What is Solarpunk and who is it actually for?
Solarpunk is a first-person survival crafting game developed by Cyberwave and published by rokaplay, set across a sky full of floating islands. You build a home base, grow food, craft gadgets, generate renewable energy, and eventually pilot an airship to reach new islands and biomes. There is no combat, no story campaign, and no PvP. The entire loop is about gathering, crafting, upgrading, and decorating at your own pace, solo or with up to a few friends online. Released on June 8, 2026, it launched to a 73% positive rating across 592 Steam reviews, which is a fair reflection of a focused indie experience that knows exactly what it wants to be.
Your starting sky island home
How do you survive your first hour?
You wake on a small sky island with a near-broken axe, some honey bread, watermelon juice, and a handful of raspberries. The five-stage tutorial in the top right corner walks you through collecting berries, cutting a tree, and crafting a pickaxe to mine your first rocks. Follow it. The tutorial only appears once, so pay attention rather than skipping through it.
Raspberries are your best early food source because they address both hunger and thirst simultaneously. Plant every seed you collect immediately. Crops and trees grow quickly, but they rarely drop more than one seed per harvest, and you cannot craft seeds in the early game. Losing a seed to carelessness early on slows your farm down noticeably.
The day and night cycle runs 24 real-world minutes. Nights are very dark. You can craft a candle early, but proper lighting unlocks much later, so sleeping through the night is the smarter move while you are still getting established.
Understanding the crafting and research system
Solarpunk has two distinct crafting layers, and understanding both early saves a lot of confusion.
The quick crafting menu gives you access to basic tools and a crafting table without any prerequisites. The crafting table expands what you can make, but most recipes require blueprints first. Blueprints come from the research table, which you also need to craft and then upgrade over time.
Upgrading the research table costs resources, and each tier unlocks new blueprints for equipment and decorations. The resource requirements for each upgrade tier act as a natural guide for what to gather next, which is genuinely useful when you feel directionless.
Research table blueprint tiers
Ores are the one resource that does not respawn as individual lumps. Once you mine a deposit, it is gone. The replacement system uses flat ore patches that can be mined repeatedly and eventually automated with a drill. Prioritize finding these patches rather than burning through one-time deposits.
What materials do you need first?
How does the building system work?
The build hammer opens a component wheel with multiple layers of options, from foundations and walls to roofs, stairs, and decorative pieces. It takes a few minutes to get comfortable with the layered dial, but the range of options is genuinely large. Every placed component snaps to existing edges, which keeps construction tidy without requiring precision.
The best part of the system: demolishing any component returns all the resources used to build it. You can tear down an entire structure and lose nothing. This makes experimenting with layouts completely risk-free, and the Solarpunk community has already produced some remarkable builds during the pre-release demo, from multi-story cliff dwellings to large mechanical structures.
Stairs serve double duty. Inside your home they connect floors, but they also let you reach elevated sections of your island, which matters because some parts required for the airship are only accessible by climbing higher terrain.
What is TraderBot and why does it matter?
Just north of your starting island sits a hovering structure where you will find TraderBot, a robot that exchanges resources for special blueprints unavailable through the research table. These blueprints unlock the automation and energy systems that define the mid and late game: solar panels, wind generators, batteries, wireless power nodes, sprinklers, mining drills, and transport drones.
What makes TraderBot particularly useful is that it displays future resource requirements in advance. You can see exactly what you will need for upcoming trades before you have the resources, which lets you plan gathering runs efficiently rather than scrambling after the fact.
The order in which you select blueprints from TraderBot is one of the few genuinely strategic decisions in Solarpunk. Prioritizing airship upgrades expands your exploration zone faster. Prioritizing automation frees up time for building. Neither path is wrong, but thinking about it before you arrive with your first trade resources pays off.
How does the energy system work?
Solarpunk's energy system runs on solar panels and wind generators, both unlocked via TraderBot blueprints. Weather directly affects output: overcast days reduce solar generation, and wind speed fluctuates. You need batteries to store surplus energy so your base keeps running through low-production periods.
Wireless power removes the need to run cables between every machine, which simplifies base layouts considerably. Plan your battery placement relative to your most power-hungry machines (drills and drones draw the most) before you start wiring everything up.
How do you build and fly the airship?
The airship is the game's biggest milestone. Parts for it are scattered across your starting island, including in elevated areas only reachable via stairs and climbing. Once built, each player in a multiplayer session gets their own airship rather than sharing one.
Flying is available in first or third person. The controls are explained through the in-game airship manual and are straightforward. A visible range circle on the map shows how far your current airship can travel. Attempting to fly beyond that boundary results in strong winds pushing you back, which is a clean way to communicate the limit without an invisible wall.
Airship upgrades, obtained through TraderBot trades, progressively expand that range. The world map cannot be zoomed out far enough to show all islands at once, which gives a genuine sense of scale. Two biomes are available: the starting lush green islands and a snowy biome unlocked through the final upgrade tier.
Airship docked and ready to fly
What does the animal and farming system look like?
Farming is the main food source throughout the game. You plant seeds, wait for crops to fully grow, then harvest them. The coexistence angle is genuine: animals are not exploited for resources in the traditional survival game sense. Pigs, for example, will dig up truffles if treated well. Chickens appear on your starting island but cannot be domesticated until you unlock the animal basic pack through progression.
As you explore new islands, you will encounter additional animal types beyond chickens. The farming loop pairs with automation: once you unlock sprinklers and drones through TraderBot, watering and resource gathering can run without constant manual input.
How long does it take to see everything?
The main progression, including unlocking all available items and reaching the snowy biome, takes roughly 15 to 20 hours. After that, the game shifts into pure sandbox mode: your home base, farm layout, decoration choices, and personal building projects become the focus. There is no endless procedural world and no content beyond what is currently built, so players expecting hundreds of hours of discovery will hit that ceiling.
For the cozy survival crafting audience Solarpunk is built for, 15 to 20 hours of structured progression followed by open-ended building time is the right shape. For players from adventure games with larger open worlds and longer story arcs, that scope may feel modest.
Quick-start tips before you launch
- Plant every seed immediately. Do not hold them in your inventory.
- Build a small enclosed room before day one ends so you can place a bed.
- Use the research table upgrade requirements as your gathering checklist.
- Visit TraderBot early and note future resource requirements before your first trade.
- Find ore patches rather than burning through single deposits.
- Prioritize airship parts found in elevated island areas before anything else.
- Store surplus energy in batteries before building power-hungry machines.
- Use Soft mode if this is your first cozy survival game.
For more strategies and system breakdowns, the full Solarpunk guides collection covers everything from energy optimization to advanced base layouts.