The Planet Crafter How to Unlock the Fusion Reactor

This guide assumes you’re a good ways into the game and understand the basics. This guide was written when the game was first released on early access (March 2022) and may not be updated for every patch afterwards.

So you’ve earned tier 4 buildings, are down to a handful of unlocks left, and are wondering what your end-game goals should be. Your mileage may vary but the whole journey took me about 25 hours to get the fusion reactor, though there are definitely things I did out of order or inefficiently so you may outpace me. This is also a general guide, you don’t have to follow my exact numbers or suggestions. If you want to build more of something and less of something else, go for it. You’ll still get there.

End game is building a bunch of the same thing, and that includes miners, algae production, food growers, and water filtration. Let’s begin with those as they will be a stepping stone towards our end goal. Don’t make all of something at once, slowly scale up your operation as needed. The quantities I give below are what I ended at, and all the miners/growers/whatever are of the highest tier.

• 5x miners for iridium. This is honestly the most needed resource and should be set up (at least partially) first. You need iridium rods for rockets, heaters, miners, and a handful of other things. There’s an iridium cave by spawn, under the sand waterfall, as well as on the eastern wall of the canyons
• 5x miners for super alloy. You’ll need super alloy for a bunch of things and making it from the 6 “basic” resources is a hassle, takes a lot of inventory management, and can quickly deplete an otherwise stable and needed resource pool. You can mine super alloy in the cliff-side cave near the battleship
• 2x miners for osmium. You won’t need a ton of osmium, not near the amount of iridium and super alloy, but it will be needed before you get that last unlock. You can mine osmium in the cave by the crashed freighter (the one by spawn), in the cave in the dust storm, in a cave linking the broken spires area to the southern desert, in the tunnel connecting the western canyon to the southern part of the desert with the battleship, or on the most southern end of the map
• 1x miner for sulfur. This is mainly needed for fertilizer, though is also gets eaten up by a few other things you’ll end up mass producing. You may want to build another miner to limit your trips to get sulfur when you need it, but that’s up to you. You can mind sulfur at the sulfur fields which you can get to via the sand fall tunnel or by going west of the battleship through a cliff pass
• 1x miner for uranium. For me, I got most of my uranium through asteroids and exploration so this miner wasn’t really needed, but it was nice knowing it was there if I ever needed it (and I ended up needing it once or twice). There’s a spot to mine uranium on the southern end of the map, west of the crashed space gate
• 1x miner for aluminum. I personally didn’t need one, I got all of my aluminum through chests and exploring, but if you plan on crafting super alloy yourself I would recommend at least 1 miner, as it’ll be the resource you’ll burn through the fastest. Aluminum is mined from the aluminium zone. It’s the zone wtih weird silvery rock formations and grey ground. Hard to miss

 

• 10x level 2 algae farms. Algae is surprisingly important as it’s used for fertilizer and bacterial samples, both of which you’ll need a lot of, and it’s annoying as they take a relatively long time to produce. Make more if you want to avoid lots of underwater trips, but don’t go wild
• 10x Food grower T2. You’ll need tons of mushrooms, squash, and eggplants for a fertilizers and bioplastics and they take a while to grow. With 10 growers I was able to harvest in between other tasks and almost never be waiting on stuff to grow. Be sure to get 10 of each seed to make the most out of them, as well as grab some bean seeds (beans aren’t needed for anything, but make a great general purpose food)
• 3x gas extractors. Methane isn’t a super hard resource to get and you don’t need a ton of it, it just takes a while to naturally produce from the the extractor
• 3x lake water collector. You also don’t need a lot of water, until you do. Having 3 collectors allows you to mostly forget about water until you need it, and then you can fill your inventory and forget about it for a while again
• 1x Bio-dome T2. You’ll need at least 1 to get bark which is needed for a lot of end-game biomass related recipes. I was able to survive with just 1, as long as I remembered to gather the bark is makes in between tasks, but you may want to make 2 or 3 if you’re more forgetful or want to rush biomass related buildings and rockets

Rockets are great for increasing your terraforming value and shouldn’t be slept on. Each rocket will increase its associated value x10 (so if you have 1,000,000 ppq/s for oxygen, and launch the oxygen rocket, you’ll start getting 10,000,000 ppq/s oxygen). This is great, especially when you first start popping off rockets, but the percent increase does eventually taper off as you use more of them because the x10 is additive.

For instance, using the starting value of 1,000,000 ppq/s, by your 4th rocket you’ll be getting 40,000,000 ppq/s, and launching a 5th will get you 50,000,000 ppq/s. That’s a 25% (total) increase from 1 rocket! However as you launch more and more the percent increase actually goes down: going from your 7th rocket to your 8th is an 14.3% increase, 12th to 13th rocket is an 8.33% increase, and it levels off around the 16th rocket (which is only a 6.66% improvement from the 15th).

The take away from this? Launch as many rockets as you can early on, as those give the largest percent increases. I wouldn’t hinder myself by dedicating all my resources to launching rockets, but as you find rocket engines you should use them ASAP. I ended up launching a total of 12 of each kind of rocket (besides the satellite ones) and would recommend that number, if not more. Again, don’t go crazy with them and hamstring production elsewhere by dedicating yourself to rockets or send 20+ up, but do what feels best to you and is expendable within your resource pool.

As you can imagine, you’ll need a lot of power for everything already listed (not to mention the biggest power pullers which we’ll get to next: terraforming production). Scale your base as needed, but I was able to get my base powered with:

• 4x nuclear fusion generators
• 9x Tier 2 nuclear plants
• A handful of aesthetic solar panels and wind farms.

Finally, the thing that actually progresses the number in the top right hand of the screen. Now that you’ve launched some rockets, have your resource production set up, and can power everything, it’s time to make number go up. This is the set up I ended with, though you’re always welcome to make more if you get bored, as I did have to afk for around an hour once everything was built to unlock the fusion reactor.

• 20x Tier 4 heaters
• 20x Tier 4 drills
• 20x Tier 3 tree spreaders (with an assortment of tree seeds, you can definitely optimize this to speed up your terraformation).

That’s it really. In case you aren’t aware, you get tree seeds by combining a plant (not seeds) + mutagen + bark in the DNA manipulator. The better the original plant, the better the tree is as making oxygen.

Scale up your base as needed (don’t go down the list and do everything in order). Explore a lot for chests and natural resources to jump start your base. Go around after asteroids hit to get free resources (especially the iridium and super alloy ones!)

• 15x T2 miners (5 iridium, 5 super alloy, 2 osmium, 1 sulfur, 1 uranium, 1 aluminum)
• 10x T2 algae farms
• 10x T2 good growers
• 1x T2 bio-dome
• 3x gas extractors
• 3x lake water collectors
• At least 12 of each rocket
• 4x fusion reactors
• 9x T2 nuclear plants, or another fusion reactor
• 20x T4 heaters
• 20x T4 drills
• 20x T3 tree spreaders