What to Do With Silk Worms in The Planet Crafter

After players get access to the Incubator in The Planet Crafter, they can use it to take common, uncommon, and rare larvae and turn them into more useful butterflies, bees, and silkworms. But while it's clear that butterflies go in Butterfly Farms and bees go in Beehives even before these machines unlock, it's not as clear what silk worms are for.

The answer to that question is the Silk Generator, which unlocks when insect biomass reaches 800 kg. Once it does, players of The Planet Crafter get access to a completely new material that can make it much easier to decorate and furnish a base.

Silk and Fabric

Planet Crafter Silk Generator — A silk generator in The Planet Crafter.

To craft a Silk Generator, players need three silk worms, one zeolite, one water bottle, and one oxygen capsule. Silk worms and bees are the two insects uncommon larvae can become, and there's a 50/50 chance of a larva becoming one or the other.

This can be an issue when players only want bee larvae or silk worms, but one way to deal with this problem is to put an unwanted larva in a Recycling Machine. This will turn it back into the basic materials and give players a chance to try again.

Once a Silk Generator is up and running, it produces silk in each of its four slots over the course of a few minutes. The only way to use silk is to turn it into fabric, which is a Biolab recipe that unlocks at 950 kg of insect biomass. This means players may want to wait until then to build a Silk Generator.

Fabric Uses

Planet Crafter Bedroom — A basic bedroom in The Planet Crafter.

While silk only has one use, fabric is an important material for a variety of equipment and furniture recipes. The Agility Boots T1 and T2 both require fabric, and so do the water and air filters. Decorative items like beds, chairs, sofas, and the Butterfly Display Box also need fabric.

What makes this important is the fact that the Silk Generator makes fabric a renewable resource. The only other way to get fabric in The Planet Crafter is from random crates and wrecks, and there are only so many of them to find.

So while players have to be careful where they use their fabric and how much decoration they do in their base during the early game, once the Silk Generator and fabric blueprints unlock, players are free to be as ambitious as they like when decorating their homes.