The Planet Crafter Beginner Guide

So, for the aspiring planet crafter, I offer you a simple tip that will help expand your range of exploration in early game.

I usually ignore the oxygen tanks, because I find them to be a waste of good Cobalt, they only really help if you like to play it safe and even then I usually only keep 1 oxygen tank on me, with no backups made. The big reason I don’t really concern myself with Oxygen tanks will be explained in Tip 2.

This is really easy, really basic, but helps a whole lot. Whenever you plan on going out on an exploration mission. Take 4 Iron, 1 Silicon, and 2 Titanium. Why? I can hear you asking. Well, you can build a foundation, a living compartment, and then a door for easy access to oxygen.

Essentially this creates a little outpost building that you can quickly get inside to recover your oxygen. Furthermore, you can collect nearby iron and build storage inside so that you can gather materials from an area, store em in your outpost, and then haul them back easy peesy. This basically cheeses the oxygen game mechanic so you never have to worry about oxygen ever again once you set out a net of Outposts

Grab free objects first when exploring. What are ‘free objects’ you might ask? Well convenient strawman, they are objects that are not stored anywhere inside of wrecked areas. Take for example, seeds. The battleship in the desert has plenty of seeds aboard, however most will end up ignoring them and go straight for the good stuff, like Alloys and datachips, thinking you can pick up those seeds later… Well here’s some bad news, those free objects will eventually despawn. (The timer doesn’t start til you near the actual wreckages)

Once you near a wreckage, your goal is to gather anything that isn’t sealed inside a storage box pronto! In the prologue I made the mistake of not picking up said seeds on the battleship and when I tried going back later for them, they had all despawned, leaving me with about 5 different food seeds, and 7 different plant seeds for my run. Always collect your free objects as fast as possible. Couple this with tip #2 and store free objects within your little outpost bases scattered across the map so you can haul it back to main base when you’re ready to return!

This is really just an explanation. The Ore extractor, extracts ores from its location. So if you want Aluminium, build it in an area that has aluminium.

The tier 2 ore extractors are the only ones that can extract things like Osmium, Sulfur, Iridium, etc.

Food and Water… Those are the only two things you have to worry about if you’ve been slapping out outposts.

Now, this should come as no surprise, but Growers and the Water Collector are your best friends and should definitely take priority in building.

Typically you can get by with 2 growers (One doing Beans, and the other doing whatever else) However, this involves you really micromanaging your food, so if you want to just grow a lot of food without any worries, go with 4 growers strictly for food. You want about 10 more growers after that… why? (4 for Eggplants, 4 for Squash, 2 for the shrooms) You will need these plants for hi-tech stuff later on.

Water is pretty easy once you get a water collector, however I recommend 2x to start with and when you can get water from lakes, you’ll immediately want to replace your 2 water collectors with lake water collectors. Your water struggles will be more than managed. Then as soon as you can, build the water purifier, and you will never really need to carry water around ever again, because you can drink straight from any lake.