We left off last time with Aqualis being well on its way to being terraformed. Potshot and I, having arrived with just some food and water built up a base and a terraforming infrastructure to make the place habitable.
Certainly A Planet Crafter
If there is a flaw in the game play loop of Planet Crafter, it is that eventually the game turns into watching numbers go up and figuring out how to make them move faster.
It starts off with exploration and resource management and survival, but eventually you hit a point where you have reached a level of abundance and you’re just figuring out how to get around a supply bottleneck here and there as you pour resources into tree spreaders and planet heaters and giant drills and butterfly farms. And when that gets dull, when you have those all deployed, then it is more and more satellites to boost those items.
That is how each planet ends its cycle. You boost a bunch of satellites into orbit and watch the numbers more faster until you finally get there. And so it went with Aqualis.
Aqualis terraformed
With Aqualis completed, we were done with the content that came with base game… or would have been, except that Miju Games gave us an addition free planet to terraform named Skeo.
You can read about it here.
Since we already had the extraction platform deployed and the interplanetary rocket fueled and ready to go, we wasted little time getting aboard and getting off of water world. It had its charms, but it was also limited in size and scope. The main building achievement was Potshot building a long staircase to get to the upper reaches of the island we named Borneo.
You couldn’t just fly up there… or I couldn’t anyway
So it was into the rocket to select Skeo.
A new option on the menu
Once we pressed the button the cut scene took over, the camera looping about the capsule as the rocket fired and lifted off.
One last glance at Aqualis
And then we were on Skeo, an orange tinted planet that felt more like Prime, the first planet, with some more of Mars mixed in.
Arrival on Skeo
There were plenty of resources scattered about so we collected what we needed as we scouted around, eventually settling on some high ground to drop our base.
The initial base
I somehow was allowed to put up the beacon for the base again… a bit of a surprise after Aqualis… and dubbed the place Olympus, in the spirit of Olympus Mons on Mars.
Then it was time to explore a bit… and Skeo has a lot going for it on that front. There are a lot of places to go and many things to see. There was an ice encrusted cliff side not far away.
When that melts it is going to expose something else
Further along there was a huge frozen lake and then some upland ice canyons where the color palette dropped its orange flavor for some chilly blue tones.
Up the icy canyon
This was all early on, with no breathable atmosphere and no liquid water and only food found in abandoned chests. That meant packing along supplies to stay alive, including the 1-2-3 combo, 1 silicon, 2 titanium, and 3 iron, that allows you to build a little hab with a door so you can refresh your air supply.
The frozen areas had areas that were clearly going to open up once the terraforming got for enough along. Meanwhile in the other direction there was a long open rolling desert and some canyons off in another, with abandoned equipment and construction sites and outposts scattered about, waiting to be scavenged.
While I was out and about Potshot was changing up the base, swapping our 3×3 building for a pair of mega domes, which match some of the structures we were seeing back on Selenea.
Mega Domes
Then it was time to settle down for a bit to focus on getting the terraforming rolling. That included building the exchange shuttle that lets you grab supplies from bases on the other planets to help you along.
Each planet has its own set of phases. With Skeo we first unlocked the “monsoon” phase, which unfroze the larger bodies of water and cleared a couple of passages to new places we could explore.
A new sandy beach area exposed
That is kind of what I enjoy most in Planet Crafter, being able to roam and expore… and find goodies to haul back to base.
And on that is something that Skeo does well. When it comes to size it feels a lot more like the first planet, Prime, than the two much smaller moons, Selenea and Aqualis. That said, once you have an upgraded kit and a rover with the speed upgrades, it isn’t hard to just pick a direction and go and then end up hitting an invisible wall.
Checking the moisture farm while out in the rover
The team, however, has built out a number of interesting things to explore, things that get exposed when the ice melts, things delayed until the planet hits a terraforming goal, things that are… well, you don’t have jumping puzzles with jet packs really but that sort of things, things you have to dig around to find, and even a place where gravity seems to be turned off.
Where we’re going, we don’t need jet packs
This is the benefit of a handcrafted world experience. There are also laptops and terminals scattered about these locations with log entries describing what the previous expedition was up to, allowing you to build up a back story around the planet and what happened before you arrived.
Not that it will change what you do in the long term. Whatever mistakes that previous expedition made… and at least they weren’t crashing spaceships everywhere like on Prime, so they learned something… the same general terraforming routine applies.
Skeo does change more noticeably than past planets as well. Past the monsoon phase things go green as plants begin to spread.
Lots of green and lakes… and one of my little oxygen buildings in the center
Looking back at those orange cliffs with the icicles hanging down earlier in the post once we got past monsoon shows a different look.
The cliffs and plain around the landing site… how green was my valley
We’re already to breathable atmosphere on Skeo now, which means my scattered oxygen tents are more landmarks to prove I’ve been there than useful survival tools. We’ve got the tree spreaders going, the butterflies and been released, there are frogs down by the lake, and the launch gantry for satellites has been erected so we’ll soon have those in space providing a bonus to all terraforming.
At which point it will be watching the numbers go up and figuring out how to make them go faster when the slow down.