Hired Stars

Hired Stars is a tactical space game about commanding a growing mercenary company in a human-dominated galaxy. You explore a procedural sandbox, take contracts, trade and fight, while each Jump Drive activation can lead to a fortune or a lethal ambush. Ships and captains can be lost permanently, and the universe responds to your actions.

Tactical fleet combat

You command a squad of captains and vessels in real-time engagements, issuing orders to individual captains to outmaneuver and outgun stronger forces. Combat relies on physical armor, hull integrity, heat signatures and positioning behind environmental cover rather than shields. You can pause or slow time to assess the battlefield, coordinate weapon cycles and set navigational vectors.

Nearby hostiles, Imperial patrols and opportunistic brigands may jump into an engagement, turning a strike into a multi-faction battle. Staying close to hostiles can jam their distress calls; eliminating targets without witnesses can prevent diplomatic fallout and preserve your standing with their faction.

A procedural galaxy

Each campaign uses a new procedural seed. You can set the star count and connection density, and adjust travel speed and fuel costs. Star systems have randomized astronomical traits that shape local production, trade demand and resource scarcity, while faction territories, pirate bases and lawless outer-rim belts vary between campaigns.

Contracts and specialized quests respond to your location, reputation and fleet strength. Before starting, you can also adjust faction sizes, threat levels and other generation parameters.

Build your company

You recruit and develop individual captains, whose traits emerge as they level up and shape their tactical roles and combat abilities. You can recover derelict hulls from wrecks and repurpose vessels from defeated enemies. Contracts and battlefield loot provide weapons and hardware, which you assign to captains and ships; matching ship types, captain traits and armaments helps tailor each vessel to a mission.

You also salvage encrypted data cores from destroyed enemy hulls. Decrypting them provides intelligence and specialized quests. As commander, you manage your captain roster, set fleet objectives and choose targets while balancing risks against shifting faction loyalties.

Trade and piracy

Legitimate trade routes offer one path to profit, while the outer rim, captured Imperial vessels and seized goods offer others. You can attack Imperial convoys, tax collectors and wealthy trade ships for commodities and intelligence. Destroying veteran hulls can yield powerful equipment and experimental modules that are unavailable on the open market.

Nearby fleets may reinforce ongoing battles according to their diplomatic ties. Pirates can join to attack everyone involved, while Imperial patrols may arrive to protect sanctioned commerce. After seizing goods, you need to find a non-hostile station or hidden outpost willing to buy stolen Imperial cargo.

Factions and reputation

Contracts and destroyed ships affect your standing with factions, which in turn determines market access, available missions and safe passage through controlled space. Factions can expand or lose influence in response to trade, combat and your interventions. Betraying major powers brings increased sensor attention and pursuit by specialized hunting squadrons.

A secret society operates from the shadows. Following its hidden plot opens narrative paths and access to specialized Black Market services. As hostility toward the Empire grows, the Emperor’s Doom Fleet is sent to hunt you across the galaxy.

A human-only challenge

The setting is a gritty, low-fi science-fiction universe with no aliens. Rival factions, pirates and brigands follow the same rules as you, using the same tactical modules and procedural advantages. You balance profits and supplies against the attention your actions attract, choosing between bold moves and staying undetected. Lost ships and fallen captains stay dead, and enemies range from small skirmish forces to dedicated hunting fleets.

Modding and options

The game supports script-based modding through human-readable files. You can edit game logic and event triggers, add captain traits and faction modifiers to procedural generation, change ship hulls, fleet archetypes and equipment statistics, and create encounters, branching dialogue and quests.

You can save at any time, adjust the zoom from close-up combat to a wide view of battle lines, and pause or slow time. Other options include rebindable keyboard controls, separate difficulty sliders for combat lethality, economy scaling and resource scarcity, independent audio levels for dialogue, effects and music, and hover tooltips for weapons, traits and modifiers.