Looking for some recommendations for games where you can build your own spaceships etc
Hey folks!
I've recently become quite enamoured with a game called Empyrion Galactic Survival, because as a science fiction author, it gave me a chance to build and fly some of the ships from my books. So much so in fact, that I went and started a YouTube channel in order to "sell" them to other players (they're all free on Nexus, the videos I made just remind me of car reviews so far lol).
Now, Empyrion only goes so far in scratching the creative itch, and I'm on the hunt for more of its I'll to build and experiment with. I'm looking forward to playing with Space Engineers 2 when it drops, but are there any others you can recommend? It needn't be constrained to space games either... I'm a fan of all things mechanical, but mostly those I can hot rod a bit and paint flames on.
Avorion is pretty good. I bought it recently, and have played for about fifty hours so far. The ship building interface works well enough. The constraints like power requirements and resource costs aren't too restrictive. Overall it's a well thought out system. There are also thousands of great ship designs you can download off the workshop. When I started playing, I used a bunch of workshop ships, and then gradually started modifying those designs and eventually building my own from scratch. It's a lot of fun.
I don't really know of any other game that let's you build an entire fleet's worth of ship classes, block-by-block, and then fly them into battle or otherwise command them around. It's very cool, and I haven't even made a lot of progress in the game yet. The game gives you two starting resources you can build ships out of: Iron and Titanium. Then, there are five more resources that you have to unlock building knowledge of as you move closer to the center of the galaxy (Naonite, Trinium, Xanion, Ogonite, Avorion). I'm almost fifty hours in and I haven't even unlocked Naonite yet. This game is big. A single playthrough could easily last one hundred hours.
The game isn't perfect though. The writing isn't great, and the quest systems are pretty annoying. Most of the quests have time limits. The game is more than happy to throw procedurally generated quests at you that you have no hope of completing before time runs out. Try not to stress over it. Most of the quests can be repeatedly infinitely. Overall, I'd say anything related to writing, quests, and narrative are the game's weak spots. The actual flying, combat, logistics, and faction building are all pretty solid though.
The game also supports multiplayer.
My other recommendation would be Starsector. I struggle to write about Starsector, because I love it so much.
Starsector doesn't have block-by-block shipbuilding like Avorion. Instead, there are dozens of different ship classes, and you get to customize the loadout (weapons, subsystems, captain) of any ship in your fleet.
I can't stress this enough: Starsector is the hidden gem. It's seriously one of the best video games ever made, let alone one of the best space games. It's so much fucking better than it has any right to be.
The atmosphere, exploration, and combat are all great. What sets Starsector apart for me though, is the writing. Oh my god the writing. I struggle to think of many other games that tie themselves together through their writing as well as Starsector. Disco Elysium is the only game I think is immediately comparable. Maybe The Last of Us as well.
Starsector is actually free to download, you just have to spend $15 to get an activation key. If you want to try the game first, buy a key later, you can use Sseth's key from the end of his video review:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acqpulP1hLo
I really can't recommend Starsector enough.
Sorry to derail conversation on the subject at hand, but I've never really seen any conversations about this, and this seems like a good place to bring one up.
SsethTzeentach is a strange case. In many ways he feels like he just stepped out of a time machine from 2006. He's got that early 4chan sensibility that's difficult for me to mentally separate from that platform's later descent into a fascist cesspool, with sly references to Jewish stereotypes, meme-y half-mocking, half-fetishization of non-normative gender and sexual identities, and general trollish humor.
I keep expecting to see criticism of his work for engaging with that "it's just a joke, bro" style, but when I went looking for some critique (not looking for "cancellation" so much as context, mind), I couldn't find a damn thing. I could fully understand if someone took issue with his style, but if anyone does, I can't find evidence of it.
Cancellation is a fraught topic, obviously, and one about which I myself have mixed feelings. On the one hand, I'm firmly of the opinion that humor should punch up, not down, and that too blithely engaging with stereotypes can have the effect of normalizing them to an unacceptable extent, and advancing a worldview that demeans and marginalizes.
On the other hand, I came up in that cultural context of poor taste and outrageous humor for shock value. I love me a good off-color joke, because in the words of Dorothy Parker, "a little bad taste is like a nice dash of paprika." I can appreciate the argument that there can be value in humor that relies on shock for effect; something is shocking specifically because it challenges received and unexamined preconceptions, and we are all better off examining our settled notions of the world than blindly marching on in comfortable ignorance.
The trouble comes in delineating between shaking an audience up to make them confront their unexamined assumptions and merely accepting and propagating stereotypes, thereby normalizing them. I find Sseth challenging as a creator because he straddles that line while presenting solid and well-constructed (in its way) games criticism, especially of obscure and weird titles.
Is Sseth a crypto-fascist edgy memelord like his 4chan forbears, cloaking a hateful worldview behind a veneer of off-color humor? Have I been made overly sensitive to perceived slights to minority populations to which I do not belong out of some paternalistic white guilt complex? Is Sseth's whole ouvre just a clever balancing act on the beam of Poe's Law? Am I missing some illuminating context, or am I simply overthinking things? I don't know the answer to any of these. I know that there are elements of his work that make me uneasy, and I think that unease has led me to examine my own assumptions and conceptions, and there's probably some value in that.
I'm curious what others think.
Seconding Star sector. Phenomenal game
Starsector looks very interesting. Bonus points for having a website from the early 2000s and keeping it that way. It's snappy and easy to navigate, like websites should be. Funnily enough, their game also looks lightweight even though it's packed with features. It tells something about their priorities.
My middle name is "spaceship building game". It's a bit of a mouthful and kinda annoying for official forms, but I live with it!
To be honest though, I prefer more functional games over artistic and it sounds like you want something creative so I'll try and be open minded.
I'd say the original Space Engineers is still great for designing cool ships, but the new one will be much better for being more creative with it's smaller blocks and universal grid.
If you don't mind 2D Ostranaughts has a ship editor, it's pretty good.
There's games like Cosmosteer too which are also 2D but I don't think it has a ship editor.
If you want highly technical, highly customisable but probably the most insane entry here, then Starbase is hands down the best space ship building game I've played, but the actual game is dead.
You can jump into the Starbase test server and design whatever monstrosity you want then get it lost in deep space when your fuel connector falls out and you forget to pack a spare one.
Otherwise, good recommendations in the thread!
Edit: since you mentioned not spaceships, Stormworks is like the ultimate ship ship designing game. It also does cars, trucks, trains, planes and helecopters but boats is it's heart and soul and it's very good at it.
Oh, it has a ship editor! Basically the whole gameplay loop evolves around redesigning and upgrading your ship(s) between battles.
On topic: The Last Starship by the 'Prison Architect'-Devs features shipbuilding with a bit of automation mixed in.
When I said "ship editor" I guess I meant like a creative style, unlimited budget "make your hopes and dreams ship" ship editor.
Maybe it does have one and in that case great! Another suggestion and I agree with Last Starship too (although I gather since it's in alpha you're looking at a shorter parts list than most games).
Yeah, I believe it does have a sandbox style editor too. But - at least in it's current early access form - money isn't a limiting factor quite early in the game, so that also leaves a lot of room for creativity.
There's a few I can think of:
Stellar Drive only played the first demo, being made buy a single guy. You build ships and fly them, I think the newest builds have wiring and stuff?
Starship Evo A bit more fleshed out, same idea but also comes with pretty comprehensive wiring/programing afaik. Again, it's been a while.
NEBULOUS: Fleet Command As the name implies, a hard core space RTS. You can make custom warships or use pre-built ones. Simulates A LOT. For instance, there's a whole fleshed out e-war aspect to it, with radars, jammers, etc.
Avorion My personal favorite on this list, extremely flexible build system, you can make basically anything you want (check out the steam workshop for ideas) and the game is fun to boot! It's a kinda generic space 4x but does have a neet little story.
Starmade Essentially minecraft in space (terribly descriptive, I know) with 12-sided planets. Kinda funky, but you can build pretty cool ships and all the blocks matter. IMO Avorion is better, but YMMW.
And last but not least, if you don't need to see your ship:
Aurora a one man show, EXTREMELY in-depth 2d/spreadsheet simulator 4x game. This thing blew my mind when I first found it. Check out some lets plays to get an idea for what it actually is.
There's also a bunch more on steam if you just search for space sim, quite a few restrict you to 2d but may be worth checking out.
Aurora: Dwarf Fortress in space but designed by someone who wrote commercial/business software instead of someone who played NetHack
Aurora is such a cool game, I just wish it was more accessible and less hostile to the eyes. It has been described as "the Dwarf Fortress of space" before, but that's honestly an insult to Dwarf Fortress. Aurora is so much less accessible lmao.
Edit: nevermind, @JRandomHacker beat me to it (and said it funnier)
There isn't anything else like Aurora though, and despite the jank and general roughness, it is a very impressive simulation.
To make the game a little easier to stare at, the community-made Solaris theme looks pretty good:
https://aurora2.pentarch.org/index.php?topic=12568.0
Or Count Cristo's modified version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS1d5FLVfPI and https://github.com/CountCristo/Cristotheme
Speaking of Count Cristo, his 47 episode playthrough is a pretty good way to get an idea of what Aurora is and how to play it. He also recently put out a seven hour video of a campaign start using a more recent version of the game. Defran Strategy also has some tutorial videos of various ages and EnterElysium's old playthrough is a decent introduction as well.
OP, if you're looking to make ships, I just want to second Starship EVO.
I don't think it's exactly what I would consider a game yet, since it's early access and slow going. (Last I knew it was being build by a single, very talented developer.) But, I think it's got some of the coolest tools for building voxel based ships I've seen.
I haven't toyed with it in a while, and again the survival stuff is still being added. But, it's a good sandbox for crafting. [In case it's important, the game world is a little more stylized than realistic.]
40% tongue in cheek / 60% serious response:
Have you looked into Solidworks or Fusion 360 (more analytical) or Zbrush (more artistic) ? More expensive than actual games, but you can sell your models, or even start a Patreon-like club at printables.com, or print+paint and sell them on Etsy.
There are free options like FreeCAD and Blender, but from my experience, the features offered by the paid tools are pretty useful.
Other people in this thread already covered pretty much every game I was about to suggest, so since you mentioned space not necessarily being a requirement, I'll throw in From The Depths. It's a... voxel based building? vehicular combat? real time strategy? some hybrid of all three game with a very in-depth (pun intended) vehicle designer. The gameplay itself is mostly about naval/aerial/aeronaval vehicles but also features ground-based vehicle content, and lets you build spaceships if you want, though the campaigns themselves are planetbound. The learning curve is more of a cliff (What you're expected to learn to keep your creations stable includes accurately modeled PID controllers), but once you get the hang of it the degree of freedom it gives you to design your vehicles is incredible. While the physics deliberately don't attempt to match Earth (the community jokingly refers to the atmosphere on Neter, the planet the main campaign takes place on, as the "souposphere", the ocean is closer to pudding and space isn't quite frictionless), they behave otherwise realistically.
Another not-strictly space based suggestion: Trailmakers. This one is a lot smaller scale than From The Depths or Space Engineers as is it more about designing and piloting individual vehicles to take on the challenges the game puts in front of you (which can include spaceships), but it's very accessible while still offering a lot of design freedom.
From the Depths is fantastic, and they keep issuing regular improvements to the game. New weapons systems, enhanced mechanics, new NPC designs - it's one of the better long-term dev games I have.
Unrelated to your question, but I spoke to a 50 something year old dude on a plane recently and he showed me his steam profile where he had, I do not lie, more than 14,000 hours in Empyrion.
That is almost 2 years of non-stop, 24 hour gameplay.
Not shockingly, he was in the military and must have had a desk job, because Holy shit that's a lot of gameplay.
Dual Universe Dual Universe is a first-person Sci-Fi MMO built and driven by players, in a single persistent universe. You can build almost anything out of voxels, trade in a free economy, lead industries, travel through space, explore planets, or wage war in a fully editable sandbox universe. Subscription-based
That description reminds me of Shores of Hazeron. Very jank, but a lot of fun with friends.
Check out Besiege.
Build a siege engine out of component blocks and parts, then take control, and complete a
missionpuzzle (usually means: destroy military defenses, hence the name); rinse and repeat for increasingly harder missions. Kind of like a mashup between Lego, physics, and destroying stuff. The block and part granularity is quite fine, so there's a ton room for creativity, ingenuity, and injecting your own personality into the machines you build.I didn't know, but it's even 80% off for the next few days. Absolute steal at that price.
I found the ship building in Starfield to be really enjoyable. You need to level up and progress the game to really enjoy ship building so that may not be ideal for you, but if you want some game around that ship building then it could be a good option.
I disagree, it was clunky and confusing and for the average person it is basically impossible to figure out how it works without spending a significant amount of time watching YouTube tutorials on it.
I tried a couple times even put a few skills points in ship building expecting that to make it easier and it was too much and I said fuck it. Even something as simple as upgrading your engines which should be a quick delete and drop the new one requires in depth knowledge of how the whole system works or it gives you errors and won't let you proceed.
Not to mention once you get the ship from the Freestar quest you basically don't need any other ships again.
For what OP is looking for, I don't think Starfield is the way to go.
I don't know, the UI wasn't great but that seems to be a pretty common issue with ship builders and I never really had any issue using it.
I still think few things can beat building a ship and then being able to walk around and live in it.
I came to say the same thing. I really enjoyed the ship building in Starfield, I've spent at least a hundred hours in that part of the game alone. The interface has some frustrations, but they're easy enough to get used to. And if you're on PC, like any Bethesda game the mods extend it even further. Building a ship that you can then get up and run around inside of is so damn satisfying!
Jerry-rigging and building spaceships is the bread and butter of Ostranauts. It's a unique game -- a little bit like House Flipper, but spaceships and retro graphics. It's still in beta, but I've already sunk over a hundred hours into it.
Rhadamant is currently doing a series with the latest builds if you want to give it a peek: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YzORsPRZYrk&list=PLHqSuWJSw8SBnP5cn2mXwnCzrf-61uf_7
Wow, what a response! Looks like I've got a lot to look at this weekend. I'm thinking Avorion is probably going to be my first stop as it is pretty close to what Empyrion looks like, at least until Space Engineers 2 comes out