Somewhere in space is a planet that’s orbiting its star in the goldilocks zone but is otherwise fairly useless. The frozen ball of dirt and ice has decent resources just waiting for an industrious explorer to pluck off its surface, but the complete lack of anything resembling a survivable environment means it’s more trouble than it’s worth to harvest them. Why deal with all the problems of a planet’s gravity well when asteroids valued in the quintillions of dollars can befound floating aroundan asteroid field? Even so, if the expenses are low enough it might be worth throwing a few people at the planet to see what they can do with the place, because a little care and nurturing may be all it needs to blossom into something far more valueable than a pile of rocks and metal- a life-supporting planet.
This Planet Right Here’s What You Might Call a Fixer-Upper
The Planet Crafter launched this year after a good stretch of time in Early Access, and it’s done very well for itself by breaking the one million sales mark. Starting off on a frozen airless world, you harvest minerals to create machines that raise the planetary temperature, release gases from below the surface, work up from algae to grasses to trees, bugs to fish to full-sized wildlife, and transform the world into somewhere that’s almost unrecognizable from when you arrived. Since release it’s got a couple of updates, one minor back in May and a major one today that adds two new biomes plus a driveable vehicle. You can see the trailer fortoday’s update here, but the big news is the announcement of Planet Crafter’s first paid DLC, Planet Humble.
Review: Planet Crafter
The “get rocks, make stuff” beginning turns into an adventure through a lush green world that’s very different from the dead planet it started as.
Planet Humble is currently planned to be not-quite-Planet Crafter 2, in that it’s not so much a redesign of the game but rather a new world to unleash the familiar gameplay elements on. One of the strengths of Planet Crafter is in its hand-built map, with each biome having its share of secrets to root out from their carefully-hidden locations. Sometimes the secrets give resources that get a jump on the next tech upgrade, while others reveal bits of lore filling in the story of the world and the people who tried to make a go of it before your arrival, but knowing they’re there gives a good reason to explore properly rather than just grab a few minerals and walk on by. Having an entirely new world to start from zero on, with its own unique biomes and storylines, should be a great excuse to dive into the game again for those who have become familiar with its locations.
Planet Humble is currently planned to be not-quite-Planet Crafter 2, in that it’s not so much a redesign of the game but rather a new world to unleash the familiar gameplay elements on.
Currently there’s no release date or price for the new DLC, but with Planet Crafter being a self-published success not having any shareholders to maximize profits for, the current plan is to make it cheap. One person with the DLC will be able to host games for people without it, so multiplayer won’t be splitting the player-base on Day 1. The screenshots fromthe DLC’s Steam pageshow icy biomes, glowing trees in rocky caverns, lava caves, and plenty of alien landscapes, all of which will most likely look quite different by the time the new planet is terraformed into something comfortably habitable.
