I was putting a lot of faith in the Sentinel Corporation. I was hoping I was being sent to a plant I could survive on in the long term. I was hoping that they would keep their word if I became successful. I was also hoping this was no some kind of trick to get rid of me.

There I was hurling towards a planet with just a couple of days' worth of supplies. Along with your average issues spacesuit that the Sentinel Corporation gives all of us criminals hoping to survive the experience to get our remaining jail sentence commuted.

I must have been insane, bored, or just wanting to touch grass again one day. Having gone along with this when it seemed like no one would survive it seemed unwise. Despite that, I had high hopes I'd be the one to not only survive but thrive. The irony of it all is I'd have to survive long enough for the planet's surface to terraform to even have grass again. Something I may never see if I end up becoming yet another frozen corpse on some distant privatized planet a bunch of trillionaires wants to make bank from.

After being cramped into that space pod for far too long I felt a soft bump as the pod hit the red surface of the new planet, I'd be calling home for indefinitely. Once I arrived the Sentinel Corporation sent me a short message along with a to-do list of what I needed to survive my first days here.

You would the Sentinel Corporation would have given me some better starter gear. I guess this is how they keep their massive profits by not giving you even a basic backpack to carry around needed resources to build.

Instead, the Sentinel Corporation ended up giving me quite a few blueprints. Not enough blueprints to get me off this planet or cause them any kind of issues. Just enough so I had some kind of chance.

The Sentinel Corporation even offered to give me further blueprints to advance this terraforming project. I however needed to make certain milestones relating to my progress before they would do so.

While out and about exploring where my pod had landed. I went around mining some basic resources such as iron, titanium, and silicon. I even ended up finding a container with a small amount of loot in it.

I can only assume this was not the first attempt to tame this planet. Not only were there containers sometimes with blueprints or other helpful items inside. There were also quite a few shipwrecks littering this planet.

Every time I'd leave my pod to gather a couple of resources, I'd have my hand on a swivel. Wanting to take in every view of this place as I could. Then I'd get that rather failure warning that my oxygen was getting low.

Around midday, I was quite starved and thirsty. I decided to open up the resources the Sentinel Corporation had left me. It became quiet I was not going to survive long on what little they left me with. At least it was enough to buy me time to come up with some kind of action plan.

I could see that in the distance up a hill near me was some kind of crashed ship. While I was so tempted to run over there. I was given a constant reminder that I was about to run out of oxygen and was quite tethered to my pod for survival. It seems the Sentinel Corporation did not want me wandering off very far on my own.

As the first night fell on the planet. I managed to get up a couple of basic structures. A basic one-by-one habitat that I could build inside. Along with a single wind turbine and a miner to start slowly terraforming the planet.

I spent as long as a single tank of oxygen would last admiring a distant planet that could be seen in the night sky. While this place looked so harsh and barren. There was still a certain kind of deadly beauty about the place.

What I was not expecting to wake up to at daybreak was a bunch of asteroids crashing onto the surface of the planet. Turns out this planet went through quite an active asteroid belt. Not only would this end up being a common reoccurring theme. I would even become somewhat reliant on the resources you could sometimes find from the crashed asteroids.

For the time being there were quite a few basic resources on the ground around me. While I so wanted to go out and explore not only the wreck I could see off in the distance. There were also some strange rock formations and other things that caught my eye as well.

I’d however need some better equipment for going off on quite an expected exploration. Along with making myself a backpack to carry more per trip back to my starting base. I also expanded my oxygen tanks slightly and created a suit exoskeleton so I could install further upgrades into my space suit.

I even went as bold as putting a viewing window in my base after I expanded on it by a couple of units. Inside I'd install some basic monitors so I could see things like the progress I was making on terraforming. Among other things like a blueprint reader device.

I then set my sights on expanding the amount of power my base was generating. The solar panels I could create produced very little energy output. I would require quite a large solar array to get the basics up and running. I just hoped at some point the Sentinel Corporation would end up sending me blueprints to more powerful energy generation systems. For now, I'd have to put up with what I had access to.

I started to have other concerns than needing more power. I was starting to get low on food and water. This place as far as I could see had no flowing rivers or standing lakes. This experience would end up being quite short if I did not luck out and find some spare supplies left behind by anyone else who had the misfortune of being on this planet.

Final Thoughts

While it seemed like my first couple of days on this planet ended up going by so fast. The biggest thing occupying quite a few cycles of thought was still survival. I still knew so little about the planet. What dangers were lurking around or even where I'd start harvesting more materials once my local area was depleted?

In the back of my mind, I wonder even if I managed to survive on this planet for years. Even if I manage to terraform it to meet the requirements of what Sentinel Corporation was looking for. I wondered if the Sentinel Corporation would end up honoring their side of the deal. For now, I just had to have faith that it would all work out in the end.

Information

Screenshots were taken and content was written by @Enjar about Planet Crafter.

Disclosure. A review copy of the game was received for free.