The Planet Crafter: First Steam players love the survival game with open world

A new survival crafting game is celebrating great success on Steam. Rising player numbers and dream ratings point to a new hit.

If we were to claim that the survival genre on Steam has a certain hit potential, that would be a bold understatement. Rather, the keywords survival and Steam seem to be a downright guarantee for great player interest. If an open world is added, there is usually nothing to stop the game from soaring.

This is what happened once again on Steam: The survival game The Planet Crafter entices with a large open game world and a lot of freedom – and has triggered a lot of cheers from the first players on Steam. So that you don’t miss out on a possible new survival trend, we now present the game to you in more detail.

The screenshots give you a first look at The Planet Crafter:

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What is The Planet Crafter about?

Do you know the film The Martian? That’s how you have to imagine the starting situation of The Planet Crafter. Single players land on a hostile planet and have to carve a flourishing landscape out of the inhospitable rock. Okay, maybe that was a bit too figurative.

Let’s try it again: The Planet Crafter reminds us a little of Satisfactory, only without assembly lines, but with terraforming. The gameplay focuses on reshaping an entire planet, while not losing sight of your own survival.

The short trailer shows how the barren rocky desert is transformed into a living paradise:

How a round goes: You land on a desert planet that does not allow human life. Now you have to firstly search the rock for resources, secondly use these resources to stomp advanced machines out of the dusty ground and thirdly use them to make the planet arable, i.e. terraform it

This is done by heating up the planet, producing oxygen and even creating entire oceans! Your growing base serves as the pivotal point, which also ensures the life of your character. Along the way, you explore the game world to uncover secrets. And this incremental gameplay goes down really well with Steam players!

If you have a heart for cute pixel style à la Stardew Valley, take a look at Core Keeper:

Core Keeper: New co-op mining sandbox conquers hearts on Steam

Players Celebrate The Planet Crafter

Of over (1,200 users), 95 per cent give The Planet Crafter a thumbs up in Steam reviews, resulting in an extremely positive average rating. This means that the game, which was only launched in Early Access on 24 March, is already one of the most popular titles on the platform.

Since its Early Access release, the open-world survival game has been in the upper echelons of Steam’s top sellers, at times it was even in first place. The Planet Crafter is therefore also selling well, which is likely to be helped by the positive player perception.

The number of concurrently active players also points to a hit, although not as clearly. At its peak, 9,351 players were active at the same time. That’s not the world, but it’s also not the maximum person capacity of a lift. Whether the proverbial elevator for The Planet Crafter goes up or down will probably depend on the course of Early Access.

Are you playing The Planet Crafter? What do you think of the terraforming survival game? Let us know in the comments