Fly out. Dock. Loot in the dark. Fly the haul home — if your ship is still there.
You fly a small ship out of a hub station into a 2,000-by-2,000 debris field. You dock at a derelict hulk, go in on foot, and take what you can carry. Then you fly it home.
The catch is the tether. While you're inside, your ship sits docked on the hull, and a docked ship is exposed: it can be boarded, robbed, undocked and left stranded, or simply destroyed. Every minute inside is a bet that nobody outside noticed you.
Inside, you can only see what's within reach, in line of sight, and lit. Your torch is a 34° wedge and the only directional light you own. Turn it on and you can see. Turn it on and you can be seen.
The whole design is built to answer one question: does lights-off stealth still beat shooting? If sneaking through a dark hulk is reliably the smarter play than kicking the door in, the game works. If it isn't, nothing else matters yet.
It borrows its bones openly: the sneaking-through-ships of Heat Signature, the crew-in-a-hull dread of Barotrauma, the loot-and-extract loop of Marauders, and the "someone can take it from you" economy of Rust. It's a second attempt at making a game after UNSEEN, built solo, and built in the open.
Six rules the whole simulation obeys. All six are implemented.
Two scales, one world
Ship and foot share the same coordinates. The camera switches at the helm; nothing else does. What happens to the hull happens to the people inside it.
Vision is the resource
On foot there is no facing cone: visible means within reach, line of sight, and lit. Light and line-of-sight are separate layers. At ship scale, sensors keep their cone.
Hulks are systems
A derelict is rooms, doors, conduits, and per-room power that anyone can cut. Darkness isn't set-dressing; someone made it.
The tether
A docked ship is a vulnerable ship. Boarded, robbed, undocked and stranded, or destroyed — the loot run has a clock you can't see.
Sound is information
Noise travels as expanding rings through the fog; ships ping. The feral drones that hunt the hulks hear it too — by light, by sound, by touch.
One server, one truth
A server-authoritative simulation at 20 Hz with client prediction and interpolation. The client renders and owns zero rules, so nothing on your screen can lie for you.
Fifteen milestones and eleven playtest sprints in. The game exists; the art doesn't yet.
Ships. Tug, Scout and Hauler, plus the warden Cutter. Fuel and trim, eight fittable modules, hired crew, a gunner seat. Ships welded back to life can be registered as your own.
Places. A Grand Hub with an enclosed hangar courtyard, three NPC factions, hulks with atmosphere you can vent, EVA between them, and anchor-kit homesteads with a bunk to respawn in.
Consequence. Downed and revive. Corpses that keep their last words. A typed salvage economy with a fence, bounties, insurance and debt, so losing a ship is a number, not a shrug.
Under the hood. A TypeScript monorepo: a deterministic headless simulation and content in shared/, a thin websocket loop in server/, canvas renderers in client/. Content is ASCII-in-JSON layouts with flood-filled rooms. A headless bot player makes solo multiplayer testing possible, and an interest filter means the server only tells you about what you could see.
Faster in the dark, a bigger sky, and eventually no wipes.
- NOW
Cover
Crouch, snap to cover by walking into it, lean out, sprint. Faster on foot — and more reasons for the dark to matter.
- NEXT
A hub per faction and a solar map
A bigger universe you set waypoints across, with somewhere to belong in it.
- THEN
Things in the dark
Infestation-style enemies that make darkness dangerous in a new way. Drones stay mostly indifferent to light; these won't.
- THEN
The first fast growth loop
Build fittings inside your own ship for credits, directly. Homesteads stay the slow, salvage-priced ladder.
- HORIZON
Persistent, no-wipe
A world that doesn't reset, where players form factions and build their own bases. EVE Online is the reference. Free-to-play, monetised some other way than the door.
Faction shared keys and standings-driven turrets · sieges and reinforcement timers · multi-sector gates · the ops layer a no-wipe server needs · a playtest of the core question with two humans, not one human and a bot.