The Planet Crafter: Best Starting Locations

The Planet Crafter combines elements of a survival game with 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.

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The Planet Crafter: Best Structures To Construct First

These structures are important for players to build as soon as possible in The Planet Crafter in order to ensure their survival.

The Planet Crafter offers 6 pre-generated starting areas, each of which is intended to provide its own set of challenges to overcome, mainly due to the crafting system being 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.

6 Starting Valley

Easy Start For New Players

Good for:

• There are a number of crash sites dotted around, with free resources and consumables to loot.
• Quite close to the center of the map and the Central Plateau area which is rich in resources.

Bad for:

• Floods very easily, and by late game the entire starting area will be underwater.
• No easy access to either Volnus Seeds or Plant Orema

Starting a new gale in The Planet Crafter will 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.

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Overall, this location is well rounded, and offers just about everything a player needs for an entire play through. However, they will need to relocate their base once flooding becomes an issue.

5 Waterfall

Cascades Of Water In Late Game Stages

Good for:

• One of the most stunning areas once terraformed
• Close to both the Meteor Crater and Meteor Field locations for resources
• Easy access to the Mushroom River

Bad for:

• Little flat land makes building a large base tricky.
• Less free resources on the ground, and only 1 crash site close.

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.

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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.

4 Grand Rift

Easy Access To Fissionables

Good for:

• Great access to both the Osmium Tunnel and Iridium Cave locations.
• Fairly close to the Uranium Cave area.
• Plentiful access to Plant Orema Seeds

Bad for:

• Sources of Osmium and Iridium will eventually be underwater in the late-game stage.

The Grand Rift is a large canyon, that is very close to all three of the areas for collecting late game fissionable 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.

3 Sand Falls

Great Access To Early Game Resources

Good for:

• Plentiful early game resources freely available to pick up.
• Easy access to Plant Volnus Seeds
• Very close to the Osmium Cave

Bad for:

• Ice blocks the closest entrance to the Iridium Mine, meaning the player will have to make a long trip to one of the other entrances
• No local crash sites for free resources

Sand Falls is one of the most dramatic landmarks in The 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.

2 Meteor Crater

For A More Challenging Playthrough

Good for:

• Access to the bunker complex that has plenty of free resources inside.
• Very close to the Pulsar Quartz Cave and the Zeolite Cave

Bad for:

• Limited access to either Plant Orema or Plant Volnus
• Until mid-game, there is no access to the rest of the map other than through the Zeolite 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 in The Planet Crafter in this location. The player receives an early game boost by looting the large bunker that is close by.

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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.

1 Ice Plains

Very Hard Starting Location

Good for:

• The area looks cool and is cool.
• Good enough access to early game resources.

Bad for:

• Very limited access to the rest of the map
• Multiple entrances to the biome are initially blocked by ice

The Ice Plains is the hardest of all of the start locations in The 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, the ice will start to melt and the situation gets a little better, as additional routes become unblocked.

The Planet Crafter

Released

April 10, 2024

Developer(s)

Miju Games