Distant Flux: System Initializing

Distant Flux: System Initializing is a text-based game about remotely piloting combat drones in a distant universe. When monsters pour through rifts to invade worlds, the universe’s guardian System lets people from non-magical universes control drones to fight them and close the rifts. You help a new scrapper base survive and grow while clearing a dystopian tomb world. If your drone is destroyed, a copy respawns with your progression intact, though you may lose items and mana.

Explore and fight

You explore a hand-designed open world spanning diverse biomes, locations, resources, anomalies, treasures and dangers. In post-apocalyptic magitech ruins, you hunt monsters and scavenge materials to improve your faction’s base, while absorbing different kinds of mana to advance. The world contains 4 sectors, 670 zones and 20 rifts, across 1 campaign scenario and 1 single-world scenario that includes all campaign sectors.

You can work alone or join parties from your base on missions to study artifacts, collect scrap, gather mushrooms, mine, hack doors, view distant zones or search for hidden objects. The party system also lets you ride along with NPC parties and support them as they explore. There are 10 combat NPC parties with 50 members, all of whom use items and abilities you can unlock, buy or help improve.

A changing world

Monsters attack anything, including one another, and their ecosystems can spread as they grow stronger and try to conquer other monster spawners. Your base begins in a less dangerous sector, but that situation can change. Closing rifts removes threats and is the ultimate goal. As you act, the world does too: NPCs undertake projects such as research and crafting, and can explore, study artifacts and scavenge materials as you can.

Play takes place in simultaneous turns. While you make decisions through a mouse-driven text interface, time effectively stops in the remote universe because of the connection between universes. Once you act, the world acts as well. The rules use deterministic, variable-driven outcomes rather than added random number generation; for example, attack results can vary with factors such as enemy evasion or accuracy falloff.

Build your progression

Earn faction prestige by helping the base research technology, craft supplies and construct upgrades. Killing monsters and completing sector quests earns System credits. You can spend prestige and credits at the faction shop on gear, consumables and progression, or on room upgrade projects. Base projects also let you extract and harvest resources, refine raw materials, raise equipment and supply levels, and improve rooms to unlock further shop purchases or research levels.

Choose from 18 starting civilian paths, 21 starting combat paths, 6 zone utility paths and 6 equipment proficiency paths, with more paths unlocked later. There are 4 playstyles and a range of difficulty settings. Paths can be combined without limitations, and a mana-based leveling system means some paths grant different abilities or stats depending on the mana you use to level them. You can also develop stats, affinities, attributes, resistances, skills, power, pierce, steal, reflect and proficiencies, including versions tied to each magic type and physical damage.

Combat and equipment

Fight with missile launchers, laser rifles, submachine guns and other magitech weapons, or use catalysts to strengthen innate magic spells. The game has 9 magic types, with spells for buffs, debuffs, damage and healing, alongside physical damage. Combat and exploration also involve evasion, flight, accuracy, stamina, damage-over-time conditions, environmental effects, armor-piercing, calorie burn, stealth and detection.

The shops include 51 starting paths, 139 starting items such as weapons, armor and accessories, and 122 starting stat-upgrade categories, with more options unlocked later. Other progression systems include perk and ability shops, stat-training stations, persistent food, drink and jukebox buffs in the cafeteria, and an infinite stat shop where each purchase costs more than the last. Artifacts can unlock shop upgrades for everyone, while serums increase your stats. You can also hack and pick locks, and use toggleable items such as jetpacks and force fields.

Play options

You can choose Explorer mode, which removes all allied combat units and leaves exploration, resource gathering and extermination to you. The game also offers a tutorial, a contextual help system with hundreds of tooltips, quick start and auto-leveling.