Atmosfar is an open world survival crafter that sees you flying from one glorious sky island to the next. However, instead of simply having you settle down on one of these islands, the team at Apog Labs did something else entirely. Atmosfar sees you building a massive floating base that keeps you traveling, ensuring you have the ability to explore this cast world and dive deep into all its mysteries.
However, to start this expansion, we need to get used to the tools we have available to us. The first of these is the extractor, a hand-held device that helps you turn scrap into useful materials for crafting. It can also get ore from small deposits which can help you make fuel for your Wasp.
The Wasp is a class of agile, pilotable flying crafts that you'll use to zip around on, and hover in place, should the need call for it. This vehicle comes in a few variations. From the Utility Wasp to the Striker, there are also the Hauler Wasp, and the Scout. However, during my time with the game, I had yet to unlock the Scout.
Each of the Wasps that you can find has a different purpose. The Striker Wasp is your fighter, made to be agile and provide fighting capabilities in the air. The Hauler is meant for cargo, which can carry an abundance of materials and fuel plus carry large objects for you. It's the workhorse of the group.
The first Wasp available to you is the Utility Wasp, as it's the basic all-rounder that is more of a jack of all trades. This Wasp can carry around a mobile base with, allowing you to craft, cook, and heal on the go, no matter where you find yourself.
But that is not where the mobile base aspect of Atmosfar ends as there is one more mobile base you can have. And that one can do everything that your small camp can and then some. This base is a massive ship called the Cloud Cruiser, and boy is there a lot you can do with this ship.
For starters, this ship is fully customizable. You can add new walls to it, color it to your liking, and set up different spots for each process you need. So you can let your imagination run wild as there is no limit to how you can build the Cloud Cruiser. That said, just make sure you have enough systems to keep the thing afloat or you may find yourself slowly descending below the clouds.
Other than being fully customizable there are a few things the Cloud Cruiser can do that your Utility Wasp’s camp cannot. First, it can make an infinite amount of fuel that you can use to fill up your Wasps, so you will only need to find hydrogen crystals in an emergency. The second is that it can process the large ore chunks that you find around you as you explore, with the help of your Hauler Wasp. This adds more ways to gather resources and help you build up your base.
The point of Atmosfar is to figure out what is happening to the weather in the world you are in. To do this you need to travel from island to island exploring any PACE settlement you find for information, while collecting the materials needed to upgrade your base or repair stuff in the settlement to find the information you need. Luckily, when you need to craft the UI is easy to navigate and understand with a clean and simple design that makes it easy to find what you need.
Now, since Atmosfar is in early access, there have been a few bugs that I have run into while playing. Some have been fixed, some have stayed, but these are minor things like the current tool I am using would either disappear or change to another, forcing me to re-equip it. The worse bug is that I cannot for the life of me get the big ore chunks onto the Cloud Cruiser to be processed. I've tried rebuilding the cargo shuttle, adding new containers, and even rebuilding the processor, but nothing has worked.
While these issues are very likely to be ironed out as the game continues its life in Early Access, Atmosfar is still a really excellent experience, one I highly recommend if you like the survival crafting genre. While it may follow certain traits within the genre, it does enough to feel unique and is a breath of fresh air in my book.