Planetbase Review

Putting aside that yesterday I have started trying out "The old Republic" I want to share my opinion about a game called "Planetbase".
I played it a few months ago and despite its simplicity it was very addicting.

Planetbase is a base building game where you have multiple types of planets that you need to colonize.
The first type of planet is a red mars like world with dust storms and meteorites. This is the easiest world to start with.

Once you landed on the planet your first colonists leave your landing pod and you are ready to start.
Personally I think that first day on the planet belongs to the hardest because you have to hurry building up the basic stuctures.
You need an O2 generator (or your colonists wont survive the first day). This O2 generator only works if it has energy and water so you need to need a water pump, idially also storage for your water, something that can produce energy -> solar panels or wind turbines (Solar panels are more efficient) and you need to store this energy somewhere.
If you dont hurry on your first day and the first night approaches your new solar panels might not able to produce energy and store enough energy in a collector. During night all buildings consume power... and if you have bad luck there wont be any wind during that night to make use of a wind turbine.
Without energy (and water) you wont have O2 and the whole colonization is at risk.
Like I said... the first day on the planet belongs the hardest.

However, if you did everything right you are ready for the next tasks.
Food. You build a cantina... and a biodome and start to grow crops.
Your colonists also need to sleep somewhere. The lack of sleep is bad because then your people dont want to work... and if they dont work they wont produce food and without food they die.
You see, this game constantly confronts you with what could go wrong.
(there is a lot stuff that could go wrong)

Just about that time you notice that your resources are nearly gone. No metal, no bioplastic... no way to construct something new.
Thats the time where you say goodbye to your landing ship and recycle it to be able to construct a mine and a basic refinery.
After this point you should save. Thats the point where you created your first self sufficient colony.

From this point you can start to slowly expand your colony and improve its structure. You will notice that its a good idea to keep ways short, that it is a bad idea to expand too fast and that you can unlock better buildings with time.

Never forget to save regulary because it is extremely easy to completely mess up everything.
e.g. I expanded my colony too fast and my engineers were constantly busy building new buildings. At that time I didnt notice that the workers didnt have the time to manufacture repair tools and my engineers didnt have the time to repair my solar panels. Due to all the construction work they didnt get enough sleep and lost motivation to work. In the end my Solar Panels stopped working... I lost energy... O2 levels decreased and half of my colony did die (just because I expanded too fast).
This and similar incidents happend multiple times to me and forced me to load an older savegame because such mistakes always cause a chain reaction that is incredible hard to stop.
This game looks simple ... but you will change your opinion the first time when something goes terribly wrong.

Building that colonly is still very fun. You have to carefully plan your layout because mistakes are hard to correct. Just alone the fact that all buildings have to be connected makes it hard to redesign your colony in a more effective way. You can not simply recycle a building if other buildings are connected to it.
Thats a tricky task later in the game when more effcient buildings are available and you want to replace old structures.

In the end I managed to build a colony with almost 600 colonists, mulitple space ports, observatories, radars, bars and other building for enterainment purpose.
By making progress with the colony you unlock achievements and depending on how many achievements you unlocked you can get access to new planet types.
You can play on a Ice planet, on a rock planet with dark environment and also on a stormy planet.
Basically the construction of the colonies on the different planets is similar but the difficulty is hard due to the various environmental conditions.
On a dark world or a world with storms your solar panels wont work effectively... but maybe wind energy can be used. There are storms with thunder that could damage your colonies... etc.
There are also different landmasses which limit the construction of the colony.

Overall the game is pretty cool... but you need alot of patience.