The Planet Craftercombines elements of asurvival gamewith a sci-fi crafting experience focused on terraforming a planet. Players advance by unlocking blueprints and technologies, striving to stabilize tectonic activity, reduce the heat of the planet, and establish a sustainable ecosystem featuring surface water, flora, and fauna.
The Planet Crafteroffers 6 pre-generated starting areas, each of which is intended to provide its own set of challenges to overcome, mainly due to thecrafting systembeing impacted in some way. Most players will start with the Starting Valley, which is the easiest starting location. Advanced players might like to try the more difficult ones, such as Sand Falls, the Meteor Crater, or the Ice Plains.
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Starting a new gale inThe Planet Crafterwill land the player’s drop pod at this location by default. This is considered the easy tart location. It has plenty of surface resources available, and lots of flat land to construct even the biggest base.
Overall, this location is well rounded, and offers just about everything a player needs for an entire play through. However, they will need torelocate their baseonce flooding becomes an issue.
Most players that start a game in this location, expect to load into an area that already has an active waterfall. This is not the case. The area is initially just desert, but with a large number of channels that water will eventually flow in, once terraforming has progressed far enough.
When fully terraformed, this area will have multiple chained waterfalls. However, the area does not flood fully, so this can be a permanent base location and the player will not need to move at all.
The Grand Rift is a large canyon, that is very close to all three of the areas for collecting late gamefissionable materials. It has enough flat space to construct a pretty lage base. There is also access to freely available surface resources all over the area.
The only downside with the Grand Rift starting area, is that once the player has established free flowing surface water as part of the terraforming project, some parts of this area will flood, cutting off access to the resources below the water.
Sand Falls is one of the most dramatic landmarks inThe Planet Crafter. When the player exits their drop pod, they will be confronted by a wall of sand, constantly falling from the edge of a cliff, much like a waterfall. There are plenty of resources needed in the early game freely available to pick up.
There is a downside to starting the game in this location though. Gaining access to Iridium will mena quite a trek to the Central Plateau area to get into the Osmium cave.
The Meteor Crater start location is intended to be a harder start than any of the other locations. However, it is still entirely possible for even beginners to succeed inThe Planet Crafterin this location. The player receives an early game boost by looting the large bunker that is close by.
The real downside with this area is very limited late-game access to certain biologicals, and this means the player will have to travel quite far to gain access to these.
The Ice Plains is the hardest of all of the start locations inThe Planet Crafter. Apart from plenty of freely available surface resources needed in the early game, this location offers little in the form of later game resources.
Players that decide to give this starting location a try, need to be aware that they will need to travel very far to gain access to some types of resources, and they will need to do this frequently. That being said, once the temperature of the area has been raised enough, theice will start to meltand the situation gets a little better, as additional routes become unblocked.
