If ever two independent systems with differing purposes were still linked by a common goal, it would be Greenlight and Kickstarter. A strong presence on one frequently leads to a good result on the other, and now Planet Nomads has landed on both. It’s off to a good start, too, with the Kickstarter easily clearing 20% after a single day and plenty of positive chatter on the Greenlight page.

Planet Nomads is an interplanetary survival game, where you’ve crash-landed on an alien world and need to use whatever you can get your hands on to science the $#!t out of near-certain doom. Thankfully the wreckage is semi-salvageable, so you’ve got a nice tech advantage over the alien wilderness, but even if you wrest survival from the landscape and its strange beasts and weather, there’s a universe awaiting exploration out there. Mine, harvest, craft, explore, solve a few planetary mysteries and then jet to a new world to do it again. Honestly, we’ve seen this kind of game before, but what sets Planet Nomads apart is how pretty everything is. While the flora is a little sparse, there’s a real sense of art direction in the biomes that’s made every screenshot and video look like they depict a place worth exploring. Canyons with layered rock formations, frozen arctic wastelands where ice-spires tilt at strange, windswept angles, forests of trees whose fronds sway in the breeze, and of course the promise to raze any part of this flat to build your home base in its procedurally-generated, voxel-based landscape make for some fun possibilities.

While the initial struggle for survival is an early-game focus, plans are for the tech to meet its match against the harsh environments its used in so you can’t just establish a foothold and dominate nature. Magnetic storms can fry electronics, giant alien beasts are not your friends, and radiation isn’t healthy for much of anyone. Sure, you can build a giant stationary base or even a super-tank mobile fortress to truck your tech around with you, but at some point it will be necessary to venture out and pit yourself against the hazards of a dangerous planet’s ecosystem. It’s a big, beautiful, deadly universe out there, and if Planet Nomads can live up to its ambitions it should be a rewarding place to journey through.