Ascent: The Space Game

Ascent: The Space Game is a player-versus-environment space MMO focused on exploration and community. Humanity’s empire has been lost, and in the Apollo Sector you help rebuild civilization and discover where humanity is and where it came from. The game includes more than 270 billion star systems to explore; outside the nine-system Apollo Sector, players create everything.

Explore and build

You can explore planets with unique mineral concentrations, agricultural values and climates, then colonize outer systems and build planetary bases for resource harvesting and farming. These bases can grow into cities with tens of thousands of structures and hundreds of thousands of colonists. You can also design and construct a personal starbase, which serves as your home and a center for heavy zero-gravity manufacturing and research. Outer starbases can expand across open-ended three-dimensional space.

You mine asteroids by manually piloting your ship and aiming an axial mining beam, with results shaped by player and character skills. You can harvest gases from gas giants, including hydrogen and oxygen. Salvage missions can yield blueprint fragments for researching forgotten or new ships and components, as well as upgrades for buildings.

Trade and manufacture

Local NPC markets respond dynamically to supply and demand, while a global market supports player-to-player trading. You can set prices for materials at your base, and hire NPC colonists to trade on your behalf. Every ship, weapon and utility module can be manufactured by players, then sold or used to customize ships, including with custom paint schemes.

The dynamic NPC mission system offers combat, trade, passenger transport, courier and salvage missions. Solo exploration can also benefit the community and earn more through player bounties for finding particular types of planets.

Colonies and governments

Colonies have individual NPCs whose behavior follows Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Players who own colonies in a system can elect its colony mayor, planetary governor and system senator, as well as a colonial president. Governors can rename planets, senators can rename systems and approve jump-gate construction to their systems, and the president can approve gates to the inner systems.

Players can work together on jump-gate megaprojects to extend access to colonized outer systems. Colonial laws can allow or outlaw goods such as alcohol, creating opportunities to establish smuggling networks and sneak banned goods into colonies. NPCs can also be hired as pilots, though they cannot warp or jump unaided.

Space combat

You manually control your ship in combat, from fighter dogfights to broadside duels between cruisers. The game also includes combat missions and player-created ships, weapons and utility modules.

Planned features

The game’s description also lists planned additions: bounty hunting to track fugitive NPCs, crime and punishment systems involving colonial police and prisons, freelance investigation, and assassination contracts carried out by destroying a target’s ship or tracking them to their home.