Humanity evolved to live in one very specific place, and that’s the planet Earth. We like a set range of temperatures, a specific atmospheric pressure and composition, nutritional intake, etc, because that’s what’s here. The environment existed and humanity evolved to fit right in, which is great for living on this one planet and terrible for journeying out into the entire rest of the universe. Of all the potentially hundreds of billions of planets in the Milky Way galaxy, there’s only one we’re aware of that supports life, and even if it turns out life is common, it wouldn’t have evolved to be anything like compatible with us. If humanity wants to spread to the stars, it’s going to need to terraform suitable planets into shape.
Making A New Planet Feel Like Home, One Machine At A Time
Meanwhile, over in automation gaming, it’s kind of hard to ignore that most of the time the player is not exactly having a positive effect on the environment they work in. Sometimes it’s rationalized as saving Earth, like inSatisfactory, while inTechtonicait’s the only way out of the caverns, but most of the time a planet getting industrialized from pole to pole is a side effect of just how much fun it is to create a sprawling interconnected maze of machinery covering the land. Sometimes, though, it’s about transforming a dead world into something nicer, such asPlan B: Terraform, and that game is now joined byEden Crafterswith the goal being to build a better planet.
Automating a Better Planet with the Eden Crafters Demo
In Eden Crafters, the player is out to terraform hostile worlds into friendly green planetary oases, although not without the planet fighting back.
Eden Craftersis a first-person automation game that’s so easily described as a cross betweenPlanet CraftersandSatisfactorythat there’s no way to avoid it. As a lone astronaut on a desolate planet, it’s your job to set up a base and make the place habitable, starting with nothing but a few supplies brought on a now-powerless spaceship and whatever minerals you can scavenge off the ground. Iron, copper and quarts are plentiful, but hand-harvesting everything you’d need sounds like a lot of work, and the joy of automation is in eventually getting all those machines to do the heavy lifting for you.
Miners on mineral desposts create a steady supply of ore, which can be transformed into useful ingots in smelters. Rock is easy to get, so the supply of concrete shouldn’t ever be an issue, but plates, rods, gears, wire and other components all need to be created through various types of crafting machinery. It’s all Automation 101, butEden Craftersdoes have a couple of good tricks up its sleeves.
Probably the best feature unique to the game is the drone, which is always available at the press of a key. While the astronaut stays on the ground, the drone can fly high in the air, building everything from a bird’s eye view. Its range is limited, but it can still place things relatively precisely into the distance, which is especially handy when running a few thousand feet of conveyor belts or pipes. The pipes send water wherever needed, and while initially that’s to a number of different types of refiners it doesn’t take long for greenhouses and fertilizing buildings to show up. The greenhouses need water to produce plant matter, which is good for making into rubber, but more importantly it feeds into the area fertilizer to bring some greenery to the barren landscape. Not only does it make the place look nicer, but once 100% fertilized, the area atmosphere is strong enough that the oxygen meter no longer depletes.
There’s just something rewarding about building in a wasteland and watching it sprout grass and trees, even if you’re simultaneously covering it in the most awkward tangle of belts, pipes, and machinery imaginable.
The ocean, though, isn’t much nicer, being a toxic yellow sludge, and it needs to be purified before its water can be used. Similar to the fertilizers, this is no more difficult than dropping a purifier into the water and making sure it’s got power, but you still need to make sure you’ve got access to the necessary components to build it plus a solar panel or two for power. Automation games tend to view buildings in one of two ways: make buildings and store them in inventory, or carry around the parts and assemble it on-site.Eden Craftersis the latter, and its warehouse system makes it so there should be no issues always having the materials available. Each warehouse is a large structure with five inputs and each input can hold nine stacks of items.
Once an item is in a warehouse you can access it anywhere to either craft items at a bench or place buildings as needed, so long as the supply of parts keeps up with the demands of construction. While you can hand-load the warehouse to hold a bit of everything, it’s best to build a bunch of them with each connected to assembly lines keeping them stocked with materials and components. The planet is big, mineral deposits plentiful, and once you’ve got one warehouse being continually stocked with the materials needed to build more there’s no reason not to pave the planet with them.
Bite-Sized Challenges In Automation Are Still Pretty Huge
That would actually be harder than it sounds, though, becauseEden Crafters' planets are surprisingly large. Unlike a standard automation game, where the goal is to spend a hundred hours or more in a place,Eden Craftershas a smaller quest-loop that takes you from one planet to the next, each with its own challenges. At the moment there are only two of them, one with hot and frozen zones plus a bit of radiation for good measure, and another being a revised version of the ocean world from the playable prologue that came out early this summer. The third is due by the end of this month and it’s promised to have floating sky-islands, while later on a lava planet should be an interesting place to build while trying not to set the poor astronaut on fire.
While it’s nice to have something more bite-sized, seeing as automation games tend to run huge, it’s worth noting that one of the defining features ofEden Craftersis that it’s a little rough around the edges. Using the drone to place a building too far away from the player, for example, will usually see it end up embedded in the ground. Building a cliff base is almost impossible, seeing as while you can stack supports and staircases on top of each other you can’t do the same thing in reverse, starting from the top and working down. Metrics are frequently hidden, only telling you how many units per minute an assembler can manufacture while it’s in the middle of building its product, and while you can create different kinds of platforms for multi-story factories, the belt system isn’t designed with any kind of verticality in mind. Even so, the game is functional and with a bit of prodding will do what you want, but there’s a lot of room for polish that I can only hope it will eventually get.
Rough as it is, though, when the game works it works incredibly well. There’s just something rewarding about building in a wasteland and watching it sprout grass and trees, even if you’re simultaneously covering it in the most awkward tangle of belts, pipes and machinery imaginable. The nice thing about having a planet to build on is that even if a mineral-rich area is industrialized, once you’ve got the spaceship running again you can see just how small a part of the world it is and work on making the rest of it better. Eventually huge buildings become necessary to transform the environment and half the fun is finding the most dramatically scenic place to put them, whether that be on top of a mountain, rising up from a peninsula or carving out the side of a hill to nestle it on in there. It’s a dead planet that’s of no use to anyone in it’s current state, and so as long as you’re automating the place into inhabitability, it might as well look like somewhere people would want to live.
