The Crust Walkthrough: Campaign Structure and the Official Quest Order

Prologue

~20 minutesTutorial and campaign entry

Structure

Named questsNot numbered chapters

Endings

MultipleCount not published

Endgame build

Laser cannonBuilt in named stages

Also referenced

Interstellar shipReputation-gated support

Side systems

Contracts, factions, reputationRun alongside the story

Start with the Prologue, not the campaign

The one piece of sequencing the developer does state outright: if you have not played before, start with the Prologue. The 1.0 announcement describes it as “a scenario about 20 minutes long” that “combines tutorial elements” and lets you “transition smoothly into the story campaign”.

It matters for a mechanical reason too. A hotfix note records that the option to choose your subsequent difficulty at the end of the tutorial was added — meaning the Prologue is where the game asks you to commit. Choosing that setting blind is the most common way to end up restarting.

For the systems themselves, the beginner guide covers power, conveyors, colonists and research in written form.

The quests the developer names

Official patch notes refer to quests by name. These are quoted, not paraphrased:

Two structural facts fall out of that list. First, the campaign is not purely narrative — several of these quests are gated behind production capability, so a stalled factory reads as a stalled story. Second, reputation is a campaign resource: the 1.0 announcement states that the pool of colonists available to hire depends on reputation, and that how many Organizations will help you build the laser cannon and the interstellar ship — and how much they help — depends on reputation too.

The endgame: the laser cannon chain

The clearest picture of the late campaign comes from the game’s own mission log, captured in an official store screenshot. The entries read:

• Laser gun
• Prevent the catastrophe 4/7
• “Complete the construction of the laser cannon on time to be able to deflect the course of the approaching asteroid.”
• Fifth stage
• Install the targeting system
• “Send the necessary resources to complete the fifth stage of construction.”

Read that carefully and three things are confirmed: the cannon is built in discrete named stages (the log names a fourth-of-seven objective and a fifth construction stage in the same panel), each stage has its own resource demand, and the whole chain is time-pressured — the objective text says “on time”, and the thing you are building exists to deflect an incoming asteroid.

The 1.0 announcement adds the operational constraints:

A later patch note is worth knowing before you plan around it: the developer fixed “an issue where game difficulty incorrectly affected the amount of resources required to build the Laser Cannon.” Building the cannon should not scale with your difficulty. If you are on a higher tier and it appears to, you are on a build older than that fix.

How far players actually get

Completion rates on the official achievement list are the most honest walkthrough we have. Sorted by rate, they describe the campaign’s real difficulty curve:

The shape of that table is the useful part. There is a first cliff between 71% and 57% — surviving a full in-game year kills a roughly one-in-seven cohort, which lines up with the official note about eliminating situations where you run out of power on the first lunar night. Then there is a much bigger cliff between 31% and 7.5%: the Hope-2 rescue is where the campaign stops being a base-builder for most people. Anything past that is genuinely late game.

Percentages captured from the official achievement page on 17 September 2026 and will drift as more people play. Names and requirements are quoted from the same page.

A workable order, given what is confirmed

We are not going to pretend this is a step-by-step solution — the developer has not published one and we will not invent the gaps. But the confirmed pieces do imply an order:

1. Prologue, then choose your difficulty deliberately at its end.
2. Early production. "In the Wake of the Disaster" hands you starter modules to get production running; how many you get depends on difficulty.
3. Scale into outposts and gas. The New Horizons thread is where outposts and gas extraction enter, which is also where colonist experience starts accumulating at outposts.
4. Build reputation before you need it. Hiring pools and Organization help with the endgame builds are both reputation-gated, so reputation earned late is worth less than reputation earned while you can still act on it.
5. The laser cannon chain, built stage by stage under time pressure, with Energy Cells stockpiled and a decision made about what it covers.
6. Then the long tail: the interstellar ship, interplanetary contracts for the moons of distant planets, and the leaderboard targets.

The contracts page and story choices page cover the two systems that run alongside the main thread, and the laser cannon page dissects the endgame build in detail.