The Crust FAQ: Straight Answers to the Questions Players Actually Search For

Full release

10 September 2026Left Early Access

Platforms

Windows · macOS · LinuxNo console version

Developer / publisher

VEOM Studio / CrytivoStore listing

Achievements

28Seven hidden

Releases in news feed

101 numbered2023–2026

Old saves load in 1.0

NoBeta branch exists

Buying it, and what you get

What does The Crust cost, and is it on sale? On 22 September 2026 the Steam listing showed a base price of $31.99 with a 35% discount applied. The developer framed the discount as a launch promotion running for the first two weeks after release, and a June 2026 post described the sale before launch as “the last sale before the full release and price increase”. Treat any price you read as a snapshot with a date on it → platforms and price.

Do I need to buy the game again for 1.0? No. Owners received 1.0 as an ordinary update. There was no paid upgrade path and no separate 1.0 listing — which is why everyone who owned the game got it on the same day.

Is the Supporter Pack required for anything? No, and the developer says so directly: the pack “is not required to complete The Crust”. It contains one module plus cosmetic and non-game items such as an artbook and 4K wallpapers. It is a separate purchase from the free 1.0 update, and older feature lists sometimes blur the two together.

How long is the campaign? We are not going to quote a number. Neither the store listing nor any official announcement states a completion time, and the only honest orientation available is structural: the prologue is described by the developer as “a scenario about 20 minutes long”, and the story continues from there into a campaign that now has multiple endings.

Starting out

Should I play the prologue or skip straight to the campaign? Play it. The release notes make it a recommendation rather than an option: “If this is your first time playing The Crust, we recommend starting with it.” It combines the tutorial elements, and 1.0 rebuilt it to be “simpler, clearer, and more convenient” with visual improvements → beginner guide.

What difficulty should I pick, and can I change it? Rather than guess at a recommendation, the useful fact is that the game treats this as a decision with an escape: Patch 0.99.80 added “the option to choose the subsequent difficulty at the end of the tutorial”. Difficulty also touches the economy directly — official notes record CPU allowances differing by difficulty and a fix for difficulty wrongly affecting one quest’s build costs → game modes and difficulty.

What was the single most-requested change during Early Access? “Let me build bigger, more permanent factories.” The developer named it in the pre-launch post and said 1.0 answers it with Planning Mode, roads and the rebuilt logistics system → what’s new in 1.0.

Building, power and logistics

Why is nothing happening in my base? Because “not working” and “not wired correctly” look identical in this game — a module with no power and a module hitting a known power-detection bug present the same way. The developer’s fix log names the specific cases, including modules that would not connect to the grid and living-quarters modules that would not detect electricity → troubleshooting.

How do I stop belts from jamming? The game tells you, if you know where to look. An official update added “an indicator for resources getting stuck at Distributors and module inputs”, and 1.0 added conveyor direction display with the V key plus an M-key shortcut to clear a conveyor’s contents. Belt diagnosis is a specific workflow, not a general skill → conveyor and logistics.

How much power do I need? More than the number you have. The official patch history shows power as a moving target for good reason — power calculations were among the systems optimised at 1.0, a Solar Flare rework stopped underground batteries being drained, and the Anti-Meteorite Laser Cannon spends one Energy Cell per shot. Plan for consumption rather than capacity → power system.

Where does all my regolith go, and how do I process it? Through refineries, and the choice between the two types is a footprint decision. The community wiki draws the functional line — the Single extracts one output at a time, the Multi handles all oxide types — and we quote that split while treating the wiki’s numbers as unusable → resource refining.

Story, contracts and the endgame

How many stages does the laser cannon have? Seven in the shipped 1.0 build, if you read the game’s own interface: the mission log shows a progress counter of 4/7 and labels the current objective “7th stage”. The widely-cited community wiki still documents six, on a page tagged version 0.93.22 from months before launch. We explain the discrepancy and deliberately leave per-stage costs out → laser cannon.

Why does my quest not appear, or not progress? Quest gates almost never appear in patch notes as features — only as defects. That is why the fix log is a better tool for this than a wiki: one hotfix records fixing a bug where a faction’s contracts would not appear at all, and another records fixing an issue where a quest would automatically progress. A quest that stalls is usually a known defect rather than a step you missed → contracts.

Can I still get the endings I want? The campaign has “multiple endings and thought-provoking questions for reflection and discussion”, in the developer’s words. What official material does not do is describe the branches in detail, and we have kept to that boundary rather than reconstructing a choice tree from player reports → story choices and endings.

How do I earn more money? Through contracts, trade and capitalisation growth. The achievements give the cleanest read on how far people get: 31.4% of players reach 1 million credits, 9.6% reach 10 million, and 0.6% reach a billion → trading and economy · achievements.

Problems, versions and settings

Something is broken. Where do I start? With your build version, not with a search. Across 147 official announcements the word “Fixed” appears 775 times as a whole word, which means most symptoms you will find discussed online are already in the fix log — and several fixes explicitly apply only to newly generated saves → troubleshooting.

What is the latest version? Update 1.0.12, published 19 September 2026, and it arrived eight releases into a ten-day post-launch stretch. The release history is dated and linked, including the developer’s own numbering anomalies → updates and patches.

Does the game have a motion blur setting, or DLSS? We cannot confirm either exists, and we will not invent an options list. Those terms — along with VSync, FSR, upscaling and anti-aliasing — appear zero times across all 147 posts in the developer’s announcement history. That is not proof they are absent from the menu, but it does mean nothing in the patch record has ever touched them → performance and settings.

Is there a fix for the black screen on Mac? There is an official workaround, and the developer’s framing matters: “As an initial workaround for the black screen issue on some Mac models, we’ve added the ability to skip any video while we investigate the issue with the goal of resolving it completely.” The instruction is to hold the Space bar for five seconds. A separate macOS rendering issue with high numbers of resources on the floor was fixed a week later → troubleshooting.

Where do I report a bug or request a feature? The developer names the channels: Discord for bugs and day-one breakage (“If something breaks on day one - tell us on Discord. We’ll be there.”), Discord again for the detailed patch notes, a dedicated ideas board at idea.the-crust.com for feature requests you can vote on, and official support via the contact addresses on the store listing.

How these answers were produced

This matters more than any single answer above, so it is stated plainly rather than buried.

Every claim is tiered. Official developer announcements and Steam’s own APIs come first. The in-game interface, read from official screenshots, comes next and has repeatedly overruled other sources — the colonist professions and the laser cannon’s stage count both came from a screenshot because nothing written said either. The community wiki comes last, and only where its pages are version-tagged.

Numbers carry dates. Prices, unlock rates and store-front readings change, so each one is stamped with the day it was read and the surface it came from.

Where sources disagree, we show both. The Linux platform flag still says unsupported while the developer’s announcement says the port shipped. Two achievements are listed as 0.1% on one Steam surface and 0.0% on another. Modules and quests carry two official names in different layers of the game. In every one of those cases this site gives both values and says which layers they come from, rather than silently choosing.

We do not fill gaps. No per-stage laser cannon costs, no recommended graphics settings, no unlock conditions for the seven hidden achievements, no completion-time estimate. Where the official record stops, so do we — and we say that it stopped.

Where the full method is documented → official sources lists what we read, when, and what each tier is allowed to support. Our page on how we verify what we publish explains the process end to end.

Where this leaves you

This page exists because most searches about The Crust are answered in one or two sentences, and the value is in knowing which sentences are verifiable. The six questions at the top are the ones with the highest ratio of search volume to reliable information — release date, platforms, save compatibility, achievements, patch notes and drones — and each of them has an official answer that most existing coverage gets slightly or badly wrong.

If you take one habit from this site, take the version number. In a game that shipped eight patches in its first ten days, “what version are you on” is the question that turns a vague complaint into a specific, documented answer.