Planetbase

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

Used to play this a lot years ago and wanted to give it another go now. It's a fun and chill game (until your colonists start doing something mysteriously dumb and cause your whole colony to die, then it's less chill), I like it and would recommend

+

Been playing a very long time and love the challenges the game presents.

Another failed early access.

fun game and the AI are stupily funny

Planetbase is one of a handful of games that I have more than 1,000 hrs of playtime invested into. I enjoy playing it, with my biggest base on the easiest planet having over 1,000 colonists and four busy starports, and my smallest base, barely surviving on the hardest planet, being a really good challenge. Yes, I highly recommend Planetbase for the city planning/building people out there that like a sci-fi/space theme.

Planetbase is a solid and fairly challenging base building game that's held back from being great by a few relatively minor balance and quality-of-life issues.

If you've played other "survival" city building games, you'll find Planetbase familiar: the first day is critical, the first 10-20 days are a struggle, and then once you have a solid foundation and you've got a surplus, things become significantly easier. There are four different worlds to play that each have slightly different atmospheric conditions, and a number of challenges with special objectives.

The game works well together, but there are a handful of things that cause some annoyances. There are only two power sources: solar and wind, and in general wind isn't worth investing in. Building new structures always takes precedence over everything else, so colonists will spend time hauling resources for construction that would be better spent for maintenance. There's no way to pause construction, so it's difficult to plan out your base ahead of time. And every level starts with a long, unskippable landing sequence.

But those annoyances are minor, and once you get the hang of it, they're less obstructive than they seem early on. Overall, it's a fun game and worth giving a try.

Hmm, I'd give it a neural if I could. An ok game full of minor frustrations.

The game does pose a challenge which will test your planning skills. Temper the following comments with the fact I am probably not very good at this game :D

The starting resources seem like a lot, but are only barely enough to get up and running. If you don't get to producing your own resources and food fast enough, you're in for a slow death.

There are only two building resources; steel and bioplastic. Making the facilities to make those resources take the resources themselves to build, which can lead to frustrating situations.

You have no direct control over the colonists. You can "prioritize" operation of a certain facility, but that's all. It's not clear if they are doing anything at all sometimes. Things move very slowly. Colonists are specialized; for example only "workers" can mine ore that you desperately need while the medic sits in the sickbay doing nothing. Or worse, they will go berserk converting all your materials into something you don't need, because by default colonists will start building things and there is no default upper limits on the number of units they construct

You can't place base modules unless they are connected directly to another. This sounds fine, but it can be hard to know where it is possible to place modules until you can drag the module there and see it turn green (which it won't if nothing is nearby). Sometimes you can only build a module (or in it) if the connected module is fully built. Or has power. Or is oxygenated. Hard to tell sometimes.
Base modules are locked behind arbitrary requirements (you can't make a mine before you make a solar panel). You can't dismantle a base module if it would split the base in two. Some modules can only have a single connection to another module; put something in the wrong place and it can be a massive blocker to extending the base. All of this makes planning a base very frustrating

Also, when you start a level, it shows a slow ship landing animation with everyone walking out one by one which is slow and unskippable. You get constant tutorial popups, and annoying siren noises when there are shortages. Would be nice to have settings to get rid of these

I really enjoy the game. it's not a slug fest and you don't fight anyone, but the challenge is managing a society and keeping them happy and productive. This is an over simplification of the game, but you get the jist. If you like mind games like chess give it a try!

This game is abandonware for many years. There are game killing bugs that will never be fixed. This game is therefore not recommended.

The game has good idea and interesting but miss balance an some micro management like assign priority task for specialists. In most case base are going well then suddenly critically miss food and biologists doing nothing, medics don't produce medicines and etc. Some mechanics looks like broken and that dissapointing.

Very Clean with a interesting set of challenges.

This is a simple game. it get borring after a few hours but I enjoy it anyway. It has that chill farming simulator vibe that I enjoy

9.5/10
+ graphics run on my mediocre laptop
+ balance is exquisite
+ animations are excellent
+ challenging without being onerous
+ music is what you want in a game like this
Anyone who likes a good builder/sims in space/chill-out timesink look no further!

The colonists are nothing like the character in The Martian, they are barely functioning morons that would rather die than get food from a vending machine, much less do their job, just wander around aimlessly. Randomly you can get intruders come to your base and even if you set alarm your colonists will just run to the intruder and stand there waiting their turn to be shot several times to death. Building is stupidly restrictive and the meteor defense systems never seem to work and nuke your populated building killing your moron colonists that must reduce enough air from the rest of the base that the surviving colonists lose half their already limited brain cells so they just wait to die instead of getting back to work to recover before the next incident. There are much better colony builders out there.

I love this game! If you like building and you want a relaxing game, this would be it!

has one if THE worse beginning sequence, if you dont build airlock,air,power,sleep,farm,water withing 5 min you might as well start over. It get worse! Air locks are Queue based and are restrictive on were you can put them making it guarantee for you guys to die while waiting in line and yes your robots get PRIORTY over LIVING HUMANS, OH it get WORSE, Storage come in SUPER early-mid game making storing items a nightmare. making food takes a million years but your guys will eat like its a gordan ramsey restauraunt. if you like pure torture play this, Its harder than Elden Ring and I beat that game 7x I cant even beat this once... stay away.

After all this Years i still come back!

Planetbase represents a really good idea, with in incredible amount of potential, which it sadly fails to truly realize. Some minor ability to set general policies regarding e.g. priorities more nuanced than "do this if you've got nothing else" vs. "kill yourself to get this done" is very low-hanging fruit. Meaningful challenges to growing bases would be very nice to have to prevent full formulaicism - but internal challenges are purely formulaic and external challenges are functionally nonexistent.

To raise one specific example of what COULD be done, "your Water Extractors have exhausted this area, scramble to set up new water production in this new area (which might require relocating existing facilities in that newly wet region) before your Water Tanks run dry." In practice, "oh, I've apparently got a shortage of X, better add more X" is as challenging as problems get.

There's plenty of micro optimization that can be done (e.g. setting up a compact area where all of your Workers can fulfill their needs and do their work, another such area for your Engineers, etc.) but it's easier and as effective (plus better to reach milestones) to just throw more people/bots at any given issue.

In comparison, the complete lack of ability to quantify "these plant pads + tissue synthizers can produce X food per day, and my population requires Y food per day," and some sort of capability to balance X against Y, is a huge gap. OK, I may need more biologists or hauler bots to reach the maximum X, but sufficent information to really measure/balance X and Y in practice is grossly lacking.

That you can only measure "do I have enough plant pads producing food" by observing trends in the charts which are only evident on timescales much longer than you actually need to deal with, rather says it all.

A bunch of user-friendliness features that are currently "de rigueur" have been totally ignored (e.g. Factorio-style ghost entities to plan things out). Overall, Planetbase would've been groundbreaking 20 years ago. Today, it's a below-replacement-level entry into a heavily-explored field.

If you're thinking about this, stop. There are a great many vastly superior alternatives in the same general gameplay space. Go elsewhere.

i started playing this game because my dad absolutely adores it (he has like 650h in it already).

i really like it so far! it is hard but after a while, you can get the hang of things. it doesn't really become boring, just sometimes there are parts where you have to wait a bit for colonist to actually do stuff (for example, the things you had set as a priority). i do not mind that at all though; actually, i really like i have to wait sometimes because it gives me time to slow down a bit and think about my next steps.

i can honestly recommend the game! not only because of my dad but because i really love it as well!

The game can be very challenging and can sometimes end in a doom loop when things go wrong but I really love this game. It was recently updated by the developers to bring the game up to modern unity standards and it fixed some bugs that were there. I think this planet game is really fun and reminds me a lot of moon tycoon from back in the day. If you are looking for an alternative mars colony sim that doesn't have so many dlc like the paradox mars game then this is one of the few options you will find in that moon tycoon similar genre. Side topic: Someone needs to bring moon tycoon to steam.

Worst game I've played in quite some time. I can't believe it's not a early access. You can't do much with it. You can't remove the music while playing. You cant chose the building orientation. You can't pause to see what they didn't show you during "tutorial" but you HAVE to see all the annoying cinematic. Can't miss all the humans and robot aligning themselves toward you, right ? Or your base screenshot because you played one ingame day.
Damn it sucks.

I got this game when I was 11 years old. A decade later and I just got 100% on the game. This will be one of those games I look back on growing up with.

Unfortunately like their successor "Dawn of Man", this game's AI is an absolute piece of garbage. The game also lacks terraforming capability to change terrain, as if human being's adaptive creativity never existed. I thought "Surviving Mars" was terrible enough, until I played this game.

its so fun game that you could spend hours on it without noticing

The planetbase must grow

It's like gardening, I enjoy the calm of it. I wish there were more modules and better tech, maybe even a tech tree that you could research to improve power production and better task scheduling for colonists.

I love this game. Challenging, yet relaxing. The music is great.