Planetbase can be a difficult game to get good at but with these tips and tricks, you’ll be able to create stable colonies and hit all the milestones with ease. Be aware that the first hour or so of gameplay in any new colony will keep you on the verge of failure nearly the entire time, but that is what makes this game so much fun. One wrong decision can spell doom for your game. With that in mind, the first tip I can give to you is save often. There is nothing worse than getting an hour or so into your game only to have a chance encounter with a falling meteor that hits your bio-dome wiping out all of your biologists before you had a chance to get a landing pad setup to bring in more. I speak from experience.
When you first start a game, it is tempting to bring in more people to help out as soon as possible. But growing your colony too fast will almost always lead to failure. It is a delicate balance between having enough resources, mainly food on hand but also plenty of power and water to accommodate any new recruits. Before growing much larger than 15 or so members, make sure you have at least a small storage unit built and have started to stockpile medical kits, spares and food.
Also, when you first start a game, only spend your resources on things you absolutely need to survive and become self sufficient. The game does not count it, but I consider the lab part of self sufficiency. You have to mine the ore at first which can cause injuries to your workers. If you don’t have the medical kits to keep them mining until you can get automated with a robotics factory you run the risk of them all getting injured without any way to heal them.
When it comes to the build order have fun with it and experiment. But I have got a lot of questions as to what build order I use when playing. After you have played the harder levels a few times, you soon realize how important build order really is. This is how I do it… As soon as the ship lands, quickly survey the area you have to build on. You have to get a solar panel and power collector up ASAP, before the sun sets on that first evening and have a little bit of power already stored. Once those two are up, quickly build a water collector afterwards, followed by an air lock and O2 generator. It is pretty essential to get all of that done before the sun sets, but the first two are the most important. If the planet has an atmosphere, get a wind turbine up at this point too.
Your next immediate priority is to get a canteen up with a water fountain to take care of your colonists thirst. Once that is built, build a table, video screen, and food machine in it. If you have extra plastic, build a potted plant too. From there I build the Bio-Dome and get some tomatoes and wheat going. These will combine to make pasta in the food machine in the canteen. This will keep your colonists from getting malnutrition. After that build a mine and processing plant with both a metal and plastics machine. Next, build a lab and sickbay and lastly a storage area. You will then be self sufficient and ready to tackle growing your colony. I usually don’t worry about building a dorm until this point. Just let your colonists sleep on the floors. If they get cranky, once they wake up they will just watch the video screen in the canteen or stare at the plant to get happy again. Also, you’ll want to build a landing pad at this point so you can start trading and bringing in more peeps.
As for layout of your buildings in Planetbase, I really like the hexagon setup with a massive storage right smack dab in the middle. You can see an example of this in the screencap at the top of this post. It is highly efficient and allows you to maximize work from your colonists. When working and moving things around your base, they never have to walk further than 2 hallways. This is especially handy if you are low on or don’t have any bots yet. The one caveat to this base setup is building around where the massive storage goes in the middle of the hex. You have to buy the tech for the massive storage and if you build a smaller storage as a “placeholder” in the middle, all of the spacing of your other habs will be f’ed up. I tackle how to achieve this and workaround those problems in a YouTube “Let’s Play Planetbase” series if you want to check it out. Go here to view it.
My last pro tip is a way to collect up plastics and metals before you have a storage area built. To do this, all you need to do is build extra plants and machines in your shops and canteen. Then when you need a quick boost of both plastic and metal, simply recycle those extra items. I like to do this to save them up, then when a trading ship lands, recycle them and sell off the extras for some quick money. Do this over and over until you have enough money to buy the massive storage tech from one of the trade ships. Then you can build it right into your original design right from the get go.
Questions?
Got questions or other remarks? Feel free to post in the comments below!
Be sure to check out all of my Planetbase coverage here.
