What Did We Play Yesterday?

I finally got around to nabbing the Planet Crafter's Planet Humble DLC. This is a more streamlined planet, but it has a steeper learning curve. Cobalt is not readily available at the start of the game, and you have to leave your starting location to find ice for water. Cobalt is essential for improving your oxygen situation, and evidently the only way to get it is to create an ore crusher which mines cobalt from other things.

I tried playing this on Steamdeck and it's verified, but it's not a super comfortable experience. The game takes a while to initially load, and navigating the menus isn't great. I'm very much a button mis-masher (I cannot tell you how many times I accidentally ended a round of combat in Slay the Spire when I intended to use a potion by pressing Y instead of X) and it's only matter of time before I hit the wrong button and flub an emergency shelter build and end up dying due to lack of oxygen. So I'll be playing this one on my PC. But I'm looking forward to a more condensed terraforming experience, for sure.

I've been playing Planet Humble, but have not been posting about it because I have the game on GOG and GOG Galaxy has a completely different location/naming scheme for screenshots, so I have to either bulk rename and move the screenshots (which is exactly what I want to avoid, and it is the whole reason I made a custom front-end for screenshot handling) or write howevermuch code to integrate it, and I haven't decided how to do that without it being a major PITA.

ANYWAY, this is getting good. Once you overcome the more immediate oxygen and water problem, there's the food problem. I was able to develop food growers just in time, I think, to start storing food instead of relying wholly on scavenging. The next problem will be water again, when the planet starts to warm up and the ice melts, but that's down the road since I've been completely focused on surviving and haven't done much to actually terraform.

Imagine my muted squeal of delight when I found a nuclear reactor to salvage. There's a nice little area down here to explore, but I lack the tools to deconstruct some of it so I will have to come back later.

I have little bases everywhere, and my next goal is to set up a home base area to start working more seriously towards warming the planet up. Once I develop moisture collectors I'll be truly food-independent and will be able to set up water/food pretty much anywhere, but until then I've discovered an iced-over lake I can use for water down the road.

A monumental event: the first rain. It occurred right after I was able to build my first moisture collector.

Now that I can grow my own food, and harvest water, it's just a matter of building bigger and better terraforming machines. For whatever reason, updated deconstruction chips elude me. I keep finding blueprints for cosmetic stuff like fences. But I haven't unlocked any equipment that requires resources from level 2 deconstruction, so I'm fine.

I discovered a sulfur valley reasonably close to an iridium source, and started a base with food and water processing. I've completely exhausted the nearby uranium field, but the ore crusher makes it so much easier to get resources I'm not to worried about it. I have 4 nuclear reactors now, and it's just a matter of "build more" as I scale my machines up.

I'm right on the brink of bodies of water forming. My main base miiiiiight be located in an area that gets flooded, but I don't think so.

I'm pushing outward, to explore more and more, but I'm feeling the limits of my T4 oxygen tank. Humble allows you to build up to T5. I think the real issue is cobalt isn't lying around on the ground, you have to use an ore crusher, so it feels more 'precious' and I'm less inclined to build and use oxygen tanks. Speed will make the difference; once I'm able to craft rocket boosters, I'll travel much faster and the distances will be more manageable.

At this stage, we're just kinda at "chores and also exploring," because I have to do certain housekeeping things to stay alive, but I'm still pretty far away from unlocking the next tiers of items. Fortunately, nuclear power is a lot easier to gain on Humble, so it's less of a grind to maintain a power grid to support all the terraforming machines I need to make Numbers Go Up.

Continuing to play Planet Humble while forgetting to take screenshots, so I took a wild and woolly adventure in hidden areas well below the crashed landing pod and died due to lack of oxygen and have nothing to show for it! There were absolutely NO common resources down there, so I learned my lesson and from now on will make sure I have enough resources to build an emergency shelter if I decide to go way off the beaten path.

The bad news is I'd just raided the osmium lake near the starting area, which was the only osmium place I knew of, and lost most of it. But the good news is I found an osmium field just past a massive, enticing derelict that begged to be explored.

It's a bit of a trip, even with the jet pack, so I set up a satellite base with food and water. I've just researched T2 nuclear reactors (finally), the T2 deconstruction chip (FINALLY), and vehicles, so I have plenty to do. I'll need to raid the sulfur fields, and also return to that frozen lake (which is hopefully not frozen anymore) when I'm ready to harvest algae. The next research item to shoot for is the gas extractor, so I can get methane.

I haven't really paid attention to my terraforming numbers since I unlocked the T5 inventory. I don't even have a main terraforming progress screen set up yet, I've been "cheating" using the blueprint screen to gauge where I am and what I need to do next.

I also finally found something to blow up! Weird spherical rocks have resources inside. So far, I haven't found any worth blowing up (I blew up one with aluminum not knowing what was in it, so now I'm reserving my explosive charges since God knows when I'll figure out how to make them).

Once I've replaced my T1 nuclears with T2 and have a solid vehicle I'll probably start setting up ore extractors. The ore crusher has done a really excellent job of providing iridium, uranium, aluminum, and super alloy so far, and that has improved the grind considerably. Since I've harvested all the Uranite in the ice caves, setting up an extractor there is priority, but eventually I'll need to start harvesting sulfur as well.

If you break it down, the Planet Crafter is really just a never-ending list of "space chores to do so I don't die" or whatever but it's so fun.

Unexpectedly scavenging 2 rocket boosters allowed me to build a vehicle. Right now, it's utility is somewhat limited outside carrying cargo. It's slower than the jet pack. But when I find Zeolite I can craft an oxygenated cabin, and then it's on.

I went looking (and kicked myself when I realized I didn't pack any explosives...), but I now realize Zeolite doesn't spawn until you're at 150 MTi and I am NOWHERE near that. So I'll head back to the base and get to work on my numbers, which I haven't paid much attention to since unlocking T2 nuclear.

Ice is starting to melt, which has allowed me access to better bounties. I set up an ore extractor to hopefully mine uranite, so that should solve some of my resource problems.

aaaaaaaaaaaaaaa what did i sayyyyy

Lakes are now pooling around my "maybe it will be underwater haha" base. Having water close is convenient, so I'm going to wait it out, but I've been meaning to upgrade my nuclear reactors anyway so I'll probably go ahead and move those. I don't like having a bunch of lower-tier machines around, since each advance in machinery makes the last obsolete, so this is a good time to rebuild some stuff on the high plateau nearby and never have to move it again.

The race to terraform continues, and I've finally unlocked algae-generating stuff. I also took the liberty of shooting several rocks into the air, and those have 1000x multipliers. In response, they've showered the surface with iridium and uranium, it's just a matter of going around picking it all up.

Finally, my uranite mining did not in fact mine uranite, boo. I moved it to another area, and in doing so, uncovered a lot more uranite at a higher elevation. So I might not need to mine for it after all. We'll see.

Good news: My base did not flood, and I've got a very convenient river circling it.

Bad news: The game is starting to get a little grindy, as I'm in a weird place between T3/T4 heaters and miners.

My base may not be out of the woods yet. As snow melts, the water level rises, so what was a natural bridge is now the beginnings of a waterfall. I found a osmium grotto I missed when I explored the snowy area previously. This is probably a mineable area. I also found my first machine optimizer fuse and put it to work on a pair of newly unlocked T4 drills.

I'm to the point where I need to trek out quite a bit to explore further. My vehicle is nowhere close to where it needs to be, and we're a long ways off from Zeolite development still, so IDK. I should probably build another base farther out.

Suddenly, everything is green!

I think the reason this happened is I put off terraforming for so long, and now my percentage is going up very fast. It is a little disorienting to arrive in an area that used to be a desert-type expanse, and find it is now a green canyon leading... somewhere.

I've unlocked T4 heaters, so my next task is to upgrade those and explore that big pit thing that just opened up.