Planetaries (v1.66)

An alien frontier full of hostile wildlife, pirate threats, abandoned facilities, and valuable minerals gives Planetaries a rugged survival-RPG identity. Humanity has pushed beyond Earth, but the distant worlds on offer feel more like dangerous work sites than clean sci-fi utopias. Players arrive with basic tools and ambitious goals, carving out a foothold through scavenging, construction, trade, and combat. The mood balances lonely planetary exploration with the constant pressure of protecting what you build.

The main loop revolves around landing on a world, extracting materials with a gathering laser, hunting fauna, searching caves, and taking contracts from settlements. Completing jobs, securing data, and surviving risky raids earns experience and technology points, which open up stronger equipment, new blueprints, and more advanced infrastructure. Bases can serve as fortified shelters, resource-processing hubs, or practical launch points for vehicles and further expeditions, with power generation and specialized machinery becoming increasingly important. Combat is not limited to roaming encounters: activating a beacon can draw enemy waves to your position, turning careful base planning into a tower-defense-style test, while raiding other installations offers a more aggressive route to loot. Cooperative multiplayer lets a group divide responsibilities between gathering, building, defending, and contract work.

Planetaries stands out by letting survival, automation-minded construction, RPG progression, and outpost defense overlap rather than forcing one preferred playstyle. One player can pursue dangerous caves and combat-heavy assignments while another builds an efficient industrial base or gathers rare crystals for trade. Its appeal sits somewhere between the resource-driven freedom of No Man’s Sky, the settlement pressure of Valheim, and a lighter sci-fi tower defense game. Players who enjoy making their own objectives in a hostile sandbox, especially with friends, are likely to get the most from it; newcomers should expect a learning curve but plenty of room to progress at their own pace.