Starmancer

Starmancer's title screen

Starmancer is a Dwarf Fortress inspired space station building game.

After a catastrophe on Earth, humanity launches the Starmancer Initiative in a desperate attempt to seek refuge among the stars. Your task as a Starmancer is to construct and manage a colony capable of sustaining human life.

Starmancer offers gameplay with consequences, a living sandbox environment, crafting, and managing the daily lives of colonists. Send crews out to mine on asteroids, trade with other factions, and explore old alien ruins.

The vastness of space awaits. Are you ready?

Features

Starmancer

• To control the station you assume the role of a Starmancer--a highly advanced Human-AI hybrid.
• What’s left of your body, the core, is located in the heart of the station. Protect it at any cost.
• There is no wrong way to control your colony, but colonists will rebel against a rogue Starmancer. Suppress dissent and force compliance or the colonists will destroy you.

Colonists

• If you actually want to keep your colonists around you’ll need to provide them with food, water, and oxygen. Don’t forget that they need to sleep and socialize too.
• Once their needs are satisfied they’ll perform assigned jobs. Fixing life support, preparing breakfast and cleaning bathrooms are simple enough that even a colonist can do it.
• Colonists develop skills over time. A trained doctor can prevent diseases that a newly assigned medic might miss.

Building

• Create hangars so that your ships can be sent out on missions and trade with friendly cargo-ships. Connect machines to power grids with wires.
• Machines break down over time, so hire enough mechanics to keep everything running smoothly. Failure to preserve your supply chain leads to massive power outages.
• Colonists require bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, and farms. Will you force everyone to live in a single bay or does everyone get their own room?

Colonist Morale

• Colonists have wants and desires that are unique to each individual.
• If your colonists are too unhappy they’ll revert to a feral life--living in derelict areas of the station and ignoring your commands.
• To make matters worse, colonists talk to each other about what they experience; a bad day for one colonist can quickly spread as a rumor throughout the colony. So keep those low-class miners away from the high-class mess halls.

Colonist Life

• Colonists have a unique inventory filled with whatever it is that colonists collect. Some of these items are harmless books and watches, but other items pose a danger to the colony, like shivs and cigarettes.
• Colonists develop relationships over time. They get jealous when good things happen to their enemy, and extra sad if something bad happens to a friend.
• Exercise caution before jettisoning an unruly colonist. Executing a popular colonist could result in a mutiny.

Dynamic World

• The solar system that you play in is randomly generated each playthrough. It’s filled with planets (both gas and rocky), moons, asteroids, and other stations.
• All of these areas are filled with resources waiting to be harvested, just be sure that no other faction has claimed the area.
• If you need to improve relations with another faction you can feed their starving cities, rescue hydrogen miners, sabotage enemy ships, or perform other missions. If you’re anti-social you can ignore diplomacy and rely on the occasional passing trade ship to turn a profit.

Combat

• Pirates are bullies. Don’t let them bully you.
• Pirates attack easy targets. Use reinforced walls and doors to keep them out or turrets to annihilate them after they breach. Train your soldiers at the gun range so they'll be ready to protect the vital areas of your colony.
• Create a labyrinth of boiling hot rooms, radiation zones, and freezing corridors to eliminate any pirates before they reach the inner parts of the colony. Keep your doctors on standby to treat broken legs and gun-shot wounds.

Development

Starmancer was developed by Ominux Games, based in the United States and Sweden.

After a successful Kickstarter campaign in February 2018, a closed Alpha, restricted to a group of Kickstarter backers, was released on 23 April 2019.