

The Planet Crafter
Price History
Past 36 months · Updated dailyPrices cover Steam and 39 authorized stores; only legitimate offers are counted. The chart shows weekly market-wide lows and Steam's official price across the past 36 months.



01About The Planet Crafter
The Planet Crafter combines exploration, resource gathering, and base building with terraforming a hostile planet. Build machines to generate heat, oxygen, and pressure, then watch a biosphere take shape. Steam players rate it 96%% positive across 69,479 reviews. The interface is available in multiple languages, including English, German, and Chinese. English full audio is available. Released April 10, 2024.
Credits
Lowest recorded in 36 months
$9.992025-10-30 · SteamBase game · same records as the chart above; USD history, not a regional Steam low.Language support
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Traditional Chinese | Yes | Yes | — |
| English | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Show 11 more languages
| Language | Interface | Subtitles | Audio |
|---|---|---|---|
| French | Yes | Yes | — |
| German | Yes | Yes | — |
| Spanish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Russian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Polish | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Korean | Yes | Yes | — |
| Japanese | Yes | Yes | — |
| Portuguese-Brazil | Yes | Yes | — |
| Italian | Yes | Yes | — |
| Turkish | Yes | Yes | — |
Steam PC edition data · 2026-10-19
02Before you buy
Play modes
The Steam PC version supports solo play and online co-op for 1 to 10+ players. Difficulty is adjustable, and a creative mode is listed.
Language and controls
Full controller support is listed for Steam PC. English has full audio; the interface is available in multiple languages, including English, German, and Chinese.
03Frequently asked questions
What is the main goal?
Gather resources, craft equipment and machines, build a base, and raise heat, oxygen, and pressure to terraform a hostile planet.
Can I play solo or with others?
Yes. The description specifies online co-op for 1 to 10+ players as well as solo play.
What changes as terraforming progresses?
Terraforming brings life such as moss, insects, forests, and animals. Animals can be created by combining DNA extracts.
What survival options are described?
Survival mechanics include thirst, oxygen, temperature, and health. Difficulty can be adjusted, and a creative mode is included in the description.
“Nursing a toxic dead world into blue skies and grass, where the journey beats the destination while story and sound stay thin”
Our Verdict
The Planet Crafter will not crash any awards podium, but it is the most reassuring kind of 2024 recommendation: clear in its goal, long where it needs to be, and honest about its flaws.
Where it sits, and why nobody can copy it
On OpenCritic it lands in the Strong tier, inside the top 17% of all games; on Steam it wears the Overwhelmingly Positive badge, that 96% rating built on more than 65,000 real reviews and over a million copies sold. Together those numbers say one thing — this is not a divisive experiment or a flawless masterpiece, but a sturdy genre favourite that most people enjoyed and whose weaknesses are clear without being fatal. In a crowded sci-fi survival field, it carved out room on the strength of a temperament rivals cannot reproduce.
That temperament is the un-copyable part. It runs directly opposite to its closest rival, Subnautica: that game grows you through fear, dropping you into a lightless deep and using raw dread to force competence out of you. The Planet Crafter does the reverse, coaxing you forward with the steady rewards of building, letting you grow life out of a dead wasteland with your own two hands and no one chasing you. Same genre, two completely different souls — one a thriller that wants your pulse up, the other a balm that wants it down. You can clone its Terraformation Index, copy the machines, mimic the rocket multipliers. What you cannot clone is the specific, hard-won calm of watching a dead world breathe again and knowing it happened because of you. That feeling is what protects it from imitators, and it is made of tone, not features.
Who it is for, who should skip it, which version to grab
So are you the player it is built for? If you love the slow payoff of long-haul cultivation, the sight of your own labour stacking up into visible, undeniable results, and you would frankly rather not be jolted out of that flow by combat, death penalties, or punishing difficulty spikes, then this was practically made to order for you. Its core high is the exact arc PC Gamer described, oppression giving way to relief — the long, patient work of nursing a toxic dead planet into blue skies and waving grass, and the quiet satisfaction of having done it yourself. For the right temperament it is close to perfect comfort food.

If instead you want deep narrative, tense combat, or hardcore survival stakes, you will likely come away cold; the thin story, threadbare audio, and late-game repetition will only loom larger for the wrong player. As for editions, the advice is simple: the base game is complete on its own and will happily eat dozens of hours, so start there. Only if you finish still craving the loop should you add Planet Humble for a fresh world to redo it all. For most people, one planet's worth of story is more than enough to settle into for a good long while.
Popular Steam reviews
Native-language selection · 10 reviewsSelected helpful reviews in this language show both recommendations and criticisms. This selection does not represent the overall positive rating; opinions reflect the version reviewed.
Bought this for me and my son to play together since it seemed like a simple co-op game, turns out to be a ton of fun for me and him, been playing it for weeks and he races home from school now and asks if we can play together to unlock the next stage and build new things, Incase any of the creaters of the game see this, thank you. Life has been hard on us both since i split from his mum and this game has really brought us closer togetherShow moreShow less
Overall: Has promise, but needs a lot of work to resemble a quality game. Pro: * Solid survival-crafting basics. * Terraforming progress is reflected in the world. Easily the best feature. * Large map filled with lots interesting set pieces. For an early-access game there is a surprising amount of terrain to explore. * By default (see below) there is a very natural progression curve. Tech is tied to your terraforming progress, so you have to start small and work your way up. You also have to explore to access higher tech because the default start location has only basic resources nearby. Con: * Base-building is very constrained. Clipping restrictions are much too harsh; you're basically forced to build a base that floats at least a few inches off the ground, because the smallest intersection with the ground blocks construction. And don't even try to build near interesting terrain: every rock formation or wreckage has a gigantic exclusion box. * Alternate start locations are highly unbalanced. The alternate start positions drop you right next to advanced resources and let you blaze through the tech tree. * The lighting system is just bad. Different biomes have unique shaders, which is fine. The problem is that they apply based on player position - so if you cross the boundary into purple-land, and look backwards, suddenly everything behind you is purple! This is particularly bad inside crashed spaceships when everything suddenly turns pitch black because you stepped over the "inside" line. * Generally poor UI/UX. It's better than it was in the demo, but the menu still looks like it was created in 20 minutes for a game jam, and the inventory and crafting screens aren't much better. * The story... doesn't exist yet, and the placeholders are laughably bad writing. I would honestly rather see "Captain's log: BAD THING HAPPENED" than what's currently there.Show moreShow less
It's a great game even in early access. it's subnautica on a mars-like world. BUT BE WARNED - DO NOT START BUILDING A BASE on lower ground, eventually the whole base will be swallowed up into a lake, find some decently high ground or it will break your game many hours in as it did to me. I had to watch as the water line slowly drew closer and closer to everything i had build until it was too late. developers - please stress to players more heavily than a very vague hint about building in altitude. the fact that the default landing zone is in an area that becomes a lake is going to cause this issue for many people if you don't somehow warn them more clearly.Show moreShow less
Playing the 1.0 update of Planet Crafter has been fun so far— now that I'm approaching the end and progression feels fairly repetitive and drawn out, I feel like I've formulated my thoughts enough to share them in a review. Planet Crafter is a game with big ideas! You're taking an entire map that's so barren and orange/red it hurt my eyes at times, and turning it into something lush and honestly pretty striking at times! It's very fun and rewarding to watch the map transform. The gameplay(and indeed, much of the game design itself) borrows from Subnautica; you explore, you gather resources, you build your base, you make the world your own. Instead of finding the unique flora and fauna like in Subnautica, you get to put it there yourself! Many of my issues with this game, and why I will not be finishing it despite being a stone's throw away from the finish line and ending, stem from technical issues and an apparent lack of polish that I originally thought was attributed to the early-access state of the game. Now that we're at a full release, I feel that the game is far too unstable. Hitches, freezes, and an apparent memory leak that caused my entire computer to lock up on multiple occasions made playing the game more stressful than rewarding or fun, because I was always worried about saving as early and often as possible to protect my progress(which is largely just based on waiting real-world time for your terrformation values to tick up) from the inevitable crashes. The map is full of holes. I found a gap in the geometry within a 15-second walk from the spawn point that allowed me to clip under the rocks. The game evidently makes a lot of concessions to maintain performance; one of these concessions is very aggressive LOD and occlusion culling of basically everything. Map geometry, player-placed buildings, even the plants that you grow will very obviously pop in and out of existence as you are moving to and fro. The lay of the land is hard to get a grasp on because of how drastically the environment changes as you travel; something I thought was just a bare hill that would allow me to access another part of the map is actually blocked by a huge cliff that simply popped into existence when I got close enough. It's jarring, confusing, and immersion-breaking. Another comparison to Subnautica is hardly fair here; those guys had the advantage of an ever-present underwater fog to hide what they were doing in the distance, but they also had the environments and objects fade in and out rather than simply appearing and disappearing. I don't want to make assumptions, but it feels very much like higher-quality assets and systems were added onto the very shaky foundation built by the team working on this game when they were much more amateur as developers. One example of this I feel is the lack of a proper day-night cycle. The skybox is eternally static, and "night" is signified by the game cranking down the exposure without changing how anything is lit. It's strange and doesn't feel like something that should have passed any kind of a quality check for the 1.0 release, which is a statement that I unfortunately feels like applies to many things about this game. I hope that some day I can return to this game and properly finish it without the pains of the current version. If you love survival-craft games, this is probably still worth a try. If you love having a smooth and well-polished experience, this game is not for you.Show moreShow less
I am 81 years young and love The Planet Crafter. It makes me remember things and how to get to the mines and wrecks. Its fun to build everything from an barren land into a beautiful landscape with trees and flowers and my style of buildings . Great Job !!Show moreShow less
EDIT: I played quite a bit more of this than I did for my initial review to see if my opinion would change. I have one neutral thing and positive thing to start with: I can see why a lot of people rate this game highly: the devs very effectively trigger the "number go up!" endorphin rush by showing you five different point scales that you can make rapidly change to bigger numbers. This is definitely crack for gamers, and quite satisfying, but also super grindy. In addition, to add the positive comment, it *is* very satisfying in the early game to see the lakes and rivers fill up and the terrain start to change color. That's some clever coding and makes for a very engaging early game. See the bottom for the rest of my updated opinion after ~16 more hours. Reviews on Steam aren't about whether a game is *good*. They're about whether you would *recommend* a game. And while it's a relaxing little time-waster for a lot of people, for anyone looking for a real open world survival game, this one has potential but you'll be happier if you pass. This is an early access review, and maybe things about the game will change but for now, let's look at what's here. What initially breaks the game is a sense of inevitability of everything: the map is fixed, your initial location is fixed, and you're very definitely on rails. The first two are right out of the Subnautica playbook. The last one definitely is *not*. The blueprint system is built around how you meet goals given to you by previous blueprints. In short, your build order has been set for you by the developers and you will only be allowed to build what the devs will allow you to build, and in exactly the order they allow you to build them. And this is true even if you are experienced with the map and you know where everything is. This is not at all like Subnautica, where an experienced player can rush to the exact blueprints they want and start building specific items right away. Nope. Even if you find uranium early (for example), you will be sitting on it until the game *allows* you to use it. Until that moment, it's a rock that is useless to you and will clog your storage. In addition, most of the tension of a good survival game is drained out of the proceedings right away. There's an exploration element, and you initially need oxygen to survive. Great, that's right out of every survival game handbook. The problem is that oxygen generation in this one is completely trivial: if you build a one room hut with basic materials you can find anywhere, then build a door for it, you have instant oxygen recharge anywhere you want it. I worried about oxygen until I realized this, then I would just build a hut next to each of the game's wrecks, loot them from top to bottom in one trip, just building more storage cabinets in the hut to hold it all, then ferried it all back to base. There's also an absurd unreality layered over everything. In addition to the instant/unlimited oxygen huts, let's look at power. The first power generation blueprint you get is for a wind turbine. Did I mention that you've been stranded on a planet initially with no atmosphere? Yet somehow, the wind turbine still works. A bit later, you get solar panels. These work fine at night. Frequently, the planet is blasted by meteor swarms. Don't worry about repairing your buildings: they can take as many direct meteor hits as needed and indeed you'll *want* the meteors to hit your buildings so you don't have to walk far to collect their contents. (Tip: build two doors to your main base. I had a meteor hit the door of my base scattering debris that I couldn't move through for a few minutes, keeping me from entering.) Resources are unlimited but scattered VERY widely, so you'll spend your time going back and forth, back and forth, back and forth, ferrying the more key items for advancement in an ever-larger backpack. But since basic resources are unlimited, you can just sit back, fire this "game" up, and watch a "Terraforming Index" and a few other metrics climb and climb and climb, occasionally dumping a new blueprint on you. After a certain point, you'll get the distinct impression that eventually the numbers will climb (if slowly) high enough to make you successful without you having to do anything. There are blueprint boxes you can find in the game, but these drop non-required QOL sort of items, again in exactly the order the devs want you to have access to them. Sooooo... yeah. It's a "dad game" version of an open world survival game. Maybe some of this will get toned down over the course of development (for example, right now, plant seeds will sprout an unlimited number of times, giving you unlimited food -- the devs have said that this might not be the case in the final game), but the sense of inevitable progression on rails is baked right into the core concept here. So if you're looking for real open world survival game creativity, I'd point you to either Astroneer or the newly available early access game Occupy Mars, or of course either or both Subnautica games if you haven't played those. The Planet Crafter isn't *bad*. There are some good ideas here! But it's very much "dad's survival game". EDIT: Okay, +16 hours or so and I still stand by most everything above. If anything, the "you can only build in X order" only gets worse in the mid to late game (I progressed well into the insect stage and the gaps between new build items gets wider and wider). That said, you know the bit where I say the blueprints you find in boxes are non-required QOL items? NOPE! One of them is critical to advance the story of the game... and it's FAARRRRR down the "optional" blueprint order. So in addition to my notes above, the game also has a very grindy RNG-fest as you have to cast far and wide to find those little blueprint boxes, which just adds *another* layer of frustration to the proceedings. So yeah. Still not recommended. There's some clever ideas here, but watch a couple of play-through videos and that'll give you the gist and you can keep your money. 6/10Show moreShow less
TL;DR - Fantastic game, some terrible community moderators (at the time of writing) EDIT: There's a big problem with the Planet Crafter community Discord. The moderators are called "community helpers" - one of them going by the name "Princess Luna". Often, a new player will join the Discord with a valid question, and this Princess Luna will jump in with a sarcastic reply, or a rude reply, or in some cases a completely incoherent reply. Having witnessed this a number of times, I mentioned it. Big mistake. I am now banned from the Discord, and most other moderators (with a couple of exceptions) rally around in defense of this one terrible moderator. In private, a few people DM'd me to say they had noticed this behaviour before, but can't say anything due to the threat of being banned for speaking up. It's always bad for a community to have a dodgy moderator, especially when there's no way of speaking up against them. This is such a pity, as the game is great, but it is going to be marred by the way the community is being run at the moment. Here's hoping things will change. EDIT 2: I sent off a detailed email to the developers regarding the Discord issue – no response and nothing has been done by them. However, one of the good moderators has since unbanned me, and had a word with Princess Luna (apparently not for the first time), resulting in Luna appearing to be on their best behaviour. To me, this isn’t really good enough – a bad mod needs to be removed completely, as it’s just a matter of time before Luna starts hassling new players again. People should also never be banned for politely questioning a moderator's actions. I will update this review further if the developers actually do something about some of their mods abusing power. Feel free to join the Discord yourself and check things out, but just be aware that Luna (or any moderator) might decide it’s your turn to be targeted. EDIT 3: (hopefully the last one - sorry for the massive wall of text - hope it isn't too boring to sit through :) ) I got a friendly but basic reply from the developers. Very nice people, but they obviously don't really understand how to run a Discord server. Essentially, they say they are aware there's an issue with Luna and the Discord in general, but managing a Discord server takes too much time. They will have a word with the moderators, as they want the Discord server to be a friendly and helpful place. It's a nice enough email, but I worry that the problem will persist as long as the moderators have been picked simply because they happened to make a few helpful comments in the past. Having a "talk" to them will not suddenly make them good moderators :) The golden rule should always be this: Be very careful when picking people online to represent you and your game - especially people you don't know personally. Ask yourself "why do they want to be a moderator, and what skills/personality traits do they have that make them suitable?" It's a much bigger decision than a lot of developers seem to think. Anyways, here is my original review, which still stands as a definite "positive" review... the game is excellent! :) Thanks for all the review awards - I really appreciate it :) -------------------------------------------------------------------- I have just spent 40 hours playing Planet Crafter and it’s excellent fun. It’s still in its early stages, and sometimes it shows, but overall it’s a great game. Planet Crafter will appeal to gamers who are looking for a more relaxed kind of atmosphere – there are no hostile enemies and it’s strictly single player. Your time will be spent collecting resources, crafting terraforming equipment and building your base. The base building options are very limited right now, but I can imagine these will improve as time goes on. However, it’s still very satisfying to construct your own complex. The progression throughout the game is perfectly balanced, providing just the right amount of challenge. It never feels annoying to farm items, and you get a real sense of achievement as you slowly see the planet’s environment responding to your actions. To me, Planet Crafter is a better game in many ways than No Man’s Sky. There's only one map, but because it has been hand-crafted, it feels a lot more satisfying to explore, rather than the same old procedurally generated planets in other similar games. Still, it would be nice if we could choose from multiple planets, or we could go into space. Maybe in future, there could be hand-crafted worlds as DLC? I played a very early release, and I’m aware there is still a lot of work to be done. However, here are some of my thoughts/ideas/suggestions for the developer: 1) Consider dropping “The” completely from the name of the game. 2) When upgrading the backpack, it shouldn’t be necessary to remove it, as this causes things to drop. 3) There needs to be the option for multiple saves within the same game. 4) On the screen mapping terminal, when zoomed in, the player should be able to move the screen and scroll around. 5) The foundation grid’s dimensions don’t match up with the living compartment’s footprints, making it impossible to sit a compartment perfectly on a foundation base. 6) It should be possible to remove a door and window without deleting the compartment. Currently, you can “overwrite” them with something different, but not remove them. 7) It should be possible to upgrade the jetpack again to allow for higher flight – this would help with building, as it’s a bit too low at the moment. 8) It should be possible to block off internal sections of the living compartments. For example, if you join two large ones together, you should be able to decide which walls are “solid”. 9) There should be markers on the floor of compartments to help align things when placing lockers. The large compartment does fit six neatly along a wall, but it takes some practice to learn how to do it exactly. 10) It should be possible to slightly terraform uneven land. Currently, there is no way of knowing if your large settlement will work, as it is only once you have started placing compartments that you find out the land isn’t quite right and the next compartment can’t be placed. Same goes for trees and fixed rocks – they should be able to be deleted. 11) It wasn’t obvious to me (until someone told me) that you hold CTRL to keep placing more of the same building items. 12) The deconstruction tool is currently too dangerous. It is too easy to accidentally delete something you don’t want to delete. 13) I know the world is still getting expanded, but until an area has been made, it should not be possible to go out of bounds on the map - there are many places where it is possible to wander out into unmade areas. These should be closed off until they are ready. 14) It should be possible to place the large wall info screens higher on the compartment walls. If you have a table with small screens, and wish to place large screens behind them on the wall, the bottom of the large screen is too low, meaning the info cannot be read behind the screens that are on the table. 15) The placement of the tree collection point in biodome T2 is awkward. When you come in a door, you either have to turn to the side to collect, or go across the room to the other one. 16) Seed jars and tree seed jars look too similar. It is easy to get them confused. They should look distinct from each other. For example, maybe instead of them both having a graphic of the seeds in a white container, maybe the tree seed container could be green? 17) The position of trees cannot be saved by the game, and are regenerated in different positions each time your save is loaded. This is going to be frustrating for people when it comes to planning out their bases. 18) There's no save confirmation when quitting. Overall, I would rate Planet Crafter a solid 8 out of 10 in this current early stage, with real potential to hit 10 out of 10 in the future :)Show moreShow less
I'm a huge sucker for survival and base building games, and the idea of throwing terraforming into the mix really appealed to me. When faced with the brain-dead simplicity of the early game, however, I just couldn't bring myself to continue and see whether the changes to the planet were sweet enough to make up for my utter boredom and disappointment. Resource gathering amounted to "pick up minerals that are scattered around in a roughly even distribution." No deposits or concentrations, just walking around learning to identify which small rock (that sticks out from the environment like a sore thumb) corresponds to which of the 5 or so minerals you actually need, because you sure aren't going to be able to collect everything - inventory space is extremely limited early on. So you go out and hope that you randomly find the one you're looking for before you run out of oxygen. The sole exception was a particular one that I had to hunt around for, which was probably the most interesting thing I did during my playtime, punctuated by frustration when I realized that I needed a flashlight that I didn't have, so I had to make another tedious trip back to base, burning through my oxygen tanks the whole time. Base building, normally my favorite part of these games, was even more lackluster. I had hoped for a feeling of setting up a complex logistics system on an alien world: laying power cables, fiddling with buttons and wires on panels, managing pressure and atmospheric gases, performing critical maintenance, growing food while on the verge of starving, sweating at the possibility of making a fatal mistake. Instead it's just a matter of unceremoniously plopping down devices that magically provide power, magically dig through rock with no byproducts, magically provide oxygen to your suit, and magically correct the mix of atmospheric gases to something breathable. Oh, and they all magically work forever, unless perhaps one happened to get hit with an odd meteorite - wouldn't know. One you've plopped your first set of magical devices, what do you have to look forward to? Gathering more minerals to plop another set of them, until you unlock the T2 version, and then plopping those down instead. And the scale of my operation barely felt like it would be enough to support myself, let alone make any changes whatsoever to the ecosystem of an entire planet. "Planet Wizard" might have been a more apt description here. Graphically I didn't find the game to be up to modern standards. Textures are very flat and frequently don't blend well with whatever they're sitting near. The devices you put down lack a sense of character - that is, being a working machine. Wind turbines simply run at a constant speed forever. Solar panels are static and always clean. Drills barely move. Your own character only interacts with the environment via a tool that does everything. If the gameplay were more interesting it could easily make up for this, but such as it is, it's just another reason to be unenthused about the complete package. Overall, I'd say that if you don't much care about the things I listed above and just think the idea of watching the planet turn from red to green and having life show up (again, magically) is cool, then by all means you may enjoy Planet Wizard- I mean Crafter. If you just like great survival/crafting games, though, the market is flooded with other titles that will respect your time and provide a more rewarding experienceShow moreShow less
Awesome single player survival game. No Monsters to kill. Just you against the world. Figure out how to survive from the elements. 127 hours so far. 54 yo Female. Still early access, but updates keep coming and the developer is really responsive to working on any bugs, so they don't stay long. I love this game.Show moreShow less
Just because a game is addictive doesn't mean you're having fun. This is a prime example of that. At the present time, Planet Crafter is not fun. It's addictive, and you end up mindlessly gathering resources and building the stuff you need, but there isn't really any fun or artistic value to be had here. Play subnautica instead.Show moreShow less
Source: original Steam user reviews. Helpful votes are an archived snapshot, not live data. Last collected: 08/15/2026.