Planetbase

Slightly different take on colony/city building, looking forward to Planetbase 2

Despite one annoying bug, the game gives a very nice meditative experience.

good simple fun, buy the full bundle with dawn of man as well.

can't wait for planetbase 2

Came to this store page when I saw the announcement for Planetbase 2 and noticed that the recent reviews are mixed, which is undeserved imho.

Planetbase is solid game, where building your base requires some thinking ahead to maximize production.
The game is almost 10 years old and is was the first game made by this dev, and it shows in some places.
But I never experienced any game-breaking bugs, which is not something that can be said for most AAA-titles these days.
Also the dev continued to release updates through the years - last one was September 2024. That counts for something in my book.

TLDR: Solid game. Solid dev. Deserves a better review score than "Mixed".

"Mixed Reviews" ?
Nah, this is a nice game, but it is a niche.
It is a well thought out simulation of the colonization of a different Planet.
Do not expect infinite repalayability. But you get a few sessions of strategic gameplay,
Unmatched by other games. I enjoyed it.

My ONLY negative about this game is that there is NO PAUSE allowed.
You can hit ESC and stop the game and look at the "Encyclopedia" but you cannot examine the terrain or look at your statuses of resources or do any planning.
Meanwhile your Oxy or H2O or Energy is running out.
And the developers want it that way.
Hard to learn the game without a pause to at least see the terrain, your buildings' statuses, your resources, etc.
Geme looks really good as city builder, but even in real life you do get time to survey, plan, and calculate.

Super fun and chill game to play, I only hope we get another one in the future and with better modding support.

good game, as soon as you add security though, you suddenly start to run out of food... annoying! but still a good game.

very relaxing game but with enough challenge to keep you interested

Game looks great and runs well. Good purchase for the price. But game play is simplistic and gets boring. I would like to see more modules for base building, and more goals to aim for. Hardest part of the game is fitting modules within the given terrain.

The game REALLY needs an option to upgrade existing modules to their next tier. Depending on how your base is built, you can find yourself unable to upgrade a module because (the game requires you to recycle it fist, but recycling it would split the base in two, which the game does not allow.

I have all ways liked this game , fun to play does give challenges. I am looking for the second Planet Base to come to us on the market ,I cannot wait.

good game but PLEASE loosen building restrictions the amount of times I have had to fully restart a save or now more recently use mods is uncountable

Great city builder game with some unique mechanics to make survival possible cant wait for Planetbase 2!

I love the city-builder genre, I'm a huge SF nerd, and I have spent hundreds of hours on SURVIVING MARS. I hoped that PLANETBASE would scratch that same itch.

It did, but to extend the metaphor, the scratching only made things worse.

Three major complaints:
1) You can do everything right, and still be doomed to lose if your landing site is terrain-locked.
2) The first three planets look like they should be different, but nope. They're just different colors of the same terrain, with slightly different rules for play. I haven't gotten to the fourth, but I'm not expecting much.
3) Building placement is very restrictive, to the point that there really are just one or two ways to lay out your base if you want to build a big, healthy base.

I paid $10, and I played for 32 hours, so my entertainment (read: "frustration") was priced at 31 cents per hour.

Ultimately this game made me want to go back and play another forty hours of SURVIVING MARS, which I feel I've played out already.

This is a morsel of a game, neat if you want to relax whilst listening to a podcast for an hour or three. Once you realize that you have won upon reaching ~120 colonists or so, you can treat the game like what it is. It is not a long-hauler. But, sometimes, you just want to build a base on a planet.

game is fine i guess. cant access setting while in game. pretty big oversight if theyre gonna be making another

I wanted to enjoy Planetbase.
I really did. Space colony? Harsh environments? Resource management? Sounds like my kind of thing.
But after a few hours, it became clear: this game just isn’t clicking with me.

The early game is slow and punishing. One bad choice or a sandstorm, and your entire colony collapses. Not in a fun, “I learned something” way—more like “Well, guess I’ll restart again.”

There’s depth here, and I can see how fans of ultra-hard survival sims might love it. But personally? It felt more frustrating than rewarding.

✅ Cool sci-fi survival concept
❌ Harsh difficulty with little forgiveness
❌ UI and feedback could be clearer
❌ Repetitive after a while

Final Verdict:
5/10 – Respect the idea, but not my kind of space trip.

I want to like this game. I really do. I love sci-fi and colony builders both, so this should be right up my ally.

Unfortunately It suffers from severe balancing issues paired with imbecilic colonist AI. If you go to the community hub you will find post after post about people's colonies crashing out by starvation, and there's huge long posts about how to delicately maintain a nearly impossible balance just in order to get off the ground. Even following step-by-step guided layouts for colony creation may or may not work because the colonists may just decide not to make food for themselves. I've tried to make about 10 colonies now, including following close guidelines and mixing up all different combinations of things for success. The fact that I only have about 5 in-game hours logged should tell you how successful they've been.

I'm not saying that the game is impossible, but if the formula has to be so exact to have any remote chance of success, where is the creativity in building your colony? what is the point of trying new things at all once you finally find the ONE thing that actually works? All you end up with is a painfully rigid repitition of a single formulay ad nauseum.

It's really more of a so-so than a no. It's worth it if you get it on sale. The game gets old quick and there isn't much replay value. The graphics are fine, the UI is fine and the music is fine. There are only a few gameplay issues like, guards seated at a workstation won't get up to combat intruders that enter their command center or the telescope not being monitored even though you have built multiple workstations to do so.

While I wouldn't recommend the game because it's kind of grindy and a one-shot play-through, it's good enough to spend a couple of days playing just for grins.

awesome game. not easy. Definately a challenge. worth the price all the way.

Planetbase is a chill colony builder with most of the core elements I like in this type of game. The music is chill, and there is plenty of challenge without being excessively difficult. Mechanically, this is one of the simpler colony builders as the simulation is focused on survival needs and there is no tech tree (but there are top-tier tech unlocks). There is a "morale" stat, but otherwise there is no social interaction between the colonists and no social needs - this feels like a missed opportunity. If you are looking for a chill colony builder that isn't overly complex and difficult, I recommend Planetbase.

I found this to be a great game for some laid back game time, with just enough challenge to keep it interesting. Don't fall behind the power/water curve, because everything falls apart after that.

Genuinely the worst game I have played this year. Boring does not even come close.

Planetbase is the kind of game that makes you wonder how something with such a promising premise ended up so mind-numbingly dull. What should have been an engaging colony sim devolves into a lifeless slog within the first couple of hours — assuming you can stomach the sheer absurdity of its mechanics that long.

Let’s start with the lack of content. You’re sold a vision of building a thriving base on a hostile alien world, but what you get is a paper-thin sandbox with all the depth of a puddle. Once you've placed the same handful of structures in the same optimal layout, you've essentially seen everything the game has to offer. There’s no meaningful progression — no techs to research, you have to trade them (why, how?) no compelling goals beyond the same rinse-and-repeat "survive a few dozen days" monotony. Nothing new to unlock, nothing to strive for. Just an empty grind.

And that grind is made worse by the tedious and nonsensical building placement system. The layout restrictions feel arbitrary and counterintuitive. You’re forced to wrestle with a bizarrely rigid and awkwardly implemented grid system that serves no real purpose other than to irritate. Instead of encouraging creativity, it punishes it, funneling you into bland, robotic layouts that are more about appeasing the game’s bizarre rules than about building something functional or interesting.

Even if you suffer through the placement agony, you’re still left managing colonists who behave like lobotomized Roombas. The so-called character management is an utter joke. You can’t meaningfully influence individual behavior, task prioritization is nonexistent, and watching your colonists wander around doing the dumbest possible thing at the worst possible time is more rage-inducing than entertaining.

Resource management? If you can call it that. The game routinely creates things out of thin air or makes nonsensical jumps in logic — one moment you’re low on metal, the next it magically appears because some nameless drone got around to "processing" it without ever explaining what that even means. There's no feedback loop, no sense of economy or realism — just arbitrary timers and unpredictable AI that make long-term planning a cruel joke.

What you’re left with is a boring, frustrating, mechanically broken experience. Planetbase has no soul, no strategy, no joy — just a relentless barrage of design flaws dressed up in minimalist aesthetics. Avoid it unless you enjoy watching a badly designed system collapse under its own pointlessness.

Not many meaningful decisions to make. No situations that would threaten the colony means this base builder has no struggle.

The core game loop is fairly boring. The resource trees are small. I was looking for a chill builder game but this game isn't really building to anything terribly interesting.

10 years and this is the end product? I wish the npc's where smart enough to feed the damn botanists first. Trash game.

I was in the middle of writing a deep dive into all of the little things I hate about this game, but I see many people before me have already done that.

To summarize my original review, this game feels like an early access of a colony sim which only fleshed out the resource production flow and left the entire rest of the game unfinished. Colonists are basically robots with more needs, the camera is awful, there's no pausing time and speed-up is limited to 4x, planets are basically reskins of each other, etc.

There *are* mods, however, they can be a pain to set up, and there aren't too many of them. Most of them just fix all of the issues I've listed above (as well as the dozen other ones I did not mention). The way to get these mods to function is not even clear - the most-downloaded mod on nexus for this game is an outdated version of the modloader which crashes the game now. You have to dig around a bit to find a working modloader or use an external modloader like Unity. Thus, while the potential for mods to fix this game's flaws is there, it's often not worth the hassle when you could just go play a better colony sim.

The developers are nice people, and I am looking forward to the recently-announced Planetbase 2 in the hopes that it will feel like a real, finished game. In the meantime, go play Surviving Mars instead. It's what this game wanted to be.

Unfortunately it's a non-starter out of the box. No pause button. Also, the rest of the game feels like it was let out of development too early. Maybe Planetbase 2 will be an actual completed Planetbase 1.

this game is nie

First game i bought on Steam, still play it, excited about the sequel.

not bad , not bad

Good little builder, but granularity can be unclear on what to fix at larger scales to keep the balance, aside from brute forcing it

There are so many sandbox games. Sure, their graphics is nice and the mechanics good, but they often fail in giving you a meaningful task that is challenging you as your skill grows. I think Planetbase gets this aspect very well. It is not very stressful or hard but you have to be strategic and plan ahead or you will fail. Watching it all play out is like watching a movie with a super soundtrack.

After 10 years we're finally getting a sequel, this game is amazing for a chill colony sim game! I'm looking forward to it!

Fun game, a little easy after you get the hang of each planet, Happy they are making PB2 more in depth mechanics, can't wait. WOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!

Solid Base Builder Resource Management Game that has solid challenges and casual laid back game play on the easier planets.

One of my favorite base builders. I just keep coming back to it. Just complex enough to be challenging, without feeling like I'm juggling 150 balls. Balanced enough that it feels like you're on the edge of failure, so that it feels like a triumph when you pull out of a nosedive.

it is fun! :)

good game

I dunno,
somehow this game is the little brother of.. everything.
it is a nice tech demo, but doesnt have much going on.
i think you can have a little fun but it gets very boring and repetive.
get it for like 5 bucks.

Fun game for anyone that likes base building games.

its good and creative

top

If you love micro-managing on a large scale, you will absolutely love Planetbase. The concept of building and administrating a self-sustaining colony on an alien world is executed to perfection here, with lots of options for achieving the game's goals so trying different strategies on multiple play-throughs adds to the fun.

this is a good game

A nice, chill "city" builder that offers a good mix of resource and population balancing challenges, without being overly complex.

Great Game

Great devs.

I would say it is a great strategy game! A lot of fun!

Perfect