The terraforming was complete. We had done it. The planet, once barren and hostile, now supported the teeming varieties of life.
Certainly A Planet Crafter
Fish and bees and butterflies and trees, fish swimming in the water, amphibians on the shores, and dead eyed mammals wandered the lands that were once cold and dead. Also, the big dashboard display in the base said so.
It’s up there on the big board
The planet was done.
We still had a couple of corners of the world to explore, some wrecks where we needed key cards or had to install a fusion core to open up some final doors, but it was rare to find anything we needed. It was more piling on with terra tokens, the currency you can use to buy things via the trade rocket.
Once you have hit the terraforming goal you do unlock some new technology, including the extraction platform. This allows you to build the extraction rocket which lets you run the final end game scenes.
But there is another rocket that unlocks, the interplanetary rocket. If you build that you can fly to other locations in the solar system. There are two additional planets, plus two more that you can buy as DLC. You also get a screen that lets you see your options, which is below the big board in the image above.
Known planets in the solar system… that green planet is one of the DLC options
Selenea is a barren moon while Aqualis is apparently a watery planet.
Since we were still keen on the game we decided to head to Selenea.
That was going to require some planning because the rocket is a one way trip. So the first item on the list of things to pack were supplies sufficient to build ourselves another extraction platform at the far end of the drip, plus an interplanetary rocket so we could get back to our extremely well supplied base on Prime if we needed to.
Our MOSTLY well supplied base, that is. I wrote last time about having an over-abundance of materials. But something happened to our iridium mine and it stopped producing. This was embarrassing because that is a critical resource for a lot of things and we had been basically burning off the excess by building things to send off in the trade rockets only to have the mine go bust and the cupboard end up being bare of iridium.
Potshot spent some time staging the things we ought to bring with us to Selenea. We both had 45 slot backpacks plus there was a small locker in the planetary capsule, so he laid out everything in lockers at the launch site.
The travel supplies staged for the mission
The locker missing a sign was where the nuclear fusion reactor parts were to go, but we needed iridium for those. However, out base on Prime also had an excess of power generation capacity, so we ended up just deconstructing one from the base, which went into my backpack.
We grabbed things, one locker at a time, remove the sign when it was empty until we were down to rovers and rods. We had five rovers on the list.
In the rover locker
Now, there being only two of us it might seem a bit of an excess to have five vehicles. However, these were five fully upgraded rovers. No expense spared, all accessories added on.
This was due to the fact that a rover, fitting in one locker or backpack slot, is an extremely efficient way to ship raw materials. In Planet Crafter you have perfect recycling efficiency, so if you take the accessories off the rover and put them through the recycler, you can all the parts back… and a fully upgraded rover takes a lot of very valuable parts to construct.
So at least three of the rovers were destined to be parted out at the far end of our journey… and honestly, we had gotten by with just one rover on Prime, so we could go there if we had to.
So we grabbed all the rovers, then as many of the material rods we could fit… those too can be recycled into components or used as is… then climbed up the gantry tower and got into the capsule.
In the capsule awaiting launch
The capsule has two seats, but you don’t get to sit. You have to stand and hold the hand rail for the full flight like some Ryan Air fantasy passenger accommodation. The panel in the capsule lets you choose your destination.
Where will you go?
It also has some reminders and warnings about making sure you pack for a return trip. Once I had grabbed some screen shots, the button for Selenea was pressed, the rocket lifted off, and we were on our way.
On our way to a new planet
Soon we were down on a another barren rock or a moon, just as some meteors were landing. A new task awaited us, armed as we were with only what we could carry.
Landing site on Selenea
Granted, we carried a lot of stuff and, perhaps more importantly, had all the recipes to make more if we could find the supplies. A lot of the initial game is waiting for unlocks to increase your capabilities. The first bit is literally running out of the capsule, collecting some raw materials off the ground, then running back to the capsule before your oxygen ran out.
Now, with our upgrade gear and the rovers, which included the pressurization option, so they provided oxygen when driving, we had a bit more mobility.
Still, we had to get moving. We each brought a few flasks of water, a few meals, and a couple of spare oxygen bottles to tide us over until we could start manufacturing our own supplies.
Also on the rover upgrades list was the jetpack option. We have truly arrived in the future if we finally have a flying car.
Flying rover time
That said, with all the speed upgrades applied, the rover actually drove more quickly on the surface than fly. But the jet packs, which work like our suit jet packs, allow you to hover and lift up over or out of difficult terrain or cruise along otherwise undrivable surfaces. So the utility is high, but it is often better to not have the car fly.
Learning from our last effort, we found a plateau with some open area and started working on the initial base.
The platform for our base laid out
You can see the big 3 x 3 building that is the core of our new base, as well as the two nuclear fusion reactors and the recycler currently sitting out back.
The dome in the background is one of the abandoned sites on Selenea. Unlike prime, which seemed to be littered with a ridiculous number of crashed spaceships… would like to see the lore reason to explain that… Selenea has a lot of buildings left behind for us to explore.
An abandoned base just down the hill from us
Those appear to have all the usual things, with chests and raw materials scattered about, areas that require access cards, and even areas that require explosives to get into. While I was poking my nose into that… because I am more explorer than builder… Potshot kept expanding our base, so I returned to more stuff going on.
Already more stuff is up and running
You can see the big T5 drill going, the rocket gantry out back, a T4 heater, and a water fountain.
I am not sure how to explain how we have open water on the surface with little atmosphere and sub zero temperatures, but at least we were not going to die of thirst. There was also food growing in the new dome on top of the base.
Beans not ready yet
It was all beans in the food growers, so it is going to end up like that scene in Blazing Saddles I am sure. But there it is.
We now have a new moon to explore and terraform. And I am pretty sure that is Prime hanging there in the sky above us.
The view from Selenea
It is a bit of a crowded solar system.