In almost a blink of an eye, the planet will go through a couple of terraforming stages. Up till this point, it felt like it was taking forever. It turns out I was just a couple of machines away from that all changing in the short term.

Some of the places I'd explored felt more like a moon than a planet. I recall making it out to this rather dull-looking place. At the time I was a decent distance away from my base. I was trying to find a way back but kept finding myself going further and further out.

I was due to my fault quite low on food. An exploration trip I was not expecting to take that long to check out a section of the map I had yet to be in. Ended up turning into something much longer.

It all started when I noticed I could drive off a cliff. I thought I had only been to a part of the area that was beyond a cliff. So, I went for it. I then went past a cave I had been in before. That cave ended up being my way back. I however did not want to take it since that felt like I'd be backtracking.

Beyond this, I ended up with lands filled with lava. Being near death I did not stop to take any photo shoots. I however kept trying to push on. There however became a point where I could tell I was just getting further and further away from the market on my screen from where my old base was.

I ended up building one last habitat to recover my almost depleted oxygen supply. I was then going to need to make a mad dash back to my base as my food bar went lower and lower to zero.

I barely made it back to my base in time using the very caves I ended up skipping over. As my last moments flashed before me. I opened my food container to find I had one last remaining squish left to consume. It would not fill me up, but it bought me some time to go harvest from my small in-base garden afterward.

While back at base I had made quite a few improvements to how much heat I could produce to terraform the planet. I had an entire section of my base set up with heaters. Shortly after that, I received the tier 4 variant. Since I had quite a few resources needed to craft it already gathered I went to work on building the new machines.

The base at this point had turned into a hoarder's dream. I had the entire right section of the base all dedicated to storage lockers. Even that was starting to become not enough space. Things like iron I ended up having over three lockers and even that was not enough. At one point I started to just ignore or dump any iron I'd acquire while looking at wrecks and removing old machines that I replaced with far more effective ones.

I was kind of shocked at how little time it took to move the terraforming from the lake stage into moss. Before I knew it barely ended up at my base to look at my progression screen to see it reading 99.99% progression towards the moss stage.

Like the lake stage, the moss stage had even more of a profound impact on the local environment around my base and the planet. While there would still be deserts and rocky areas. There was now a lot more vibrance to look at as I explored around.

Next up was the flora stage of the planet. It ended up spawning in an ore I had been wanting for quite some time called zeolite. While I'd later find a cave with a bunch of it in it. There would also be these moss-covered tree roots that were sticking out of the ground that would have a single zeolite for me to collect from them. They did not grow back so any time I noticed one of them far off in the distance I'd go charging at it.

With Zeolite I'd be able to craft the rather important circuit boards. Along with many things for farming like butterfly domes and farms. It was even needed in some rather advanced tree-spreading machines as well.

For quite a while I went on a rocket spamming conquest. In part, I wanted to increase the multiplier I was getting for oxygen. This would end up accelerating my progression in leaps and bounds it was silly I had not made a dozen rockets by now and just sent them all up one by one.

Before I knew it I was well into the flora stage of the planet and next up were the trees. Trees would end up being the bane of me to exist somewhat. The rover could not go through thick areas of trees.

I would also go on to make the mistake of setting up a tree farm just a few steps behind my base. I thought I would just get a couple of trees. Instead, I'd get an entire forest and then some.

At one point I was getting quite low on things like uranium. Thankfully there is quite an easy way to get insane amounts of it. One of the types of rocket ships you can send up attracts asteroids that come crashing down to the planet. They also leave piles of uranium to be collected.

I must have sent up a half dozen rockets to space. There ended up being around six or so sites that the asteroids would all crash down onto. I then went around just sweeping up as many as I could get my hands on. Not only filling up my inventory a few times over but an entire storage locker of the stuff.

Sending up so many rockets also increased by quite a lot my heat generation by giving my base amount a 1000% boost from every single rocket. Compounding that with the new tier four heaters I had installed not long ago. That made my progress skyrocket even more in such a short amount of time.

The ground was also so littered by asteroid rocks. I ended up having to stop sending up more rockets at one point as anything new that came crashing into the planet was blocking my ability to loot all the ones that were spread out everywhere.

At one point I noticed one asteroid went right into the lake. I looked under there and there had been a quarter's worth of an inventory of stuff just waiting to be looted. I could hardly believe my luck.

Final Thoughts

Progression through the stages of the planet has never been an expected pattern. Sometimes it feels like forever goes by before I get to the next stage of terraforming the planet. Then I'll have bursts like this where I'll go through a few stages in such a short time you almost don’t get to enjoy the little changes each one brings to the planet.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Planet Crafter.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.