The Planet Crafter
BANGER · Narrative · 2024
Steam Deck VerifiedThe verdict
BUY IT.
A BANGER at $23.99.
- Length
- 37.3h
- Value
- $0.64/hr
- Reviews
- 96% positive
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Minimum on the Steam store: 4 GB of memory, 3GB VRAM, 4 GB of storage. Windows only.
A space survival open world terraforming crafting game, designed for 1 to 10 players. Alter the ecosystem of an inhospitable planet to render it habitable for humanity. Survive, gather resources, and build your base. Then, generate oxygen, warmth, and pressure to create a brand new biosphere.
What drives the score
How to read this
Every input gets a grade, S to D, read from the buyer's side. The score is multiplicative, so an input only counts as raising when it sits near the top of its own scale. Anything with real room left is holding the score back, because that room is the gap to 100. ▲ marks a lift, ▼ a drag or a dock, ? an input we do not have, • a fact this genre's score does not use. The exact weights stay secret.
The value story
October 2025 is where it bottomed out, at $9.99. It has been discounted 45 times in the 5 years tracked here, typically at 30 percent off, with about 5 weeks between sales. Today it is at full price. The last sale was about 3 weeks ago, and on this game's rhythm the next one tends to arrive within 5 weeks.
On value it sits in the top 1 percent of its genre. It is pricier than 94 percent of its genre, and better reviewed than 99 percent. It outscores the games it most resembles, including ICARUS ($34.99, scores 40) and Necesse ($9.74, scores 79).
On this data it would still be a BANGER at $50.40. It costs $23.99.
This site sampled 800 of its Steam-purchase reviews; 21 were written by buyers who refunded it, sampled from reviews written December 2025 to September 2026. Inside the two-hour refund window, 63 percent of the 1,581 reviews written there were positive, against 96 percent overall, and those are 2 percent of everything written about it.
It carries Valve's Deck Verified rating, which is the one that means it just works.
The drop-off
95% start to 13% rarestNo achievement in this game marks the ending, so there is no finish rate. The curve runs from the most-unlocked achievement to the rarest, and its shape is where players stop. Steam global achievements
Players
7,330 players at peak in the last day.
The chart appears once this game has been counted more than once.Player counts via SteamSpy.
What players say
I really enjoy this game. I like the low pressure of not having to fight anything for my survival but the environment, and the cahllenges of the massive map add to the enjoyment.
I built a base, the water came and then my base turned into a lake. I had to hurry up and move all my stuff out of said lake. I am still recovering from the move. 10/10
The game is a little rough and simple but i think it shows a lot of promise for a sequel with the ideas it has brought forward. the end game is a really repetitive with the moons and humble, but the toxcity planet did feel quite fresh. overall i think the two man team did well with this.
Player reviews from Steam: the most helpful all-time, plus the newest that clear the same quality bar, with the hours each player had put in when they wrote it. The mix of Recommended and Not recommended follows the game's Steam ratio. Rotates daily. Opinions are theirs.
No data upstream: critic score (Metacritic).
Cite this score
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The Planet Crafter scores 96/100 on the BANG Score (a BANGER). The BANG Score rates what a game is worth for the money. Via Steam BANGERS. https://steambangers.com/game/1284190/the-planet-crafterThe BANG Score is one number for value, 0 to 100: price against how it reviews and how long it was built to be. It answers the money question and stops there; whether the game is for you is still your call.
Reviews set the ceiling and price moves you inside it, so a cheap game that reviews badly cannot climb. Ratings from few reviewers are shrunk toward the middle, so 100 percent from nine people does not outrank 96 percent from ninety thousand. Length comes from HowLongToBeat where it can be matched, measured against a per-genre floor so a five-hour narrative game is judged against other narrative games rather than against a sixty-hour RPG. Where no verified length exists the score says so and carries a dock, because the biggest input is then a guess. The full method, including where it is weak → Steam reviews as of Sep 15, price as of Sep 24.
A number here look wrong? Tell me what it got wrong and I will look at the inputs behind it.