This New PS5 Open-World Survival Game Makes No Man’s Sky Look Outdated
No Man’s Sky is one of gaming’s most impressive comeback narratives, and it’s hard to talk about sci-fi survival without recognizing what Hello Games has built since the game first arrived in 2016. Its universe hands players a steady stream of planets to search, places to construct bases, materials to collect, and dangers to survive across a galaxy that still feels absurdly huge. For a lot of players, it’s the perfect image of touching down on an alien world and immediately wondering what’s waiting past the next bend. But the upcoming PS5 release of The Planet Crafter points at a piece that No Man’s Sky has never fully leaned into.
No Man’s Sky gives you the full loop of planet discovery, survival, base building, and even local terrain reshaping. The Planet Crafter starts from that same broad sci-fi survival daydream, then narrows it into something more specific: taking hostile planets and pushing them into habitable territory. That shift is exactly why No Man’s Sky can feel slightly unfinished in comparison—like it’s missing the one mechanic that could elevate its sense of exploration, personal freedom, and player ownership even further. With The Planet Crafter launching on July 21, PS5 players will finally get to see what that missing “next step” feels like in practice.
PlayStation 5 players can also mark their calendars for five major titles planned for the console during July 2026.
The Planet Crafter Turns Survival Into Transformation
The clearest difference between The Planet Crafter and No Man’s Sky isn’t the size of the universe. No Man’s Sky obviously wins that race. Hello Games built a game centered on exploration and survival across a procedurally generated galaxy, while The Planet Crafter places terraforming at the heart of its gameplay loop. In other words, The Planet Crafter isn’t just encouraging you to uncover new worlds and then endure them. It’s asking you to actively reshape those worlds by collecting resources, assembling machines, producing oxygen, raising temperature, increasing atmospheric pressure, and gradually steering dead environments toward something livable.
Guess the games from the emojis.
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Guess the game from the emojis.
In many survival games, advancement usually means you can withstand the environment better as time goes on. The Planet Crafter flips that idea. Progress still includes familiar survival steps, but the payoff isn’t simply getting stronger so you can keep living. Instead, the real goal is to make the planet itself change.
Hello Games built a game around exploration and survival across a procedurally generated universe, while The Planet Crafter focuses on terraforming as a core part of its gameplay loop.
No Man’s Sky offers plenty of the ingredients players expect from this genre: base construction, resource collection, challenging planets, travel between worlds, and the Terrain Manipulator—an instrument Hello Games has continued to develop with additions like restore and flatten modes. These tools let players edit terrain locally, particularly around their bases, and that creative freedom is a big part of the appeal. Still, editing the landscape on a small scale doesn’t quite match the idea of terraforming being the main driver of the sci-fi survival fantasy. That’s the specialization The Planet Crafter leans into.
In No Man’s Sky, you’re encouraged to locate a planet and establish a base there. Yet the core fantasy—discovery—often pushes you to move on after you’ve learned what a world has to offer. At its current stage of development, The Planet Crafter does allow visits to other planets, but the emphasis isn’t on collecting more discoveries across the map. The real focus is on finding a planet, then 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 major contrast is that The Planet Crafter doesn’t include enemy threats of any kind. No Man’s Sky prioritizes exploration and survival too, but it still gives players hostile forces—such as Sentinels and Space Pirates—that can put you in danger. The Planet Crafter, by comparison, keeps the experience free of combat pressure, so the loop remains centered on creativity and transformation. That peaceful structure might sound risky in the wrong game, but it fits The Planet Crafter well, because terraforming is the mechanism players use to reveal and “open up” the world.
No Man’s Sky Owns Scale, But The Planet Crafter Owns Impact
None of this is meant to suggest The Planet Crafter is larger or more significant than No Man’s Sky. Hello Games’ sci-fi survival title has spent years expanding into a big platform, and ongoing updates have made it far more robust than the version that launched originally. The more precise point is that No Man’s Sky has a strength that can also create a kind of distance. When a game offers countless planets, each new discovery sits right next to the promise of another one. That’s thrilling, but it also means many worlds become brief stops rather than places where players can settle in and truly claim ownership.
The Planet Crafter does let players jump to other planets, but the purpose isn’t really to discover more worlds for the sake of variety. It’s about finding one place to commit to—then unlocking its full potential by terraforming it.
The Planet Crafter offers the opposite feeling. Its worlds matter because they can be left changed. The payoff is in turning dangerous, lifeless spaces into living areas, then seeing how that transformation reshapes what you can do and where you can go next.
That’s also the reason No Man’s Sky can feel incomplete in comparison. It captures the wonder of planetary discovery better than nearly anything else in games, but it doesn’t make the future of those planets feel like the player’s primary responsibility in the same direct way.
No Man’s Sky doesn’t need to be every possible version of a sci-fi survival game. Its identity is built around scale, freedom, discovery, and that feeling of being a small traveler moving through an enormous universe—and that fantasy still works. What The Planet Crafter highlights, though, is a missing element in that fantasy. Discovering a planet is exciting, surviving it is rewarding, and building on it brings satisfaction, but watching it evolve because of your own efforts adds the final layer that can make the loop feel truly whole. No Man’s Sky gives you endless places to visit, while The Planet Crafter gives you worlds that can become something else because you were there.
