Plan B Terraform Early Access Guide

This guide helps others get through early access on Plan B Terraform! Game has great potential but it just released early access so obviously there’s a long way to go. It’s also far from any simulation but it’s a fun little game, hopefully here to stay. Hope you have fun!

We know that there are people who have a hard time finishing the Plan B Terraform game. If you are one of those who find it difficult to finish the game, let’s take you to our Plan B Terraform guide.

Plan B Terraform Early Access Guide

Welcome to our Plan B Terraform Early Access guide. You have two goals: to make the towns big and to make the planet green. For this you will need first to provide towns with materials then also evacuate and recycle the waste produced by the city. Since you will need to provide food at some point you will also need to Terraform roll credits the planet to get water.

That’s really all there is for now.

Depots

The depots come in 3 tiers. Each tier have their corresponding reach in hexagons. Tier 1 has 1 drone, tier 2 has 2 drones and tier 3 has 4 drones. All their capacity are the same.

If you use depots for storage, they will try to balance eachother as they are interlinked. This means two things:

1) If you make a massive depot, it will take time and lots of resources to spread across the entire thing. It will also mean when it gets neat empty, 1 resource will be left in all the depots not in reach to a vehicle station

2) As depots try to balance eachother they will use their drones which will both impact the efficiency at disposing of resources and your framerate if like me you decided that 1200 depots of iron was a good idea

Since tier 2 and 3 have higher reach, you can alternate them to have something else inbetween. You can jump resources over roads/rails, you can line up two or three resources or you can just have the production building inbetween and have a stack of depots next to the loading stations.

Water

Water arrives suddenly and has little to no explanation right now. Dev said he’s working on improving that but for now there’s very little to know and do about it.

Water comes naturally from the ground and will evaporate and rain over the planet (not everywhere tho it follows some logic). Water simply comes once you start reaching 0°C temperature. The ice caps will not melt, so your ice drills can stay. Water will still flow on ice though.

Water flow:

Water will appear from the ground basically, evaporate and rain over the planet. By doing so it will naturally flow to the lowest parts. On your map you can see the blue slowly growing, it’s likely to become a lake, sea, ocean. But what needs to be paid attention to is also the branch looking lines reaching from it. Those are not water flowing from the ocean because the water level is rising, no. Those are rivers. The water raining down (now shown graphically) is flowing downhill toward the sea. So be aware that even if your site is far from the sea, water may find it.

Impacts of water:

Water will do two things. Irrigate the ground (green on water map) and flood stuff (blue on water map) making stuff unusable. The irrigated ground can be used to extract water with water pumps and plant trees to make the planet more green than red. The flooded parts are totally unusable. City buildings in flooded parts will be abandonned and production buildings will stop functionning. You may not build anything under water either except rails and roads. You can still operate transports through water, but since you can’t build anything you wont be able to rescue trapped resources if you get a stockpile flooded.

Control of water:

Two ways to control water. First is by simply stopping to raise the temperature. Just remove the greenhouse gas production and it should stop water from spreading.
The other way is to build dams (costs reinforced concrete). Remember that rivers flow down to the sea. Building a concrete wall around the sea will only flood the outside of the sea as rivers will have nowhere to flow now. If you want to protect a place, try to redirect that river somewhere else. Note that since you can’t control rain and you can’t pump out water (water pumps only produce water as resource to be used but do not consume or remove flowing water) you wont be able to build a sort of dry dock to mine underwater resources.

City Development

Cities come in 6 stages and have the following needs

Cities will need you to provide the resources at a sustained rate to grow and also evacuate the waste. Resource centers are needed to provide the resources. They need to be built in contact with a city hex. City hexes do not have to be connected between them so if you want to cut the city in half, go ahead. As resource centers are limited in both capacity (like other buildings, 4 of each resources) and drone speed, you will need more than one. A city with population of 1 million will consume about 1000 resources per year. I am not yet sure how the consumption scales up but be aware of that. You do not need to provide everything in the same resource center, so you can have a section dedicated to bringing food for instance.

The same applies for waste management. Waste production increases with population, waste retrieval is limited this time by the building production speed so you will need multiple buildings to cover the waste management. Be aware that metal waste, once recycled, produces both aluminum and steel. if one of the two stocks up it will block the recycling and the waste evacuation will stop.

One thing you may have noticed, the last stage of cities do not use reinforced concrete anymore. This means this stage is sustainable without using up more resources and especially concrete. You can redirect the reinforced concrete to other towns then.

Levels

The game currently has 18 levels as a form of progression. Levels can but not necessarly unlock new content. The last level, end of the game spoiler warning, does nothing, not even a “you did it you beat the game”, it’s an empty screen saying stage 18 and there’s no new objective.

I mean most of this could be counted as a spoiler anyway so you have been warned, twice.

Levels will unlock content as you need it roughly. Some stages will not unlock anything but further stages will provide something. You will spend a good part of your game using tier 2 depots because tier 1 are useless and tier 3 are so end game you have already done almost all the game’s “goals” at this point, but it’d facilitate the work over covering the planet with cities.

Below are all the currently available levels (19th of february 2023) and what they unlock when you reach them (complete previous level to get what is in the next one)

Trains and Trucks

As your only two mode of resource transportations trains and trucks are fairly important and quite simple. Trucks are single stack, single wagon trains that will clog up roads and are not so efficient but they cost less than trains. Once you get enough materials for solid train production you can ditch the trucks to very short distance and stockpile management roles. The one thing to note about trains is how they need a loop to turn around. At this stage trains don’t collide with eachother so you don’t have to worry about that. Trains of the same line will not drive over eachother but trains of different lines will pass through like nothing is there. There is also no use of setting three different train/truck line along a stockpile to grab most of it since stockpiles will automatically balance. It is a good idea to have highest tier depots around the train stop though, as more drones means more efficient loading/unloading and better output.