We have blown through the age of abundance in Planet Crafter and have reached a point of over abundance. We have too much stuff.
Certainly A Planet Crafter
I know, I know, inventory management in games like this often makes you feel like you have too much stuff. And we have spent most of our time with the game dealing with the ongoing and almost eternal question of “how do we store all of this stuff?”
But Planet Crafter takes all of that a step further.
For a bit it felt like we were ahead of the game. When the T2 storage lockers opened up for us Potshot got in there and upgraded all of our storage on the base and, for a brief moment, it felt like we had breathing room. We had a whole hallway of these lockers, one dedicated to each major resource material, but there was room to drop items when we took the rover out to the various ore extractors.
Then came the auto crafter stations and the drones.
Up until the auto crafter you had to go to a crafting station with all the materials on you and press the button to make things. The auto crafter will let you select an item to build from all of your current options, will draw from nearby storage for resources, and will build on auto-repeat until its output hopper is full. The hopper has six slots, so that is your natural limit.
This was extremely handy, especially for me who cannot remember anything complicated for two seconds and inevitably shows back up at the crafting station missing an ingredient.
Unlocking the drone station took that up a notch. All of your storage can be configured to demand or supply things and the drones will fly about attempting to fulfill the needs of these configurations, including running out to ore extraction sites to haul the resources straight to the appropriate T2 locker.
Instant abundance, and all the more so when you get the T2 drones zipping about.
So you get the auto crafters going and the drones supplying resources, then collecting and storing output and pretty soon everything is full.
Soon enough Potshot started routing some output to the recently built trade rocket, which lets you send specific items off planet for credit that can be used to buy some things you cannot find locally, like wheat and cocoa seeds so you can bake a birthday cake.
Not just a cake, a birthday cake
Soon we had two, then three trade rocket platforms running, because the rockets have a 10 minute cycle time and stuff just starts to back up.
Things were still pretty full, but we were making some space. And then we built the portal generator.
The portal generator is the Planet Crafter answer to players having explored all the local wrecks yet still being short on a few of the items you have to find rather than make. Access cards, for example, have to be found and we have a locked door in one wreck than needs five to get through.
Portal generator active, jump through the pink portal for exploration
The portal generator uses some crystals to generate an opening to a procedurally generated wreck site (usually with two wrecks if our experience so far is representative) where you can scrounge for more stuff.
A wreck in a wreck site
A lot more stuff. Especially stuff you have been trained to see as valuable, like rocket motors, which you need to build a lot of things including drones, where demand has fallen off but you still can’t help but grab them all.
So you come back to back with all 45 slots of your T6 backpack crammed with rocket engines and circuit boards and crystals you cannot manufacture and flares… why do I keep picking up flares… and genetic material and whatever else, and then you have to find a place to put it all.
Potshot put up a couple more drop off T2 storage lockers and I got over my hoarding and just started stuffing rocket engines into the trade rockets.
The sites you get sent to are kind of neat if you liked the whole exploring spaceship wrecks aspect of the game already. There is a bit of a dark maze exploration aspect to the whole thing and I do get turned around and lost. But they also hand you so many flares that I stopped trying to mark locations with them… the flares are all one color, so you can’t really tell what they mean after a while… and started just lighting a path back to the exit.
Who needs bread crumbs when you have glow sticks… erm… flares
As noted, you seem to get an isolated zone with a couple of wrecks to rummage through along with some secondary bits of loot scattered in lockers around the area.
So far all the wrecks have a familiar vibe. There are the usual things to find, plus some bonus things you can deconstruct which will give you a blueprint so you can put those items in your base. Find some arcade machines in the wreck you can deconstruct?
Arcade machines in one of the wrecks
Once you get back to base you can use the blueprint to add one to your own layout.
An arcade in our base rec room
There seems to always be an access card which you can save for something else, or which you can use to unlock a room in the wreck. For us they have opened up vaults which have held some good items, like trade token vouchers.
Likewise, there is usually a fusion reactor which you can bring online with a fusion core, something you can build back at your base, which powers up the wreck, turns on some lights, and opens up some closed doors which have more loot behind them.
A door opened, revealing a loot vault
Now, the catch is that while there is some good loot in these wrecks… stuff we even need like one of the quartz crystals we cannot manufacture… a lot of it is the same old stuff. Most of it.
So we drag back the still useful stuff and leave behind the mostly not useful stuff. This involves putting up some storage outside the wrecks so we can offload quickly then go back in for more. Then we can sort through the take and see what is worthwhile… and how many more flares I can use to continue making my trail through the wreck.
Meanwhile, the whole terraforming thing… we’re almost done. We’ve unlocked mammals, which you can genetic engineer in a pseudo-Spore like mini-game of sorts. We have a pile of genetic traits to play with and the wrecks give you more.
Genetic trait storage
I will say that the gene lab storage is huge… that isn’t even half full, I just cropped off the empty rows… so there is apparently a lot out there to work with.
In the end, however, they all just stare at you with their dead eyes,
If you pet them you get genetic material on you…
But mammals are the last waypoint before completion of terraforming.
Almost there now
Once we get done there are some additional unlocks to achieve which will get us the ability to… terraform other planets. Or so I have been told. So we’ll see how that goes.