Neon Planet

Neon Planet is a top-down open-world RPG set on Aethon, an alien world of neon-lit cities, shifting seasons and five rival factions. You arrive as an outsider and can make your way as a farmer, merchant, fighter or something else. Play alone, invite up to three friends into your single-player world, or enter The Neon Drift, a separate persistent online world for up to 25 players.

Aethon and its factions

Explore five maps: the Nexus hub, frozen Varketh, the faction-controlled Southlands, tropical Sol'Kaia Island and the war-torn Shattered Frontier. Day and night pass, seasons change, markets open and close, and trade caravans arrive. Weather affects activities: rain improves fishing, storms make the Spire more dangerous and ore richer, and fog can hide the road home.

Five factions compete for dominance, each with its own ideology, leader and agenda. You build reputation through trade, gifts and diplomacy, or make enemies by raiding and supporting rival factions:

• Solara Prime (Dominion): a human military-industrial powerhouse.
• Esh-Valoran (Keth-Raal): ancient scholars with crystalline knowledge.
• Axiom Station (Synth): a city of silicon minds.
• Mist-Kethara (Vorryn): nomadic drifts anchored in the mist.
• Bol'Grathek (Graal): an iron fortress with 10,000 years of engineering.

Reach 85 or higher reputation with a faction to unlock its species for future playthroughs. The five playable species—Human, Keth-Raal, Vorryn, Synth and Graal—each have their own bonuses, appearance and starting story.

Farm and make a home

Farm more than a dozen crops, each with its own season, water needs, growing time and yield. Plant Tharael wheat in spring or iron root tubers in autumn, and use the Farmer's Almanac to plan around rare planting windows and seed drops. In-season seeds are stocked at Axiom Agri-Systems, off-season seeds cost more, and rare seeds can be found in deep caves, while fishing or from roaming caravans.

You can fish, cook meals that restore energy and boost stats, and make wine by growing grapes, pressing them into juice and aging it. Zik's Workshop is where you craft tools, weapons and furniture. Build and furnish a home with more than 50 items, bought at the Nexus Market or crafted from collected recipes; you can also display Spire trophies, store wine in a cellar and adopt pets that help with farming and exploration.

Skills and relationships

Mining, combat, farming, fishing, cooking and crafting each develop as you use them, unlocking recipes, faster gathering and rare drops. The Daily Fatigue system limits how much you can grind one activity in a day, rewarding you for varying what you do.

Dozens of NPCs have daily schedules, gift preferences and personal goals. Help them often enough and they may save their rarest stock for you; they also notice missed birthdays. Friendships can develop into romances and marriage. You can have up to two spouses if both agree, and can also divorce. NPCs remember your actions, and you can collect volumes for the Lore Codex.

Dungeons and combat

Fight enemies in the world, track a Leviathan from the cliffs of Sol'Kaia, and explore procedural dungeons with scaling difficulty across Normal, Hard and Nightmare. Bosses guard the rarest loot. If your reputation with a faction falls too low, its members come looking for you. Dungeon and Spire difficulty can be chosen for each run.

Game modes

In solo play, you explore Aethon, build a home, form relationships, visit dungeons and play in the casino at your own pace. Co-op lets up to four players share a single-player world, with the same story and NPCs; friends can join through Steam.

The Neon Drift is a separate persistent online world for up to 25 players, with its own characters, economy and five connected maps. It uses peer-to-peer hosting, has no subscription or monthly fees, and lets you build a reputation and leave whenever you like. The five maps are:

• The Drift: a non-combat social and trading hub with a casino, bank and vault storage, player-to-player Bazaar, fishing ponds and live leaderboards.
• The Mines: surface ore nodes and a 100-floor procedural mine. Floors 1–20 have common ores and weak enemies; 21–50 add rare ores, traps and moderate enemies; 51–80 have exotic materials and darkness; and 81–99 feature elite enemies and maze layouts. A weekly boss with unique loot waits on floor 100, with elevator checkpoints every 10 floors. Dying drops 50% of the unbanked ores you carry on the floor where you fell.
• The Workshop: a safe zone with four public crafting stations: Smelter Row for refining ore into bars, Forge Kitchen for cooking meals and buffs, Artisan Hall for making weapons, tools and furniture, and Brewing Vats for potions and wine. Crafting takes 2–5 minutes, with a live progress overlay, and some recipes require specific skill levels.
• The Spire: a hostile wasteland around a 20-floor combat castle. Outdoor enemies scale to your combat skill. Each run starts with a 10-minute timer; floors reduce it by 15–25 seconds depending on difficulty, while kills add 2–10 seconds. The Spire King guards floor 20. If time runs out, you are teleported out and lose all Spire loot. Choose Normal, Hard or Nightmare, and compete for the fastest full clears.
• The Quarters: a residential district with 25 home plots arranged in a 5-by-5 grid. You can visit any player's home, and your own home persists across sessions with furniture crafted at the Workshop and trophies taken from the Spire.

Trade and play together

Prices change with the season and your standing with factions. The Graal Vault pays 2% weekly interest on deposits, and a traveling merchant carries goods unavailable elsewhere. In The Neon Drift, players gather raw ores in the Mines, refine them at the Workshop, trade at the Bazaar, store gold in the bank, gamble in the casino and buy furniture for their homes. Players set Bazaar prices, and sales incur a 5% tax; there are no NPC prices. You can also trade directly through offer windows, with both players confirming before items change hands, or send messages and shard attachments to offline players, delivered when they next log in.

The Drift casino has seven games: five slot machines with bets from 5 to 100 shards; roulette with red/black, odd/even and number bets paying up to 36 times the bet; eight-deck baccarat using classic Punto Banco rules; six-deck blackjack with hit, stand, double, split and insurance; Texas Hold'em for 2–6 players against AI or other players; a skill-based darts minigame; and Drifter's Luck scratch tickets with instant wins and rare jackpots.

Online features include Steam Friends invites and one-click joining, player inspection, parties of up to four for Spire runs, live spectating of friends' runs, global and map-scoped chat, emotes with custom text, seasonal cosmetics and room codes for returning to the same world. Players can use chat commands such as /who, /map, /time, /wave, /dance, /sit and /cheer. The first player in a room hosts it; if they leave, the longest-connected player takes over with the world state intact. The game also supports automatic reconnection, server-side anti-cheat and persistent local room saves, using a lightweight relay rather than dedicated servers.

Casino and customization

The game includes 46 Steam achievements and built-in mod support. You can add items, recipes, NPCs and translations through JSON files, browse community mods, check them with a one-click validator and share your own creations. Modders own what they make.

The soundtrack has 14 tracks generated in real time with the Web Audio API. The music changes with the time of day, season and location, including synthwave in the Drift, ambient jazz at the bar and dark orchestral music in the Spire.