Ed Note: It would be much easier to just call the game Planet Crafter, but since the game’s title is The Planet Crafter, and SEO exists, I’ll be writing the full title each time.
I like The Planet Crafter. I’m saying that now because a lot of things I’m about to say might give an impression otherwise. So I want to get this out there: It’s a fun game.
It’s just kind of weird.
A lot of games describe themselves as offspring of other games, and you could do that for The Planet Crafter. You could say it’s descended from Cookie Clicker and Satisfactory.
But The Planet Crafter doesn’t come from a happy home. Instead, after the divorce Cookie Clicker got full custody until about the 13 hour mark, when Satisfactory finally got parental visitation rights back, and finally got to introduce The Planet Crafter to the idea of automation.
It’s a weird balance. Much of the play time is spent building structures to make numbers go up, so that you can unlock other structures to make numbers go up faster, in what feels at least like an idle game sort of structure. Eventually you get automation, and it’s possible to make some things automatic. But the game isn’t really about those systems.
For example, electricity generators don’t need to be connected to structures they’re powering, so the game doesn’t really lean into “Optimize the placements of inputs and outputs” the way Factorio and Satisfactory do. It sort of just trundles along. Even the structures that are dependent on placement don’t require too much effort to optimize. They each only boost up to eight nearby structures, and it’s pretty easy to just plop them in range.
General Funkiness
Undertale, one of my favorite games of all time, was made in GameMaker, a development choice that has big “In a cave, with a box of scraps” energy. It’s a good reminder that games are ultimately judged on if they are fun, and not much else.
It’s a thought that has stuck with me through most of my time with The Planet Crafter. The game is just kind of wonky, and there are a lot of funky decisions that make you wonder if the game works this way by design, or just because the developers couldn’t do something they wanted.
As an example, a large portion of The Planet Crafter is just walking around and grabbing stones, then running back to your space shack to refill on oxygen.
Sure, there’s also some building, but a lot of the early game is walking and picking up rocks by pointing your rock pickup beam at them until they are picked up. Somehow, an experience I could replicate in my driveway becomes absolutely thrilling the second I need some more iron to put up another wind turbine.
The thing is, this sort of functional design works here. The building is pretty much fine. Buildings don’t always go where you want, but because deconstructing anything gives a full resource refund, it’s pretty easy to fix any problems. The text on items isn’t always 100% accurate to what they actually do, but with the occasional exceptions of the rockets that cause asteroid storms, it mostly doesn’t matter. The units used on certain measurements aren’t correct, but only one person I played with noticed that.
That’s not to say everything functions. Some parts are just plain broken. The worst offender of this is the game’s mini map, which you can only move by clicking on in-game arrows. You can’t pan it by clicking and dragging, it doesn’t save your place, and the only overlay options available are basically useless. Also, it doesn’t really appear to be a minimap, just a camera that’s positioned up above the skybox that faces straight down.
And speaking of systems that mostly work…
Multiplayer
The Planet Crafter multiplayer is another example of “This system is functional, occasionally breaks, but is also just a bit weird.” Outside of a few times where I’ve disconnected, and some items disappearing it mostly works! But it also doesn’t let you join from the Steam menu, and doesn’t have dedicated servers.
The one big thing about multiplayer, though, is that it lets you really divide and conquer. One person can be out exploring while another is building more production, and a third is messing with the game’s somewhat weird systems for capturing butterflies and animals. It feels like it would be an exhausting game to play on my own.
Overall
As I said in the start, I like The Planet Crafter. It’s a bit wonky, and unpolished in areas. But it’s incredibly fun to play, and I can’t think of another game that gives quite the same sense of the world being changed as the result of your actions.
Turning a corner and seeing a forest where it was once completely barren, or seeing the sky change color is a oddly magical experience.