Games

How to Make and Use Explosives in The Planet Crafter

Published

2 months ago

October 17, 2024

The Planet Crafter features several types of obstacles that keep you from entering certain areas. These include ice walls that melt as the terraformation level increases, and plateaus you can only reach once massive vines start to grow during the Trees stage.

Rock walls are another obstacle type, and you can destroy them by crafting and using explosives. You can eventually build a Large Explosive Device that lets you beat The Planet Crafter, but until then these small explosives can help you reach certain corners of the map.

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How to Unlock and Craft Explosives

Explosives are one of the many items you unlock by decoding generic blueprint microchips with a blueprint screen. The order that microchip items unlock is somewhat random, but you can expect to get explosives after decoding 30 to 33 chips. This can happen relatively early, depending on how thoroughly you explore the map, but one of the ingredients is a late-game item. They are:

Explosive powder is easy enough to get since the recipe unlocks as soon as you build the biolab. Circuit boards are harder to find, but there are a few ways you can gather them:

Wait for the recipe to unlock at 160 GTi.
Unlock and craft the Deconstruction T2 microchip. This allows you to deconstruct technical wrecks, which always produce a circuit board.
Recycle spare access cards from procedural wrecks.
Check random chests after reaching the Insects terraformation stage.
Some of the orb robots in the Planet Humble DLC contain circuit boards.

Once you have the ingredients, you can build explosives in the biolab or use an auto-constructor to make them for you.

How to Set and Detonate Explosives

Once you craft them, you can carry explosives around like any other inventory object. However, you need to interact with them in a specific way if you want to make them blow up.

From the inventory screen, interact with them like you would with a consumable. This is the right mouse button by default. This will cause the explosive to drop to the ground in front of you.
Take a moment to step away from the explosive, since it may be stuck up against your body. If the explosive drops too far away from where you want it, use the deconstruction tool to disarm it and recycle the materials. You’ll need to rebuild the explosive at the biolab, but you won’t waste any resources.
Interact with the armed explosive (default is the left mouse button). This starts a five-second timer.
Get a safe distance away from the explosive. It won’t wipe out all your health in one blow, but standing too close to an explosion still isn’t healthy.

Keep in mind that explosives only work on specific rocks. They can’t blow new holes in the terrain, and they don’t work on ice walls or closed doors in wrecks. Destructible rocks are brown with black and orange cracks, and you can find them blocking certain paths in the main map and in procedural wrecks.

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Explosives on Planet Humble

The Planet Humble DLC changes a few of the rules compared to the base game. While you still have to wait to find enough blueprint microchips to unlock the recipe, you can find explosives (and explosive targets) much earlier.

All the wrecks on Planet Humble are from a single attempt by a rival corporation to terraform the planet. This attempt failed, but you can still find the transport vehicles they used scattered across the landscape. Several of these vehicles were delivering explosives meant to expose valuable resources, and each crate on these transports contain three explosives.

You can use these explosives to crack open geodes, orange spheres you can find in several locations across the map. These geodes contain resources like iridium, uranium, osmium, and super alloy, and they often feature valuable rods of these same materials. Each rod is worth nine of the normal material, and the recipes for super alloy rods and osmium rods don’t unlock until the midgame.

You won’t find any fragile rock walls on Planet Humble, so these geodes are the best use of your explosives. You’ll still find rock piles in procedural wrecks, but by then you can find random explosives in crates. There’s no reason to save your explosives for later, so use them on geodes as soon as you can.