Free to playPlanet Explorers Build a home on an alien world
You explore, craft and colonize a voxel planet where every hill, vehicle and weapon can be your own design.
Is Planet Explorers worth it?
Planet Explorers is worth it if…
- you want survival crafting where the terrain itself is editable
- you like designing your own vehicles and weapons, not just picking them from a list
- you prefer building a farm and a colony to constant combat
- you enjoy a long story mode you can follow or ignore at your own pace
- you can accept a game that is rough around the edges and no longer updated
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Survive, then settle
Your colony ship is down, the land is unforgiving and the local wildlife has no interest in sharing. That is the starting point. You gather minerals and wood, craft tools and clothing, keep your character fed and rested, and put up walls before night falls. From there the loop opens up: plant a farm, cook, recruit survivors into a settlement of your own and keep them supplied with food, water and safety. You can play it as a fight for every meal or as slow, steady homesteading, at whatever pace you like.
Terrain you can reshape
The whole world is voxel-based, which means the ground itself is your material. Dig into a hillside for ore, cut a road through a ridge, or flatten a whole plateau for your colony, anywhere you like. Water behaves in real time, so a reshaped river actually flows around your work. Fifteen-plus mineral types feed into everything you make, and better materials make better gear. Few survival games let you redraw the map this freely, and it changes how you think about where and how to build.
The Creations Editor
Beyond crafting from templates, Planet Explorers lets you design things from scratch: vehicles, weapons, armor, boats, VTOLs, everyday objects. You build the thing part by part, then take it out and use it. A clunky flying machine that barely gets off the ground is still yours, and the next one flies better. Build Mode gives you an infinite-materials sandbox with no enemies, a 40 by 40 kilometer map to test inventions or just build a garden in peace.
A story with room to breathe
Story Mode drops you on planet Maria in the year 2287 with a 17 by 8 kilometer handcrafted map, over 140 enemy types and 40-plus main characters. The plot runs 30-plus hours, and you can follow it or ignore it: farm, trade, train, handle diplomacy and defend your perimeter instead, and you still reach an ending. The sentient aliens are the interesting fork. Negotiate with them, or refuse and fight a war. Day and night pass, moons cycle, weather rolls in, and the world keeps its own rhythm while you decide what kind of colonist to be.
What should you know before starting?
How does Adventure Mode differ from Story Mode?
Adventure Mode generates a fresh 40 by 40 kilometer map from a seed, so every run is a different landscape. You take random missions, hunt bosses, delve through dungeons and explore, with survival and versus options on top. It is the mode to pick when you want a new world instead of the handcrafted one.
Do you have to fight?
Far less than the action-heavy look suggests. You can spend your days planting crops, cooking for the colonists, negotiating with the aliens and holding your perimeter, and still reach the story's ending. Combat is there if you want it, with over 140 enemy types and several bosses, but the peaceful route is a real way to play.
