Summary

Eden Crafters is a survival crafting and automation game where you will attempt to terraform a hostile alien planet using the resources that are already present on the planet. Starting with limited tools and basic materials, you will craft components, build factories, automate production lines, and gradually transform the environment into a livable world. As the planet evolves, you will unlock new technologies, discover new biomes, and expand your increasingly complex industrial networks.

Plotline

This is another one of those games where you get to create your own stories as you go along. There are no NPCs – what with the planet being barren and all – but if you’re playing co-op, you will have your friends with whom you could create fun memories and stories while terraforming the planet together.

Gameplay

Before you start, you’ll need to choose the planet you’ll be playing on. There are many to choose from, each with their own unique challenges to overcome. There are also several difficulty modes, namely Easy, Normal, and Hard, which will in turn dictates if you get to keep your inventory after dying, for instance, or if there are more frequent planetary incidences that you’ll have to weather through.

Now, Eden Crafters is similar to many survival crafting and automation games in the sense where you’ll start off manually - and painstakingly, I might add - gathering resources to craft and build your first base. However, as you unlock new technologies, which you can easily do simply by crafting a new component or collecting a new resource in this game, you’ll find new ways to eventually automate the resource collection process and even the component-crafting process as well. This involves setting up automatic miners and crafters all connected via conveyor belts which ends up in a huge storage container.

Building is freeform here and you can build almost everywhere you want – even on a cliff as I’ve found out to my surprise! In fact, I’ve even managed to set up a lengthy conveyor belt system ferrying resources mined from inside a cave to my processing facilities built outside the cave at the bottom of the mountain. The game will just automatically clear away a neat little tunnel for your conveyors – a tunnel that is big enough for you to walk through as well.

One interesting thing to note here, in terms of mining, is the use of a drone to collect resources. At the beginning, the planet surface doesn’t contain any oxygen and hence, you have to rely on the oxygen made available to you by your suit – it’s fairly limited. You can only spend so much time outdoors before you’ll have to rush back to base to replenish your oxygen. This little issue doesn’t hamper your trusty mining drone which you can pilot from the relative safety of your base to mine any nearby ores.

The main goal in Eden Crafters is to terraform the barren alien planet into a more habitable planet for human life. This meant needing to set up water purifiers throughout the planet’s water caches, and using that to power your greenhouses and area fertilizers so they can work in tandem to turn the place green and allow the growth of natural trees. At one point, the area would be terraformed enough that you can simply breath the air there without needing your suit at all.

Of course, everything needs energy to function and there are two main renewable ways for you to generate the electricity you need to power your base, namely wind turbines and solar panels, with the latter producing much more energy but they only can do so in the day time.

Each open-world map in this game is massive and there are plenty of points of interest, particularly derelict stations left behind by other failed pioneering efforts, in addition to various resources nodes that you can tap into. Caves in this game often provides plenty of rare resources you can’t find other places like diamonds. Thankfully as well, you’ll get to unlock vehicles that will allow you to travel between your bases and outposts more quickly.

As fun as the game is, for a fan of games like Satisfactory and Planet Crafter, Eden Crafters has everything I like about both games albeit in a much simpler way. The factory-automation style it adopted from Satisfactory works here but it’s just much less complex than the original game. Similarly, like Planet Crafters, the game’s goal is to terraform whatever planet you choose to play in, and everything the game has here works, but it’s just much more inferior than the game that had inspired this aspect of the gameplay.

Don’t get me wrong - This doesn’t mean the game is bad in any way – it’s fun – and I personally love that it is much less complex, but for hardcore players of both Satisfactory and Planet Crafters, they may find the game a bit underwhelming.

Graphics/ Sound

Eden Crafters features a stylized sci-fi visual style that combines planetary exploration, automation, and large-scale terraforming. Viewed from a first-person perspective, players begin on a barren, lifeless planet and gradually transform it into a thriving and habitable (for humans) ecosystem.

The game's buildings, machines, and conveyor systems feature clean, futuristic designs that emphasize functionality and scale. As production networks expand, sprawling automated factories become an increasingly prominent part of the landscape.

In terms of sound, the audio design in Eden Crafters generally supports a sense of discovery and progress, providing atmospheric background music during exploration and base-building. Rather than dominating the experience, the music, especially the environmental effects, serves to reinforce the wonder of transforming an empty world into a living ecosystem.

Conclusion

Unlike other automation-based survival sims, Eden Crafters stands out by combining planetary terraforming with its automation-focused gameplay. Every stage of planetary development feels meaningful here, while the combination of exploration, automation, and large-scale construction creates a compelling sense of progress. In a way, you could say that it scratches that Satisfactory itch while giving players the chance of reshaping an entire world and watching it come to life.

If this sounds like a game that’s right up your alley, be sure to check out Eden Crafters on Steam now!