Planet Maker: Terraforming, Paths, and Build Limits

When the Planet Maker unlocks

The app arrived on day four of the Final Beta, at roughly Luca Arbor level 14. That timing is the important part: for the first three days the planet is effectively read-only, and anything you place is stuck where you put it. Day four is when both terrain and placement become editable.

An earlier test had the app on day three, so the exact day is version-dependent. The reliable rule is not the calendar but the Arbor: the app is a progression unlock, and the overhead build mode arrives with it rather than before. If you are planning a layout in advance, plan it on paper until the app appears.

What you get on day four is not just terraforming but a different way of working. Plants and trees can be rearranged in an overhead view instead of being dug up one at a time, which turns decoration from a first-person chore into a layout problem you can actually see.

What the tools actually do

The toolset is small, and most of the skill is in how the brushes behave rather than in what they are.

Tool	Effect	Notes
Raise / lower ground	Changes terrain height	Paintable, not tile-by-tile
Water	Adds or removes river tiles	Same painting behaviour as terrain
Path	Lays road surface	Bulk brushing was reported in an earlier test
Path edge	Changes the style of an existing path	Repeated brushing near an edge cycles the appearance
Overhead plant mode	Moves trees, flowers, and plants	No per-plant digging required
Natural slope	Placeable slope object	800 Dough each; players flagged the price

Two behaviours are worth knowing before your first big edit. Terrain painting only affects the layer you are pointing at, so raising a hill does not disturb the level below it, and you do not have to be precise — the brush accepts sloppy strokes, and the layer rule smooths out the result.

The path edge tool is the one that surprises people. Repainting the tiles adjacent to a road changes that road's style, which means the same path network can be re-skinned without being demolished. If you are laying paths early, leave the edges accessible rather than burying them under fences.

What you cannot edit

Anything with a plant, flower, or tree on it is locked. Those tiles cannot be terraformed until the plant is cleared, and weeds cannot be picked up directly — they can only be moved to a tile you have already reshaped. The practical consequence is that a scattered weed field should be herded into one corner early, where it is easy to collect, rather than left where it grew.

The same applies to the terrain itself in one respect: a large flat area is not automatically a blank canvas. Existing decoration load decides how much you can put on it later, so flattening a hill gives you space but not necessarily capacity.

The real limit is per-area load

Every area of the planet carries a decoration load, and buildings placed together count against the same area rather than against the planet as a whole. That is why the standard advice is to spread buildings out instead of clustering them: a dense plaza hits the local ceiling while the rest of the planet still has room.

The ceiling itself was never published, and testers consistently described it as too low — the common complaint was that planting a few trees was enough to fill an area and that an orchard or a Neighbor compound became impossible. Whether the launch build raises it is unknown.

Plan around it by treating each area as a budget. Put the buildings that must be close — a shop, a plaza, a Neighbor house — in one area, and push orchards, groves, and decorative set pieces into separate areas. When an area is full, the fix is relocation, not more decoration.

Moving buildings and plants later

Before the app, placement is permanent. After it, most things become movable: buildings can be picked up and repositioned, and plants can be rearranged in overhead mode. That makes day four a genuine reset point, and it is why the first three days should be spent cheaply — a hut placed badly on day two is not a disaster if it can be moved on day four.

Plants have a second, cheaper route that works from the start: dig a wild tree or flower up for 5 Strength and replant it. That is how testers grouped trees for easier harvesting long before the app existed, and it remains the way to move a single specimen without entering build mode.

What does not move is the house. Neighbor homes are placed from design plans and have no documented relocation, so their plots should be chosen last, after the paths and terrain are settled.

Higher Arbor levels and new terrain

Terrain options widen with the Arbor rather than with the app. Level 13 opens the highland region, where the terrain itself starts producing more species, and the trees change by galaxy — cedars in Hexia, baobabs in Taffeh. Level 14 adds the flowering trees for those same galaxies.

Height matters for collection as well as looks. Some creatures spawn only on high ground, and the community rule is that a mountain is not optional decoration: without high terrain, those spawns are not merely rare, they are unavailable. Testers described mountains up to nine levels high, and the useful advice is to build one substantial peak early and expand it later rather than scattering several low hills.

A high/low build mode existed as a gated feature during the test, with players asking for its nodes to unlock earlier. Treat height as progression content rather than as a tool you can use from day four.

Performance, saving, and big edits

Large terrain edits are the one place where the game asks you to slow down. Testers reported lag during heavy remodelling and at least one crash, with the standard warning being to save often and to break big changes into smaller passes.

That is also a warning against the "flatten everything, then rebuild" approach. Flattening the whole planet in one session is the most expensive thing you can ask the build mode to do, and it is rarely necessary: flattening the area you are working on, then moving to the next, produces the same result with far less risk.

One known rough edge: trimmed plots were reported to reject objects afterwards, so if a tile refuses placement after reshaping, rebuild the tile rather than fighting it.

Small-habitat blueprints

The Final Beta added a small-habitat feature that lets you apply a friend's island layout through a star blueprint. It is the closest thing the game has to importing someone else's build, and it is useful for the parts of a planet that are decorative rather than functional.

Blueprints do not override the ground rules above. They still sit on terrain, they still count against area load, and they still need their materials. Testers found that a blueprint overlapping existing paths can be made to fit by nudging it sideways until its edge meets the road, rather than by demolishing the road.

The housing guide covers star blueprints from the decoration side, and the Luca Arbor guide lists the levels that gate terrain features.

A build order that avoids rework

Do almost nothing before day four. Clear weeds into one pile, dig up the trees you want to keep and replant them in a temporary cluster, and leave the rest alone. On day four, flatten only the area you are about to use, lay the path skeleton first so the edges stay accessible, and place buildings after the paths rather than before. Put the high ground in early, because the creatures that need it are unavailable until it exists. Then furnish — and work one area at a time, saving between passes.

Baseline: Final Beta 0.95 (Starsea Call). Unlock timing, brush behaviour, the 800-Dough slope price, and the per-area load come from test-period reports. The exact load ceiling, the maximum height, and whether the launch build opens the high/low mode earlier were not published.