"The Planet Crafters" - a cool janky game about terraforming

This week is the Obon holiday, and I spent some (too much) of my vacation time playing this little game called "The Planet Crafter".

The Planet Crafter is a 3D survival game where you gather resources and build a base to gather more resources. The gimmick of this game is that you have to terraform the planet you arrive at. In the beginning, the planet is cold, yellow, dusty and inhabitable. You build machines to add oxygen, heat and pressure, and slowly the planet changes - the sky becomes blue, ice melts into water, and eventually plants start to spread.

The changes are not only cosmetic -- Improving the air increases your view as the dust settles. The ice melting opens caves and new areas of the map. As the water melts, some parts of the planet become flooded. Roots and trees break down rocks and also give access to new areas. Eventually, you do not need to track your O2 and water closely, as you can get them directly from the planet.

This is the best idea of the game, and it is very well done. You really do feel the planet changing, and it is a very nice feeling when an area you visited only once early in the game is completely changed after some terraforming.

That said, the game is very janky, and far from a master piece. Collision is a mess, and you'll be frequently clipping into terrain and risking getting stuck, or being unclear how to get to some place (or if that place is even accessible). The line between finding a hidden cave and clipping into the back of the play area is very thin indeed here. The models, other than the terrain and nature, are kinda ugly. Finally, the terraforming machines are mostly magic boxes: you plop them down anywhere and wait for numbers to go up, with little to think about other than replacing the machines with the next tier when the time comes.

The beginning of the game plays a lot like a clicker game: You place machines that increase the values of O2, temperature and pressure, and as the values reach a certain thresholds, you replace them with higher tier machines. Eventually, these higher tier machines require rare materials, which require you to explore the world, navigating caves and shipwrecks for loot. This exploration becomes the largest part from the middle game to the end game. Finally, near the end game, you unlock the ability to explore random ruined shipwrecks. At this point though, you don't really need the extra resources, except to unlock one specific ending that requires a lot of grinding. This grinding is not enjoyable at all, but I had a backlog of podcasts to listen to so...

All in all, I actually enjoyed the game, specially given the tiny size of the team (I believe the game was made by 3 or 4 people). The premise was really creative, and the gameplay was endearing, jank and all, up to until the insect stage of the game. I do wish the base building and the assembly of terraforming machines was a bit more interesting though.