New Open-World Survival Game on PS5 Makes No Man's Sky Feel Incomplete

No Man’s Sky will forever be one of gaming’s greatest comeback stories, and there is no honest way to talk about sci-fi survival games without acknowledging what Hello Games has accomplished since the game launched in 2016. Its universe gives players planets to explore, bases to build, resources to gather, and hazards to survive across a galaxy that still feels almost impossibly large. For many players, it remains the defining fantasy of landing on an alien world and wondering what might be waiting beyond the next ridge. However, The Planet Crafter‘s upcoming PS5 launch highlights one thing No Man’s Sky has never fully embraced.

No Man’s Sky lets players discover planets, survive on them, build within them, and reshape local terrain, but The Planet Crafter takes that same broad sci-fi survival fantasy and points it toward the more specific goal of transforming hostile worlds into habitable ones. In the end, that makes No Man’s Sky feel almost incomplete—like it’s missing the one thing that could really take its sense of discovery, freedom, and ownership up the next notch. Now, No Man’s Sky fans will finally get to experience what that missing piece feels like on PS5 once The Planet Crafter launches on July 21.

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The Planet Crafter Turns Survival Into Transformation

The biggest difference between The Planet Crafter and No Man’s Sky isn’t scale. No Man’s Sky obviously wins that contest. Hello Games built a game around exploration and survival across a procedurally generated universe, while The Planet Crafter is more focused on terraforming as a core part of its gameplay loop. So, The Planet Crafter isn’t just asking players to discover brand-new planets and then survive on them so much as it’s asking them to fundamentally change those planets by gathering resources, building machines, generating oxygen, raising temperature, increasing pressure, and slowly pushing dead environments toward life.

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In many survival games, progress essentially means the player becomes better equipped to withstand the world over time. In The Planet Crafter, however, progress means the world itself becomes different. Standard survival mechanics and expectations are still there, but the end goal isn’t merely staying alive long enough just to build a bigger, better base.

Hello Games built a game around exploration and survival across a procedurally generated universe, while The Planet Crafter is more focused on terraforming as a core part of its gameplay loop.

No Man’s Sky has base-building, resource gathering, harsh planets, planetary travel, and the Terrain Manipulator—which Hello Games has actually updated with features like restore and flatten modes. Those tools let players simply alter the terrain locally, especially around bases, and they remain part of the game’s creative appeal. But local terrain editing isn’t the same thing as making terraforming the central part of the sci-fi survival fantasy, and that’s precisely the thing that The Planet Crafter specializes in.

While players are encouraged to find a planet and build a base there in No Man’s Sky, the main part of its own fantasy—which is the thrill of discovery—actually urges them to leave a planet after they’ve familiarized themselves with it. At this point in its development, The Planet Crafter lets players visit other planets, but the point isn’t actually discovering more planets so much as it is finding one and unlocking its full potential through terraforming.

The Planet Crafter’s Key Features

Open-world space survival crafting
Terraform hostile planets into habitable worlds
Generate oxygen, heat, and atmospheric pressure
Build bases, machines, tools, and survival gear
Manage oxygen, thirst, temperature, and health
No enemies, timers, or forced pressure
Explore ruins, shipwrecks, and alien biomes
Unlock new areas through terraforming progress
Watch environments visibly change over time
Use rovers, jetpacks, and portals
Discover resources, lore, and hidden locations

Another key difference worth noting is The Planet Crafter‘s lack of enemies of any kind. In No Man’s Sky, the primary focus is exploration and survival, but there are still enemies like Sentinels and Space Pirates that can harm the player. In The Planet Crafter, on the other hand, there are no enemy threats, meaning the focus is kept purely on the creative and transformative side of its loop, which ultimately allows it to do more with that aspect of gameplay. That more peaceful approach could sound dull in the wrong game, but it fits The Planet Crafter perfectly, as terraforming is the core part of how players discover the world.

No Man’s Sky Owns Scale, But The Planet Crafter Owns Impact

Of course, none of this means that The Planet Crafter is bigger or more important than No Man’s Sky. Hello Games’ sci-fi survival game has spent years growing into a massive platform, and its updates have made it far richer than the game that originally launched. The sharper point is that No Man’s Sky‘s greatest strength can also create distance. When a game offers countless planets, every discovery exists beside the promise of another one. That’s exciting, sure, but it also means many worlds become stops along the way rather than places players can settle down and take ownership of.

The Planet Crafter lets players visit other planets, but the point isn’t actually discovering more planets so much as it is finding one and unlocking its full potential through terraforming.

The Planet Crafter offers the opposite feeling. Its worlds matter because players can leave them different than they found them. The satisfaction comes from turning hostile spaces into living ones and then watching that transformation change where players can go next.

That’s the part that makes No Man’s Sky feel incomplete by comparison. No Man’s Sky captures the awe of planetary discovery better than almost anything else in gaming, but what it doesn’t do in the same central way is make the future of those planets feel like the player’s main responsibility.

No Man’s Sky doesn’t need to be every kind of sci-fi survival game. Its identity is built around scale, freedom, discovery, and the feeling of being a tiny traveler in an enormous universe—and that fantasy still works. However, The Planet Crafter exposes a missing piece in that fantasy. Discovering a planet is exciting, surviving one is satisfying, and building on one is rewarding, but watching one change because of the player’s work is the extra layer that makes No Man’s Sky‘s loop feel complete. Where No Man’s Sky gives players endless worlds to visit, The Planet Crafter gives them worlds that can become something else because they were there.