Welcome to Eden Crafters! As of this writing, Eden Crafters has only recently been released, and is very notably still in active development, but this guide should hopefully remain useful for some time to come.

Eden Crafters is an open-world, survival/crafting game. You are an astronaut, tasked with taming a new world for human habitation, relying almost entirely on the local resources available to you. While the environment is trying to kill you (or perhaps more accurately, is indifferent to your survival) nothing else is: starvation, lack of oxygen and extreme temperatures are what will kill you here, not some gribbly alien beast. As such, you have a lot of latitude to how you achieve your goals. You're not competing against a rival or racing against a clock.

My playthrough has been on Echo; the Ocean World from the demo obviously has a different map, but the game mechanics should be largely the same, and most of this guide should still apply.

On Echo, you begin in a little valley, close to toxic yellow water and surrounded by gradually rising terrain. To your west, the land has a reddish tint, and that's a hint: that area is warm - so warm, in fact, that you will slowly take damage there. You can mitigate this damage by eating, so it's not an immediate death sentence to travel there - but do your business quickly.

The game, even at this fairly early state, has a walkthrough that guides you through harvesting some resources, building a shelter, building some workbenches, and so forth. You probably want to follow along; it will set you up nicely for the beginning of the game.

Beyond the tutorials, there are four ways to "progress" and unlock new craftable items and buildings in the game.

• By finding new resources
  
• By building a new type of building
  
• By putting rare materials in the Material Analyzer
  
• By completing terraforming tasks as described by the Planet Analyzer

Note that once you build the Planet Analyzer, you'll receive hints on how to unlock things, and you can access this information at any time with the "J" key. Don't sleep on these hints! I inadvertently made my game harder than it needed to be by ignoring them - more on that later.

Also remember that you have a drone, which can be launched with the "V" key. While it can't travel that far, it's a great way to do a little exploring in hostile environments, getting a birds-eye view of the surrounding terrain, and building in hard-to-reach locations.

The core of Eden Crafters centers around harvesting resources and crafting items with increasingly challenging resource requirements and build chains. While individual units of resources are indeed abundant, can be easily collected with your hand tool or drone, and are perfectly sufficient for small-scale crafting, by the mid-game you're going to want to be using Miners to harvest these resources in bulk.

Further, for at least some craftable items, you're going to want to set up the necessary machinery to process these resources in bulk. With the exception of the Alloy & Carbon Forges, which can make materials you have no way of making by hand, you could use your workbenches to make everything you need by hand. The problem is, for many, many craftable items, this becomes amazingly tedious, unless you only need a few dozen (or less) of the item in your playthrough.

For example, your oxygen upgrades, your heat/cooling/radiation shields, and your vehicle batteries are all needed in such small quantities that it'd be quite literally faster to simply make them at your workbench than to go to the trouble to build out the machinery to make them. I've also found that regular filters, AI chips, and nuclear reactors were all needed in small enough quantities to simply not be worth the trouble.

On the other extreme, iron plates are needed constantly and in vast, vast quantities: clearly an exceptionally good candidate for using machines to manufacture in bulk, and then store in large quantities. One good test is if you find yourself, "I need to make MORE of these, AGAIN?" the item in question is an excellent candidate for automating the production of. Rotors and iron beams come to mind as some of the early candidates for mass production; by the end of the game you're going to find yourself constantly needing composite beams (which have a very long build chain) in numbers approaching the low thousands - an obvious candidate for automation!

One thing to keep in mind about automating production: look out for bottlenecks. Your throughput is going to be limited by the slowest element in the build chain. For example:


Wow! 360 iron a minute! Awesome!

Except:


Oh, wait, that belt can only carry 120 items/minute. Which means I can't take full advantage of that awesome production rate. And then, even more bad news:


60/minute! BOGUS!

Forges will very, very frequently be a bottleneck, as will assembling machines. This has a couple of implications:

• It's a waste of time to use conveyors faster than the machine at the receiving end can produce. It doesn't actually harm anything to use carbon fiber conveyors to feed forges, and if you're absolutely swimming in carbon fiber (which isn't hard to do by midgame) you may want to use them anyway, but you don't really gain anything by it.
  
• Particularly for lower tier ores, it's wasteful to use fancier miners than you actually need. In our example, above, we can produce 360 iron/minute with the tier 2 mining machine - but even the highest end conveyor, the osmium alloy conveyor, can still only move 240 items/minute.
  
• You can partially work around limitations by using splitters and working in parallel. For example, a carbon fiber conveyor could feed iron into a splitter at 120 iron/min, which fed two forges each running at 60 iron/minute.
  
• One final consideration is to watch your power and water levels. Machines that need power (or power and water) seem to have their performance capped at the lowest of either of those. For example, if you only produce 75% of the power you need, your forge will throttle back to only doing 75% of the work - reducing itself to 45 items/minute. This might not be obvious unless you routinely check your machines; I know I've had circumstances where I didn't think about power, built a couple new production lines, and then found myself puzzled as to why everything was running so slowly!

I initially found flying the starship to be an incredibly irritating experience. It did NOT handle the way I thought it would, and I was constantly having to wrestle with it. The key to a successful flight is to STOP TRYING TO CONTROL IT! In particular, don't fight it on altitude control.

The game doesn't actually tell you this, but your spaceship actually tries to autopilot itself, maintaining a reasonable altitude over whatever it's flying over. This is why it's constantly pitching itself up and down. I'll grant you if you try to fly over a tall mountain you'll need to hold down the lift key, but overall it does a pretty good job of staying at a reasonable altitude above the ground. So: don't fight it.

Incidentally, I've fooled around with the Cargo Ship. It does hold significantly more cargo, but seems like it may be slower.

I haven't fooled around with any of the ground vehicles; if you have, feel free to share your thoughts in the comments.

Two keys to having a much, much better experience, particularly in the mid to late game:

• First, a small one: use the drone! Particularly when building on the side of a hill (which you'll definitely want to start doing later in the game, since you build some BIG buildings eventually) it's so, so much less stressful to use the drone to do it, instead of trying to hike up the side of a hill yourself. Likewise, it can simplify the process of running a conveyor belt through rocky terrain (or a thin mountain range) immeasurably.
  
• And the big tip: warehouses! I slept on this way, way longer than I should have. At some point my terraforming efforts had unlocked a tier 3 warehouse, which needed a whole bunch of things I had no ability to produce at all, so I just stopped thinking about them. I was a heavy user of the tier 1 storage boxes, but saw no point in building one of the tier 2 ones. And that was where I made my mistake: the tier one warehouse doesn't unlock until you build a tier 2 storage box.
  
  The great, wonderful, downright magical thing about warehouses is that anything put into them is accessible to you, anywhere, from the Q build menu or at any of your workbenches. In fact, I would strongly recommend building a tier 1 warehouse and then immediately setting up build chains to supply it with all the resources it needs so you can start building them anywhere.
  
  
  Building three tier 2 warehouses can be nice, since doing so increases your stack size by 10 each time, to a max of 50, but honestly, that's a fringe benefit compared to the ability to instantly build a 100-plate conveyor belt in the middle of nowhere without having to make a supply run. It really is that amazing. Try it, you'll like it!

Finally, a few thoughts about where I found it handy to set up my production.


The green area is my initial starting location on Echo, and unsurprisingly I've built things up there. Note, however, that to the east there's a thin strip of land that's pretty flat and rich with resources; I did a lot of building there as well. To the west, I also did some building to harvest gold, sulfur, and carbon from three carbon rocks right next to each other.


To the west here you can see that thin strip again; to the east, on the western shores of the crater island I set up a facility with a warehouse to harvest ruby, built thermal regulators, and phosphorus.


On the southern, snowy island I found a good place to harvest amethyst, diamond, and a little way up the slope to the south, sapphire.


Finally, in this irradiated section of the map, once I'd cleared the radiation I built two nuclear plants fed by a uranium mining operation to power some endgame buildings.