The Crust Beginner's Guide: What to Do First on the Moon

Released

10 September 2026Left Early Access with 1.0

Developer

VEOM StudioPublished by Crytivo

Genre

Simulation, StrategyColony automation

Players

Single-player onlyNo co-op tag on the store

Platforms

Windows, macOS, LinuxPer the official 1.0 announcement

Research

Three research treesDeveloper's own wording

What the game actually asks of you

The developer’s own feature list is short enough to use as a to-do list. It names seven things: build a lunar colony, mine and automate resources and production, explore the moon, play through a story-driven campaign, trade with Earth, influence politics, and manage colonists and their needs.

Note what is not on that list. There is no combat to speak of — the threats are environmental and economic. Global events, which 1.0 expanded, are things like meteor showers and solar flares rather than an enemy army. Your losses come from a dead power grid, a stalled conveyor line, or a colonist walking out because their needs went unmet.

The order most players actually follow

Completion rates on the official achievement list are the closest thing to a public walkthrough of the first hours. Read them as a funnel:

Two things follow from that table. First, the first real production building the game expects you to complete is a regolith refinery — so if you are unsure what to build after the tutorial, that is the answer the game gives you. Second, roughly a quarter of players stop before finishing the tutorial, and about a third do not make it to a full in-game year. The failures cluster early, which is why it is worth slowing down at power rather than at scale.

Reliability note: achievement names and descriptions come from the official page; the percentages come from the same page and were captured on 17 September 2026. They will drift as more people play.

Your first hour, in order

1. Get a power supply that survives the night. The electricity build menu in the official screenshots contains Wires, Charging station, Battery and Large accumulator battery. That list is a hint about the intended shape of the system: generation alone is not enough, because the game gives you storage as a first-class building. Plan the batteries at the same time as the generators, not after your first blackout.

2. Mine before you refine. You need regolith coming out of the ground before a refinery has anything to chew on. Excavation is also where the one early grind sits — Diggy Diggy Hole wants 10,000 cells, which is a long way past what you need to start.

3. Automate the haul, not the build. The official channel published separate short videos for Conveyors Moving and Switch Conveyer Belt, and there is an official clip for Planning mode. Read that as the developer telling you where the game gets interesting: it is not the placing of machines, it is the routing between them. Conveyors are the system that most often looks broken when it is actually mis-routed.

4. Hire people last. Colonists are the most expensive thing you can get wrong. The hiring screen in the official screenshots sorts candidates by profession, and the tabs name exactly five: All plus Botanist, Scientist, Engineer, Medic and Chef. Each card shows a wage, skills, traits and a hiring price, and the detail panel carries nationality and age. The store copy also commits to tracking health, mood and needs, so a colonist is a running cost, not a one-off purchase.

5. Then research. The store listing says scientific advancement runs across three research trees. If you have not yet decided which tree your base is short on, you are spending points blind — the research order page covers what is and is not confirmed about each line.

The three systems that stop new players

Almost every early stall traces back to one of these, and all three are systems where the game gives you a building and then leaves you to work out the throughput yourself.

What 1.0 changed for new players

If you are starting now rather than in Early Access, you are playing the version the developer called the complete one. The official announcement lists the additions that matter most in your first hours:

• Planning Mode — you can lay out a construction plan for modules and conveyors before you can afford to build them, and copy a module together with its recipe. There is also a required-resources tracker, which is the closest thing the game has to a shopping list for a design you have not built yet.
• Roads — a dedicated road and parking tool. Cargo trucks now pick the shortest route themselves and take the nearest road into account. If you played before 1.0, trucks driving across your equipment is fixed.
• Sandbox 2.0 — a proper sandbox with a choice of lunar starting location, different resource compositions, custom game settings and seeds, plus four new maps.
• Multiple endings — the campaign is now a finished story with more than one conclusion.
• Global events — meteor showers, solar flares and epidemics, expanded for 1.0.
• Leaderboards — the store category list includes Steam Leaderboards, and the announcement describes boards for base market capitalisation and its rate of growth.

If you are coming back from Early Access, the optimisation work is the other headline: the announcement separates the logistics rework, which it credits with a clean +30–50% FPS, from the rendering and draw-call work, which it credits with 100–200% on large bases. Those are two different subsystems and two different numbers, and they are often quoted as one.

Practical first-session checklist

1. Finish the tutorial. The official achievement funnel says the drop-off is real and it happens here.
2. Build power with storage, sized for a full night.
3. Get regolith out of the ground.
4. Build one regolith refinery and watch a full cycle complete before adding a second.
5. Lay out conveyors with Planning Mode so you can see the route before you pay for it.
6. Add roads between your extraction site and your production block.
7. Hire one colonist, not five, and watch their needs for a full day.
8. Only then pick a research tree.