biome’s atmosphere.

We did come across some textural issues, where textures floated, were hollow, or didn’t connect properly to the surrounding floors or walls. Rarely the collision seemed to not work properly at hard-to-reach spots (especially on rocky mountain cliffs), which had your character sink into the rock floor up to their knees or higher. Never did we get stuck though. Some weather events had weird-looking particle and coloring effects, especially when overlapping with one biome’s special lighting effect (like a dimmed effect in a moon-rock-looking biome).

Some game mechanics would also benefit from slight comfort changes. One that comes to mind easily is the camera during building. There is currently no fixed camera or other function that allows you to accurately fit buildings while monitoring their placement from all sides.This leads to quite some perfectionism-driven building-destroying cycles for us.

We experienced some crashing on one client but could partly blame this on new faulty hardware. Crashing often would pose a problem for some crews though, as there is no regular autosave function, which could hurt your whole group’s progress if you did happen to forget saving manually for a long period.

During our playtest, we encountered seldomly minor glitches but never game-breaking bugs and were always able to continue or progress.
Performance was good and stayed good even at a stage where we had a lot ‘going on’ simultaneously.

Some players may wonder if mods are supported: as Planet Crafter was developed with Unity, mods are available. We ourselves did not install any mods and therefore cannot recommend any, though. One popular place to look for mods that might interest you would be Nexus Mods, for example.

There is a limited amount of accessibility features. You can rebind keybinds for mouse and keyboard as well as if you are playing with a gamepad. Aside from that, if you have special needs regarding more tailored options like color blindness, impaired vision and such, unfortunately there is no option to adjust yet.

If you are sensitive towards topics like darkness and enclosed spaces, you might want to at least skip on exploring the ship wrecks and enjoy only the outdoors. People who feel very uncomfortable seeing insects or amphibic animals could struggle in later stages of progression.

To summarize this review, we had a very good first impression of The Planet Crafter. While it started out a bit slow and repetitive, we soon were drawn in by the game’s core mechanic: terraformation. Achieving a blue sky for ‘your’ planet, watching small bodies of water form into big lakes, walking over the first patches of moss - it just feels rewarding.

And we definitely recommend this journey to you and your crew, especially with The Planet Crafter’s freshly released Rover update in mind (also including two more biomes and more). The developer team still has plans for the game and keeps updating and fixing it regularly. And with the announcement of Planet Crafter’s first DLC, "Planet: Humble", there will be even more content to discover in the future!

We gave The Planet Crafter an rating of 3.8 out of 5.

3.8 / 5.0

The Planet Crafter is a fantastic surival-crafting space game that offered us something new, yet felt familiar. It did show some rougher edges here and there, which was totally acceptable for the price-fun-ratio that the game offers. We did enjoy our time playing it and are exciting for the future updates. It can only get better from here.

If you'd like to watch a video instead, here is our co-op focused game review of The Planet Crafter, including the DLC Planet: Humble: