You can sign up to get a daily email of our articles, see the Mailing List page.
We do often include affiliate links to earn us some pennies. See more here.

Planet Nomads, the sci-fi single-player survival game has another update out and it seems it's been a tough year for the developer.

Before diving into what's new, I wanted to point out a blog post the developer put up here. In it, they describe how it's been tough going for them, to the point of them even considering cancelling the game. They pulled people from it to work on new "mobile projects" and so on. Eventually, it seems they were able to put some more resources back into Planet Nomads after community support. The post starts a little negative but thankfully ends on a positive note about it.

Frankly, I think their decision to axe multiplayer was part of the reason people decided to ignore it. Unless you have a really good hook for a single-player survival game, competition is seriously hot. It has a lot of good features for building (including vehicles) that would be so much more fun with others. I've yet to see anything in the single-player survival that has really made me think it's worth my time compared to many other similar games, a lot of which do have multiplayer.

As for the recent update, for Linux gamers they've made a tweak to "support not so recent distributions" so it's nice to see some attention there. Additionally, there's new types of weather along with improvements to existing weather; a new "Free Roam" game mode, which allows you to explore without worrying about thirst, hunger, radiation etc; a directional indicator for damage sources; a take-all button for containers; performance optimisations and so on. Sounds like a reasonably good update overall.

Find it on Humble Store, GOG and Steam.

Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
12 Likes
About the author -
author picture
I am the owner of GamingOnLinux. After discovering Linux back in the days of Mandrake in 2003, I constantly came back to check on the progress of Linux until Ubuntu appeared on the scene and it helped me to really love it. You can reach me easily by emailing GamingOnLinux directly. Find me on Mastodon.
See more from me
The comments on this article are closed.
10 comments

Dunc Dec 20, 2018
I'm not really a big fan of multiplayer, so that didn't bother me much, however I can't deny that the game has always felt as if it's lacking something. Even if you didn't know, you could almost guess from playing it that it was probably originally intended to be multiplayer.

That said, I've had a lot of fun out of it. It just lacks variety and any real sense of purpose once you've got food and water production going. There's a sort of difficulty gap: exploration is fun until you've seen all the biomes, and then, presumably, a search for the alien artifacts is supposed to take over. But that's a much more daunting prospect, since you basically have to cover the entire surface of the planet to find them. As I say, more variety - different biomes (some kind of parametric variations on the existing ones, maybe), more animal and plant types - might make that a more interesting experience.

But I wouldn't be too tough on Craneballs. What they set out to do is really hard - probably harder than they realised - and, multiplayer excepted, it's about 80-90% there. It just needs more interest to really hook you in.


Last edited by Dunc on 20 December 2018 at 2:47 pm UTC
Gryxx Dec 20, 2018
Personally, I really like this game. Even without multiplayer vechicles and Steam Worksop are enought to keep me busy. I just wish that i can use machines in creative- without it making and testing vechicels is so much harder
hummer010 Dec 20, 2018
This game has been added and removed from wishlist more times than any other game ever! I think I want it, but I'm just not sure....
Ardje Dec 20, 2018
I love what they have achieved so far. And how the community has been able to fuck the physics and create very interesting space ships at a moment that it was not even on the table.
That's probably the biggest advancement so far to be able to load another persons design.
The game in itself is very difficult due to very advanced physics and "microbuilding" of vehicles. In that respect it's more advanced than planet explorers.
I did not care for multiplayer that much, but after seeing what NMS now has in place (small cooperating teams) it doesn't seem that bad.
But I have a hard time on planet nomads to see a goal, except for my standard goal: to build the biggest (moving!) base ever. With trains and stuff like that.

I wish that the developers of NMS, PN, FcE and PE got together and develop the most complete game.
Tiedemann Dec 20, 2018
I really like the game but as others have said, once you have the production going there's not much to do. I really like the exploration for resources and that you actually have to plan and/or use more than one base to get things going smooth.
I've never cared about the multiplayer but I hope for more content and purpose.

There's a lot of really impressive builds to check out on YT.
Xpander Dec 20, 2018
Woaah, it actually runs with -force-vulkan now and 85-130 FPS all maxed 1440p, only thing that kills perf is water reflections, if i enable those FPS tanks to like 20 fps in some places, GPU usage also drops to like 10% then. With reflections off its 90-100% GPU utilizations. So clearly something is broken with reflections.

Was nice that they added some story mission before you crash into the planet. Sad that they still haven't changed their mind about multiplayer though.

[


Last edited by Xpander on 20 December 2018 at 10:36 pm UTC
TheRiddick Dec 21, 2018
I bought it on the premise that multiplayer would be a thing. While some may dislike multiplayer, you must remember that there are FAR better survival games out WITH multiplayer in them! Just keep that nugget of information in mind when rejoicing over Planet Nomads.
Eike Dec 21, 2018
View PC info
  • Supporter Plus
Quoting: TheRiddickI bought it on the premise that multiplayer would be a thing. While some may dislike multiplayer, you must remember that there are FAR better survival games out WITH multiplayer in them! Just keep that nugget of information in mind when rejoicing over Planet Nomads.

Well, if you're not into multiplayer, the "WITH multiplayer" part obviously means nothing to you.
Question would be rather if there's better stuff when ignoring multiplayer.
TheRiddick Dec 21, 2018
There is, subnautica was free on epic store recently.

The only thing unique with this game is some of its building and linking mechanics, their quite nifty and can allow for some elaborate vehicle designs, assuming it ever developers to that stage and doesn't become vaporware or release as a early unfinished alpha.


Last edited by TheRiddick on 21 December 2018 at 8:22 am UTC
scaine Dec 21, 2018
View PC info
  • Contributing Editor
  • Mega Supporter
In terms of survival games, Subnautica is excellent through Steam Play and of course 7D2D is native (and the current A17 experimental builds are just excellent).

A game like this either has to be vaguely story-driven (like Subnautica) or multiplayer (like 7D2D). I'm not sure I'll ever get this to be honest. Still holding out for a native build of Astroneer personally.
While you're here, please consider supporting GamingOnLinux on:

Reward Tiers: Patreon. Plain Donations: PayPal.

This ensures all of our main content remains totally free for everyone! Patreon supporters can also remove all adverts and sponsors! Supporting us helps bring good, fresh content. Without your continued support, we simply could not continue!

You can find even more ways to support us on this dedicated page any time. If you already are, thank you!
The comments on this article are closed.