“PlanetSmith” is a voxel survival sandbox RPG. Its core selling point is clear: your world is not a flat map, but a planet in the solar system; you can dig, build, fight and survive on the planet, and seamlessly enter and exit space, fly to orbit or other areas to explore.
Minecraft is almost infinite, but after a long time it’s almost like opening a new world
Lead developer Kenneth Ward (Incandescent Games) mentioned that he likes the feeling of opening new worlds and exploring the unknown, but he has always felt something is weird. When the world expands infinitely and you go far enough in one direction, it feels like a new map; the freshness of exploration will become a little empty. So he changed the question to another one: If sandbox survival really took place on a planet, would it give exploration a more sense of boundary and direction? PlanetSmith is the answer.
Terrain plasticity is its weapon
The game emphasizes that the environment can be transformed by players, and your excavation and construction will reshape the landscape instead of just stacking blocks on the surface. This kind of plasticity in rewriting the landscape, coupled with the sense of scale of the spherical planet, can theoretically turn the player’s behavior directly into world memory: the holes you dug, the bases you built, and the roads you drove will all remain on that planet.
The fundraising results speak in numbers: the target was reached in 3 hours, and now it has exceeded 6 times!
The Kickstarter target is £4,314 (approximately TWD 172,560 / HKD 43,140 / MYR 25,453) and has so far raised £26,700+ (approximately TWD 1,068,000 / HKD 267,000 / MYR 157,530) and is marked at 3 The target was reached within hours, with approximately 23 days left in the fundraising period. More importantly, it doesn’t have to wait a long time after the fundraising is completed: the page information shows that early access will be launched in April, which makes it easier to believe that this is a project that is close to being playable, rather than a dream with only concept drawings.
What it sells is not the universe, but the tone of making exploration meaningful.
“PlanetSmith” looks like it packages the space continuity of “No Man’s Sky” with the freedom of mining and building of “Minecraft”, but what it really wants to fight is the fatigue that sandbox players know: no matter how big the world is, if the exploration lacks structure, the novelty will be diluted. Turn the world into a planet, make space travel seamless, and then use plastic terrain to turn player behavior into long-term traces. This is why it wants to spend 5 years grinding the concept into reality.