is a colony-building simulator developed by Ludeon Studios, inspired by games like Dwarf Fortress and Prison Architect, and science fiction settings like Dune and Firefly. The game officially left Early Access and entered full release in October 17, 2018.About three and a half thousand years in the future, humanity has spread itself across the galaxy, colonizing thousands of worlds and developing new technologies. One obstacle has proven to be insurmountable—the lightspeed barrier. Thus, each colonized planet has largely been left to its own devices; worlds develop at their own pace with limited contact between them. While small interstellar empires may occasionally form in highly-dense stellar regions such as star clusters or nearer to the core, many of the isolated colonies bomb themselves back into the Stone Age, resulting in a wide technological gap. Some ascended to become super-advanced "transcendent worlds" that appear utterly alien, while others regressed to a pre-industrial state.
Your vessel was in orbit around one of these undeveloped planets before crashing in an unspecified accident. As none of you were enterprising colonists, your group is woefully unprepared for this primitive and potentially hostile world. Luckily, your Escape Pods are well-stocked with basic tools, weapons, and supplies, giving means to provide for yourselves. Rescue is out of the question, as it'll probably be years before anyone even knows you're gone, but perhaps you can find some way to get yourself back home — provided you survive, of course. There are several other preset starting scenarios:
- The tribal descendants of a Lost Colony who had survived from an attack from reactivated but malfunctioning robots,
- A Bold Explorer who is on an adventure on a remote planet in search of fortune and glory,
- An unlucky colonist who went in for what they thought was minor surgery and wake up in a Drop Pod over a strange planet, naked and with no supplies,
- A lone mechanitor escaping the judgement of others to set up shop on a new world with a few robotic minions,
- A sanguophage running from hunters, escaping with a single thrall,
- Four researchers investigating a mysterious signal, only to have a burst of energy from the planet cause their ship to crash and one of their number transform into a ghoul,
- Or a three-man crew of a gravship that draws the ire of a powerful mechanoid hive.
Or you can make your own backstory.
The game's unique spin on the genre comes in the form of an "AI Storyteller" in addition to a standard set of difficulty levels, which allows the player to determine what sort of experience they want from their game: whether it be the more traditional progression of increasingly difficult challenges; a relaxed setting for base-building with decreased pressure from attackers and events; or a totally unpredictable sequence of events dictated by the whim of random chance.
An expansion, Royalty, was released on February 24, 2020. The expansion includes a new faction, the Shattered Empire, seeking to settle on the planet and gather allies, in addition to earnable royal titles, a quest system, and psychic powers.
A second expansion, Ideology, was released on July 20, 2021. It revolves around the introduction of intricate belief systems for individual colonists and your colony as a whole, as well as every other faction on the planet, giving additional depth to the game's storytelling. Additional features include unique leadership roles for your pawns, a slavery system, a third method to win the game, and dryads, a special creature type that spawns from a mystical tree and can be bred and trained for a variety of tasks.
A third expansion, Biotech, was announced on October 5, 2022, and released on October 21, 2022. Its major features cover children and reproduction, new types of mechanoids and ways to control and even construct them, environmental pollution as a consequence of colony industrialization, and gene modding. Patch 1.4, a base game update that was released alongside it, introduced more customization options, new turrets, a more involved corpse rot mechanic, and more variety in the types of prisoners and the colony's interactions with them.
A fourth expansion, Anomaly, was announced on March 13, 2024, and released on April 11, 2024. Its major features centre around the player's colony coming into conflict with an Archotech that has gone mad, introducing new horror monsters and weapons to counteract them. Patch 1.5, which was also released alongside the new DLC, brought with it new features including books such as novels and schematics, wall lights, crawling pawns, and a new option following a Game Over to get a second chance with your base by creating new "wanderer" pawns to inhabit it.
A fifth expansion, Odyssey, was announced on June 11, 2025, and released on July 11, 2025. Aside from elevating a huge range of popular mods to official content, chief among them the Save Our Ship mod series that enables the construction of mobile, space-capable bases, it added several new biomes with their own unique challenges, dozens of new animal species, new quests and equipment, an Asteroid Mining mechanic, and a way to permanently deal with the mechanoid menace. It released alongside Patch 1.6 that brought numerous quality-of-life upgrades (some also adapted from mods), reworked animal mechanics like actually flying birds and a more involved scaria disease, and more.
