It's still complicated, though not as much as the first game.
Brief crafting guide summary for Glean 2, most crafting data pulled from Glean 2 Guide Wiki, which is actually more like a guide than a walkthrough. But a few notes on on the above diagram:
- The icons on the top-right indicates what resources are used to craft a certain item and component types. You'll need to have one of the respective blueprint and one of each of the material you are crafting before you can make more.
- Exact number of resources for crafting a certain item are not displayed here, since it might change between patches, and you'll probably be mining enough that it doesn't matter.
- Exact components needed for upgrading are not displayed since it requires another image to display all 112 upgrades in the game but upgrades for a certain part use components from only four categories, if it makes it easier.
- Modular and Mechanism components on the bottom has a number indicating minimum depth needed to find the resources needed to craft it, and require two blueprints to research it, which vary between items. Assuming you already researched the four individual components used to craft it, that is.
- Depth which gas is found is rounded to the nearest 50 depth (like 0-50, 50-100, 100-150), but are displayed as multiples of 40 for the purposes of making the table compact.
- There's a chance that Bacteria can spawn above 140M in Aquatic areas, and lava was seen as high as 130m.
- Uranium is mined from an empty lava pocket.
The tips below are general strategies for maxing upgrades in under 50 planets (the time limitation of the preview):
- Mine everything that you can get to.
- Fuel Reserves, Repair, and Radar Pulse are the only useful things to craft. Don't get Oxygen Refills since you'll need the Water for upgrades, and only Water appears from Chests, and they only appear once at a certain depth. Everything else is late game.
- Find the chests before you leave a planet, since they contain 2 (or more) blueprints each.
- Focus on Plating / Propeller / Cooling first, as they determine what you can mine, then Item Caps, Resource Quality, and maybe Drill Vibrations, as they don't require modulators / mechanisms. Optics is unnecessary as you can craft Radar Pulse fairly early, which does exactly what a high level Optics upgrade gives you.
- You will have to get lava pockets and Uranium even though it's below the safe zone based on the best equipment you can get at the time. I suggest you get some repair nanites, do just enough to get the lava and uranium, and make a run for it.
- In lower depths in Aquatic areas, look for oxygen bubbles coming out of the ground and not from sea grass? Those are locations of Coral Shards.
- You can grab an unlimited amount of Unstable Isotopes and Oxygen by lingering next to a Aquatic chest at low depths.