The object of most automation games is industry over everything. There’s no question that inFactoriothe player is not the good guy and inSatisfactoryyou’re just a cog in the Fixit Company’s machine. Granted, the player gets a lot done even with just being a working schlub creating ever-more-complicated production lines in an attempt to fulfill the job requirements and eventually return home, but there’s no question the planet is in worse shape than when they arrived. Even the multiple-star-system-spanning production lines ofDyson Sphere Projectdrain several planets of their resources in a quest to power a single solar system, so maybe it would be nice for once to build a less destructive production line. InEden Crafters, the player is out to terraform hostile worlds into friendly green planetary oases, although not without the planet fighting back.
Building a Nicer Planet, One Machine At a Time
Like any good plan to save humanity,Eden Crafters opens with you as a lone worker tasked with doing everything. This time around it’s as an astronaut with a ship that’s out of fuel and nowhere near enough supplies to do anything but build a tiny one-room habitat. That takes care of the oxygen problem, and for everything else the standard “scavenge minerals from the planet’s surface” will have to do, at least for a while.Eden Craftersplays like a combination ofPlanet CraftersandSatisfactory, but it doesn’t take too long before the automation aspect starts to take over from the manual labor.
Floating Around the Interplanetary Debris Field of Astrometica Prologue
Astrometica: Prologue is the first two missions and a good-sized chunk of explorable space for the forthcoming survival/crafting game Astrometica.
The demo takes place on a hand-built blocky-voxel island, with a tech tree that goes up to crafting a battery for the un-powered spaceship. Miners, various assemblers, pipes for water and conveyor belts for everything else all show up soon, and while it’s very possible to complete the demo with just a single iron miner, the call of automation is strong and the demo keeps going after what should be a climactic, life-ending event. Seeing as the apocalypse turns out fine after all (at least in the demo, the trailer below shows a very different outcome) there’s no reason not to see just what the available tools can really do. Automating enough to build and supply an Area Fertilizer, which starts the process of turning what’s basically a big pile of dirt into a grass- and tree-covered island, can be done by hand, but that’s a lot of work that machines should be able to do for you.
Been There, Done That, Will Cheerfully Do It Again
It’s a solid gameplay loop, but the problem with theEden Craftersdemo is that it does feel far too close to the previously-mentioned “Planet CraftersmeetsSatisfactory”. The video below gives hints as to the game having its own identity, and having multiple worlds with their own unique challenges like acid mist or tidal waves is promising, but the disaster on display in the demo doesn’t do anything yet other than look impressive. Granted it’s early (and more than a little buggy), but what’s playable right now feels like the good bits of two games without being filtered throughEden Crafters' own sensibilities. It will be interesting to see how the modifiable voxel terrain comes into play, though, and the trailer shows not only land-shaping machines, but roads and other vehicles as well.
The important thing about theEden Craftersdemo is that, despite its bugs and rough edges, it’s a hard one to put down once you adjust to its issues. Building a complicated network of machines out of simple parts is always satisfying, and each one makes it a little easier to construct the next. It’s also really good to see all that tech being put towards waking up a planet rather than covering it in smoke, ignoring for a moment that half of it ends up covered in machines and conveyor belts instead. TheEden Craftersdemo shows a game with a lot of potential, and it promises at the very least to be an interesting ride to see how much of that it can live up to.
TheEden Craftersdemois available on Steam now, and while you can blow through it in a couple of hours there’s a bigger version on the way in June in the form ofOcean World: Eden Crafters. That latter one is more like the popular Prologue type of game, which is a free version that’s bigger than a demo but much smaller than the full release, in this case featuring the demo’s island level with a larger tech-tree to discover.Eden Craftersneeds a lot of polish to reach what it could become, but its demo is already far more engaging than it’s got any right to be.
