A 2D multiplayer space survival simulation. Players crew replicant-piloted probes to Explore, Exploit, Expand, and Exterminate across a hand-authored galaxy — gathering resources, building modular fleets, and racing a tech tree toward the warp drive that finally makes the frontier small. Bobiverse's premise, Factorio's systems depth, X4's scope, Valheim's netcode.
Factorio, Valheim, and X4 each prove a different half of this game — deep crafting chains, low-friction self-hosted multiplayer, and simulated space empires — but no shipped title fuses all three around a single resource: the element itself. Steam's own networking stack now makes "any player hosts, nobody needs a server bill" a solved problem, and a modern host-authoritative ECS architecture makes a Factorio-scale simulation buildable by a small team instead of a AAA one — a proven pattern regardless of which engine ultimately carries it (see Technology, below).
Players start as replicants — disposable, jump-capable crew — manning a single probe. Everything you can eventually build, from a mining laser to a warp drive, traces back to elements pulled out of regolith and scrap. Click a pillar below for how it plays.
These aren't roadmap promises — they're the settled design spine the whole game is built around. Click any card for the detail.
Regolith and scrap refine into ore, ore atomizes into elements, and every item in the game — hull block, gun, scanner — has an elemental blueprint.
Asteroids react to exactly where they're hit and split into real entities. The belt you strip mine stays stripped.
Ships and stations share a 2D-grid block system — one core, your shape, your loadout, your cargo and energy stats.
Atomized elements become filament. Print-bed size is the only ceiling on what you can manufacture yourself.
Most persistent-world games force a choice between a central cloud database (recurring infra cost, a company that can shut your world off) and peer-to-peer chaos (desyncs, cheating). Spacegame 3 takes the Valheim/Factorio path instead: your save file is the world, Steam's networking layer moves the traffic, and the host machine is simply the single source of truth for everyone connected to it. Click a node for what it does.
2D "signal-noir" vector art: dark vacuum, emissive hulls and thruster trails, parallax starfields. Top-down readability first — silhouette-driven sprites a small art team can produce at volume.
Edge-anchored survival HUD — fuel, hull, cargo, and travel-time-remaining always glanceable; ship fitting, tech tree, and nav as overlay panels that never hide the ship.
Host-authoritative save files mean zero standing cloud infra cost per player. Our own spend is dev-environment only — players' own machines (or their optional rented dedicated server) carry the simulation.
Save-file-is-the-world model, host-authoritative simulation, Steam transport for NAT/relay, listen-server + optional dedicated-server topology.
Godot/GDScript vs. Bevy/Rust is not yet decided. A time-boxed spike (perf, netcode, desync behavior on both tracks) gates the choice before real implementation starts — see the roadmap.
| Stream | What it is | Target mix |
|---|---|---|
| Cosmetics | Hull liveries, thruster trails, replicant callsigns and portraits — visible status, zero stat impact. | 55% |
| Season content | New authored systems and event arcs; cosmetic + convenience track only. | 30% |
| Founder fleets | Early-supporter packs: named stations, charter slots, lifetime insignia. | 15% |
Founder-stated principle, held firm under direct questioning: hard in-game currency is earned through play, never purchasable with real money — fast travel, warp access, and every progression gate stay behind gameplay, not a storefront. This keeps the tech tree and stargate network honest as a design spine instead of a monetization lever. Steam's own discovery surface (wishlist, store page, friend invites) is the primary acquisition channel for this genre's core audience.
Cosmetic/convenience-only monetization. Hard currency is earn-only, never purchasable. Held under direct questioning.
3–6% MAU conversion and $9–14 monthly ARPPU are benchmark F2P survival/sandbox figures on Steam, net of Valve's cut — not our own measured numbers. The revenue split above (55/30/15) and the free-to-play/Early-Access packaging itself are still open, to be validated during closed alpha.
Runway for a small senior team to take the playable demo (Phase 1) through the full galaxy (Phase 3) and into a Steam 1.0 launch. Milestone-gated to demo completion and a validated multiplayer backbone. Numbers illustrative pending a formal budget pass — the mechanics and architecture above are the settled, founder-confirmed design.
Team, exact runway split, and hiring plan to be finalized alongside MASTER-PLAN.md's phased build schedule.
Push out from your home system through the tech tree to reach 5–6 hand-authored systems, each with its own personality and its own new elements.
Travel time is a real resource — a distant system can be genuinely hours of gameplay away. Stargates/portals are player-built fast-travel: costly to set up, gated by research, fueled per use. The payoff tech is the warp drive, which collapses the distance once you've earned it.
Hand-authored galaxyTravel is a resourceMine asteroid belts and scrap fields for regolith and salvage, refine into ore, then atomize into elements — the blueprint behind every item in the game.
Belts permanently deplete — mine one out and it stays scarred. Asteroids are reactive: a mining laser cuts the exact geometry it hits, and a cut-through asteroid splits into two independent entities in the world, not a scripted "break" animation.
Persistent depletionReactive geometryPrint new hull blocks from atomized elements and grow a fleet — every ship and station shares one 2D-grid block system built around a single core.
Printers use elements as filament, constrained by print-bed size. Replicants can jump between ships they own and hand routine hauling, mining, or patrol runs to Factorio-style automation so the empire scales without micromanaging every hull.
One-core block systemFleet automationGuns are just another module. Combat exists in the fiction and the tech tree from day one — it's simply not required to reach the playable demo.
Scoped out of the initial build deliberately: cutting real-time combat resolution out of the first playable slice meaningfully lowers simulation-tick cost while the core build/explore/progression loop gets proven. It re-enters as a module + verb extension point, not a bolt-on later.
Deferred to Phase 4Module, not bolt-onTwo raw material chains feed one refinement pipeline: regolith → ore → atomized elements from mining, and scrap → ore → atomized elements from salvage. Every craftable item in the game — a hull block, a scanner, a gun — carries a defined elemental blueprint, so "what can I build" is always a direct function of "what have I extracted."
Destinations overlap heavily in which elements they offer, but each new system typically adds one or two elements you can't get anywhere closer to home — that's what pulls players outward and is the spine the tech tree hangs off of.
Core resource layerFeeds tech treeAsteroids are reactive geometry, not a health bar with a break animation. A mining laser removes exactly the area it hits; cut an asteroid through and the two resulting pieces become two independent entities in the live world, each keeping their own remaining mass and composition.
Belts permanently deplete. Mining a field down is meant to be visible and lasting — come back later and it should look mined, not respawned. That persistent scarring is core to making the shared world feel real rather than a resource faucet that resets.
Reactive geometryPersistent world stateEvery ship has exactly one core and is otherwise fully modular on a 2D grid — players choose the shape, the equipment, and the purpose. Each ship independently tracks its own cargo, energy, and stats. Stations are built from the identical block set, and any ship can become a station if it's parked at a Lagrange point.
Replicants aren't tied to one hull — players jump between ships they own, and every ship supports simple automation commands so a growing fleet doesn't require manually piloting each one (Factorio-style "build the system, not the single action").
Shared block systemReplicant ship-jumpingAnything in the game can be manufactured with a printer. Printers consume atomized elements as their "filament," and the only real constraint is the physical print-bed surface — bigger items need a bigger printer, which itself has to be built and placed.
This turns manufacturing into a spatial, infrastructure-driven decision rather than an abstract crafting-menu click: what you can produce depends on what you've built to produce it with.
Manufacturing layerElement-constrainedRenders the simulation via the client engine and sends player input/intent to whichever machine is hosting — it never simulates authoritative gameplay logic itself. Light client-side prediction smooths latency, but the client is a lens onto the host's world, not a second copy of truth. (Engine — Godot vs. Bevy — is still an open, time-boxed team decision; nothing about this contract changes with the outcome.)
Joining is via Steam lobby invite or a dedicated server's listing — no separate account system to build or maintain.
ISteamNetworkingSockets (and its open-source twin, GameNetworkingSockets) handles NAT traversal, encryption, and automatic relay over Valve's Steam Datagram Relay backbone when a direct peer path isn't available.
This matters concretely for a self-hosted dedicated server behind CGNAT/no-inbound-ports (our own home network's exact situation) — SDR means a rented or self-hosted box never needs port-forwarding or a public IP, sidestepping the problem entirely.
Whichever machine is hosting — a listen-server player or a dedicated server — runs the one authoritative ECS simulation tick. State-sync replication handles authoritative deltas for anything gameplay-critical (mining, cargo, combat later), and cheaper deterministic replication for purely cosmetic movement like debris drift.
This is the Valheim model, not Factorio's lockstep — clients don't need bit-identical simulation, which avoids the float-determinism minefield lockstep multiplayer is famous for fighting. Entities are ticked at variable rates by distance from players (spatial-hash sectors), aiming at the founder's own goal of simulating "everything, all the time" without the cost of full-fidelity ticking things nobody is near.
The default mode: one player's own running client is the server. Others join via Steam friend invite or lobby. Zero extra infrastructure, zero extra cost — this is how most sessions will actually run, matching Valheim's and Factorio's own default multiplayer experience.
The identical simulation binary, run headless with no display attached — a player's spare machine, a rented box, or something we self-host. Same save-file format as a listen-server game, so a group can "graduate" a save from casual co-op into an always-on shared world without migrating data.
Scope is deliberately narrow: one home system, the full mining → refining → atomizing → printing loop, modular ship construction on the 2D grid, and reactive/splitting asteroid destruction. Single-player-first, since the save-file model means multiplayer is additive, not foundational.
Combat is explicitly out of this phase — cut for tick-budget reasons and to prove the build/explore/progression spine cleanly before layering a real-time combat resolver on top.
Steam networking comes online: listen-server hosting, optional dedicated server, and the host-authoritative state-sync model validated for desync resistance and cheat resistance under real multi-client load. Runs against whichever engine track Phase 0's spike settled on.
All 5–6 hand-authored systems go live, each with its own personality and element mix. Stargate/portal travel (player-built, resource + fuel gated, research-unlocked) connects them, the full tech tree opens up to the warp-drive payoff tech, and replicant ship-jumping plus fleet automation commands ship.
Steam release with the Exterminate pillar live as a real combat module, a first season event arc, and the cosmetics storefront. Everything monetizable stays cosmetic or convenience — hard currency remains earn-only per the founder's explicit stance.