“You only need one copy of the DLC,” Miju Games wrote as it announced Magnetaris, the next paid DLC for The Planet Crafter, due December 8, 2026. For a server admin, that is a good sentence. Magnetaris costs $9.99 or €9.99 on PC through Steam and GOG, and on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S.
Read the fine print before you pass the hat. The release ties the deal to one store: “players on Steam only need to purchase one copy” to play with up to 10 friends who own the base game. GOG and console players get no such promise, so plan on everyone there buying their own. The base game’s store page lists online co-op for 1 to 10 players, so I would count on 10 people in total, not 11. Neither the page nor the release mentions dedicated servers, crossplay or how a friend joins a running game, so I would not plan around any of them.
The Planet Crafter is a slow survival game about landing on a dead world, gathering ore, building machines and pushing the planet toward life. Magnetaris is a large planet battered by electrical storms, and the new wrinkle is that you have to stabilize its magnetic fields while you terraform. That takes new machines and, in Miju’s words, the need to “balance the polarity.” Balance the polarity, they say. I read that as one more job for whoever already runs the power grid.
Past that come new biomes, anomalies and the remains of people who left the planet in a hurry, which add to the Sentinel Corp story. There are two ways in. You can travel there through the game's interplanetary system once it is unlocked, or start a separate save and pick Magnetaris as your planet. For a fresh crew, the new save is the easier sell.
The free half of the news already shipped. A September 1 update added Skeo, a moon you can terraform, on all platforms, and it works with old saves. To reach it, you fully terraform a starting planet, then build the Extraction Platform and the Interplanetary Travel Rocket. Magnetaris counts as a starting planet, so a crew that finishes the storms has somewhere to go next.
Miju Games is seven people working remotely from the south of France, and before this it made Abracadabrew, a co-op memory game, in 2020. The Planet Crafter entered early access in March 2022 and hit 1.0 in April 2024, and co-op arrived with 1.0. Planet Humble and Toxicity followed as DLC, and the console versions came this summer. That is a lot of planets for a team that would fit on one server.
Terraforming is slow work, which suits a group that drops in a few nights a week more than one that wants a weekend blowout. At 10 players, the DLC comes to about $1 a head. One Steam player buys it on December 8, and the rest of us need the base game and a free evening.
