Terraforming one ugly world in survival game The Planet Crafter is infinitely more satisfying than trudging across a billion beautiful planets in No Man's Sky

GamesSurvival & CraftingThe Planet CrafterTerraforming one ugly world in survival game The Planet Crafter is infinitely more satisfying than trudging across a billion beautiful planets in No Man’s SkyWhen you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.

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(Image credit: Miju Games)

A character standing in their base on a rocky planet in The Planet Crafter.

Let’s see if my No Man’s Sky experience matches yours. Every year or so I boot it up, hoping the latest base-building expansion or rideable space-dino will keep me playing for longer than the couple hours it usually takes for me to drift away. Every year it fails to do so, my grand space adventure quickly deteriorating into convoluted inventory management across infinite worlds overflowing with the same repetitive activities. Thelatest updatewas no different, with pretty new floating islands and revamped water tech still leaving me wanting… more.

Enter:The Planet Crafter. One planet. One multitool. One glorious sense of agency.

The Planet Crafter wears its Subnautica influences on its sleeves, from your initial drop pod landing to the individual chunks of mineable minerals you can quickly whack together to magic up familiar-looking bases. The key difference is that you start on a barren rock rather than a vibrant alien ecosystem, tasked (or rather sentenced) with terraforming it so that the awful space capitalists can come and colonise. To be clear, this and No Man’s Sky are different games in different genres that largely seek to do different things—but they both orbit a similar loop of gathering and exploring, so it’s interesting to think about why one quickly consumed me while the other always leaves me cold.

Survival games—or at least all games with hunger and thirst metres—rely on upfronting friction then slowly relieving it as you earn tools that transform desperately scrabbling around for H2O into a casual stroll to your water bottle dispenser. In The Planet Crafter those unlocks are tied to both exploration and your terraforming progress, as you plop down drills, heaters and vegetubes that start separate pressure, heat and oxygen trackers ticking up towards total habitability.

(Image credit: Miju Games)

Looking out at a barren planet in The Planet Crafter.

Contrast that with The Planet Crafter, where your role expands beyond mere survivor or explorer. You’re both, but you’re also a goddamn shaper of worlds. The more you build, the faster the world changes—which then feeds back into exploration, as certain ice sheets start to melt and open up new areas. It’s a deeper, more multidimensional package, playing off the satisfaction you get from both unlocking new equipment and the basal appeal of making numbers go up. Also important are those Subnautica-style individual resource chunks, giving each building and craftable item a small, discrete, and more immediately-placeable blueprint. No Man’s Sky can feel like sorting through a stack of periodic tables while drowning in resource soup.

What properly elevates The Planet Crafter, though, is how fantastic it feels to be responsible for such radical changes in the world around you. Those screens in your base with ever-escalating numbers are snazzy, but the reality they reflect outside is what’s truly scrumptious.

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(Image credit: Miju Games)

Looking down at a lake on a sandy planet in The Planet Crafter.

(Image credit: Miju Games)

A lush, green jungle in The Planet Crafter.

I should mention that the full package is far from perfect. The discoverable story fragments are clumsily written, the late-game procedurally-generated wrecks are too much of a headache to bother with, and on an undeniable, fundamental level it’s pretty darn ugly (unless you’re curating vistas for article screenshots). But it’s amazing how little that matters. Beauty is in the eye of someone beholding their oxygen consumption rate tick down to a breathable atmosphere.

Whether it’s over an entire planet or a scuttling platypus-thing, The Planet Crafter revels and excels in imbuing you with a sense of agency. It may be rendered crudely, but the lake submerging my first base is more beautiful than any roiling ocean in No Man’s Sky’s—fancy new water tech be damned.

More about survival craftingAfter 15 years, Minecraft has finally added two new pig variations: The warm pig and the cold pig, meaning I can delete one mod off my listPlease join me in getting super excited for all the cool looking survival games coming in 2025 (and beyond)LatestToday’s Wordle answer for Friday, January 10See more latest►

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After 15 years, Minecraft has finally added two new pig variations: The warm pig and the cold pig, meaning I can delete one mod off my listPlease join me in getting super excited for all the cool looking survival games coming in 2025 (and beyond)

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Please join me in getting super excited for all the cool looking survival games coming in 2025 (and beyond)

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