The Planet Crafter Prologue: How to Duplicate, Spawn, and Access Items from Anywhere in the World

Disclaimer 1: I have not found a simple way to spawn or access items, in game or not. The methods can be tedious, but they do work. The reason for this is that, aside from gold chests, every chest is randomly generated when you first open it. This makes simply opening every chest from the start of the game impossible. The current methods for spawning items, rely on either duplicating existing items, or manipulating chest RNG (More on both later). If you’re expecting to spawn in, type one command, and be drowning in endgame gear and loot, you’ll be disappointed.

Disclaimer 2: I will be showing screenshots of code throughout the guide, but don’t be alarmed, knowing how to code is NOT NECESSARY to perform these exploits. You will need to edit code, but it is literally just copy and paste.

Disclaimer 3: I am not responsible for any corrupted saves or lost progress you may encounter. You WILL be editing your save file, so follow my instructions and don’t break anything.

I highly recommend creating a backup of your save file before starting, as it is a very real possibility that you accidentally corrupt it. You’ll know your save is corrupted when you spawn in the Canyon Osmium cave with a broken inventory, and “TEZTEZTEZTEZTEZ” in the top left of your screen.

A corrupted save file.

Backing up your save
Backing up your save is simple, here’s how:

Step one: Take note of the name of your save file. It should be “Survival-[number]”.

Step two: Navigate to C:\AppData\LocalLow\MijuGames\Planet Crafter and find the .json file with the same name as your save, this is your save file.

Step three: Copy and paste the file into the same folder, and rename it to “Survival-2” (Or whatever the next number after the original file is)

Step four: Start your game, if everything went correctly, you should see the new save file next to your old one. Loading in to it, it should be an exact copy.

Now, you’re safe to edit your save as much as possible without the risk of losing everything.

Before you start editing your save, you need to understand how it works. The save file is essentially a comprehensive list of every item you’ve found, every chest you’ve opened, and your overall progression in the game. Open up the .json file in the text editor of your choice, and let’s begin.

This is what a fresh save file looks like, I’ll walk you through it.

Taking a look at the first line, this is where your overall progression is stored. You can edit each number to speed up terraforming and unlock blueprints.

The second line holds your coordinates, the direction you’re facing, and the blueprints you’ve unlocked from Blueprint chips.

The third line is what you need to understand, as it is how the game identifies every single item. Right now it is just the escape pod, but as you open chests and collect resources, more and more items will show up.

First, we have the item ID, this is what the game uses to identify the item internally. It is the most important part of this entire guide. The only other important part of this line is the location, if an item is currently on the ground, you can edit its coordinates to move it around the map. This is basically only useful for the escape pod, as everything else can be deconstructed or added to an inventory.

The next section below the escape pod, is where all of the inventory data is stored. In the screenshot there are two lines, one for your inventory, and one for your equipment. As you open and build storage containers, each will get their own ID number and line.

The same save file after opening a chest and equipping a backpack. You can see how every item in the chest now appears below the escape pod, with it’s own ID number.

There are a few more things to explain, but I’ll leave those until they’re relevant.

In this section I will walk you through how I identify storage containers and how to edit inventories.

Identifying your container: If you want to add items to a specific container, you’ll need to find that containers ID number. Because storage containers are only referred to by their ID numbers in the save file, and there is no indication of what a containers ID is in-game, we have to get creative.

First, find an item that you only have one of, I used an algae sample, but any item will work, as long as it’s the only one. Place the item in your container and save. Open your save file and hit “ctrl+f” to open the search bar. Search for your item, the name may be different from what it is in-game, but it will probably be similar. Some items will be easier to find than others, but if you’re struggling, you can always scroll down your list of items and search for it manually. Whenever you’ve found it, take note of its ID, and copy it into your search bar.

Go to the inventories section of your save, and you should see a highlighted ID number, this is your item, and the inventory it’s in is your container.

Identifying the item in its container

You can now copy and paste the ID of any item in the list, into the same quotes as your item, separated by comas, save, and when you load back into your world, the items will be in your container.

Similarly, you can copy the ID of any item into the first line of the inventories section (The container with the ID of 1), and it will be added to your inventory.

Duplicating an Item that already exists in your world is fairly simple. All you need to do is copy the ID number of the item, and paste it into an inventory. You can paste the same ID into an inventory multiple times, to add multiple of the same item.

Note: If you do something to destroy one of a duplicated item, save, and then reload your game, the rest of the duplicated items may be gone as well. I’m not 100% what causes this, but the game likely treats dupes as the same item because they share an ID. Just don’t reload your game without using the items and you should be fine.

Because of the way the game handles items, giving them ID numbers when they are accessed for the first time, it isn’t possible to directly spawn in new items. Sad. However, we can manipulate chest RNG to spawn in new items. This isn’t particularly useful if you already have the item, as simply duplicating the existing item is far easier, but if you want an item you don’t have, this is the way to go.

How it works
When a chest is opened for the first time, its contents are randomly decided by the game. So, all we have to do, is delete the chest data from our save file, and open the chest in game. If we don’t like what’s inside, simply exit without saving, and open the chest again. This is repeatable until you get the desired item, which can then be duplicated using the above method.

Deleting chest data
Deleting the chest data is pretty straightforward. First, find out what chest you’re using by using the method above. Then, simply delete that line from your save file entirely. If there is no save data for the chest, its contents will be randomly generated the next time it is opened. Then, you can take the desired items out, and duplicate them, or delete the chest data again to continue spawning.

I have spent many hours experimenting with this games files, and I hope I’ve explained my findings well enough. With these methods you should be able to spawn in any naturally spawning item, (This includes Osmium, Iridium/Uranium rods, and blueprint chips) obtain infinite amounts of items, including non-renewables such as osmium, and generally break your save.