What’s better than digging shit up from the ground beneath your feet? Doing it on another planet, that’s what.

Announced this month by Seattle-based SYSTEM ERA softworks, ‘Astroneer’ puts you in the adorable space-shoes of an explorer with a landscape deformation tool (much like we’ve seen in No Man’s Sky), and a construction toolset with which to survive – the rest is up to you, it seems.

Introduced as ‘a game of aerospace industry and interplanetary exploration’, your goal is to explore, survive, and thrive in the new, much wider, frontier. With each new planet offering its own set of challenges, you’ll need to plan wisely to extract the most from each, and discover the hidden artifacts and resources scattered throughout.

Even at this early stage it looks wonderful, and with multiplayer, personalisation and customisation options, and an interesting looking resource management game, we could quite easily be persuaded to explore an exoplanet or two. Planetary deformation and chill?