Get a taste of automated, voxelated terraforming in the free preview of Eden Crafters

Ocean World: Eden Crafters | Official Trailer - YouTube

Upcoming open world automation-crafting-survival game Eden Crafters has a free demo out now called Ocean World: Eden Crafters, showing an in-development slice of the upcoming game set on a couple of small islands on a vast oceanic planet—complete with a full-on giant wave from that one planet near the black hole in Interstellar that comes by and wrecks all the most fragile buildings in your base every once in a while. Which absolutely rules, honestly.

After spending a few hours with it, Ocean World: Eden Crafters very much delivers on its premise: It's the gameplay of Satisfactory with the premise of The Planet Crafter, and while the demo doesn't show the outright quality of either the premise alone will certainly get a lot of people interested.

The demo has five different resources to at first gather by hand, then swiftly automate into a steady flow of material for building an ever-larger base of machines that are both for manufacturing needed goods and for terraforming the environment. While at first you're just getting power, oxygen, and food to keep yourself alive, later on you start to expand a big base and produce batteries suitable for your depowered landing craft—which can eventually take flight again to get you onto a second island with more resources.

The automation gameplay in the demo is interesting enough, if fairly standard and simple. The more interesting part is balancing the flow of resources to also make your organic production facilities that'll enrich the local soils to get plants growing. Do well enough with that and you can get patchy green stuff growing, then grasses, then entire tall trees sprouting up.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about it is that this is just one planet, with others like an Earth-ish world, an extra-hot lava world, and more cooking for the full game. The six or so simple hours on this one ocean world are a good taste that ensure I'll be checking out whatever Osaris Games eventually puts into early access or full release later this year.

You can find Ocean World: Eden Crafters for free on Steam, where you can also check out the store page for Eden Crafters proper.

Jon Bolding is a games writer and critic with an extensive background in strategy games. When he's not on his PC, he can be found playing every tabletop game under the sun.