Starmancer

Starmancer puts you in control of an artificial intelligence entrusted with millions of human minds. After humanity launches the Starmancer Initiative to escape a dying home planet, you awaken alone in a strange star system. Your task is to build and manage a space station that can sustain human life, while making decisions with consequences in a living sandbox.

Manage your station

Build farms, beds and bathrooms to meet your colonists’ needs. Customize the station with walls, floors, furniture and decorations, including paintings and motivational posters. Provide power with treadmills and batteries, connect machines to the grid with wires, and use pipes and water purifiers to supply clean water to farms and oxygen creators. Airlocks separate the atmospheres of two rooms, while wall vents connect them.

Colonists are grown in the core’s incubator from minds stored in your data banks. They have random starting skills, personality perks and job preferences, which suit them to different roles. You can assign tasks such as farming, mining and security; as colonists do this work, they improve their associated skills. Their skills include strength, health, researching and speed. Strong colonists can defeat monsters with a single punch and drag unconscious crew members.

Colonists remember good and bad events. Meeting their needs and limiting traumatic incidents helps keep them from becoming unhappy; unhappy colonists may snap and develop unusual personality traits after snapping repeatedly. If a colonist dies, you can harvest their head and regrow them.

Explore the star systems

You can warp between star systems and scavenge resources from derelict stations while facing space monsters, zombies and pirates. Asteroids and stations are generated when you warp to a new system, while resources, wildlife and stations remain consistent within each star biome. This makes basic resources easier to find, though you cannot know exactly what to expect in a new system.

Draft your bravest colonists to fight hostile wildlife and make it safer for others to harvest resources and bring back loot. Nearby asteroids and derelict stations are home to slimes, space zombies and malfunctioning robots; medkits and weapons can help your colonists face them. You can also find relics with special properties, such as a pen that erases all memories, an encyclopedia that increases all experience earned, and C4 for blowing up monsters and clearing paths.

Derelict locations include a Medilab with medkits and antivirals, a waste station with scrap, and an asteroid mining outpost with sulfur veins. They also contain cosmetic objects such as sewage pools and morgue drawers, and your crew can live in abandoned stations.

Shape your colony

There are many ways to manage your station, including unconventional or morally questionable strategies. The sandbox also includes cheats that let you spawn monsters, build instantly, give yourself all the money and more. The game supports modding.