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I’ll be blunt: the only thing that really entices me about SpaceCraft is that it’s from Shiro Games, creators of such robust RPG and strategy fare as Dune: Spice Wars, Evoland, Northgard and Wartales. As a concept, at least, SpaceCraft seems both flavourless and oddly inclined to overplay its own familiarity. I mean, look at that title. Consider its chilly blend of functionality and punmanship. Look at that capital “C”, poking out of the middle like the bow on a present whose silhouette leaves nothing to the imagination. You already know broadly what this game involves, yes? Indeed, you do: it’s a game about crafting spacecraft, so that you can travel to other planets and craft their resources into other, better spacecraft. This you may do eternally, for there are thousands of planets in store.
If you’ve spent far too much time playing any or all of No Man’s Sky, Elite: Dangerous, Eve Online and Starfield, you may even now be holding this computer over your head, preparing to smash it against the floor and return SpaceCraft to the sleep-gobbling hell whence it came. As Shiro president Nicolas Cannasse and community lead François Roussel acknowledged when I spoke to them in December, SpaceCraft’s chief difficulty is persuading burned-out virtual astronauts that it’s worth leaving the atmosphere at least one last time.
In SpaceCraft you play an outcast human pilot, part of a grand exodus from Earth after a bunch of aliens called Tripods rock up and smash everything. Your objective is broadly to rebuild, and build, and build some more. You’ll kick off roaming planets in first-person, harvesting resources by hand, but as you found bases and improve your facilities, you’ll be able to automate extraction and production – the devs cite Satisfactory as an inspiration – freeing you up to lift your sweat-stung eyes to the heavens.
There are no character classes, but during our interview, Cannasse mentioned various “evolutionary paths” for players in terms of tech and playstyle. As your initial rickety ore-panning operation swells into a prosperous, multiple-planet minestead, you’ll stumble upon other players and found corporations, that you may even more efficiently strip brave new worlds of their bounty.
It’s a continuous universe, with no loading break between outer space and planetary surfaces, and there are thousands of systems, each with several planets and smaller organic or artificial celestial bodies, such as space stations. The starmap is broken into sectors, each woven around a core of “static” NPC encounters and missions, plus a swathe of procedurally generated material.
“It’s not like a lot of procedural generation and then everything is empty,” Cannasse assured me, evidently mindful that “procedural generation” is, for many, synonymous with “lumpy gruel”. “We have actual content, but it’s randomised in the way it’s placed, depending on the server you are on, but on one given server, it should be in the same place for other players on this server.”
Which brings us to the question of online. SpaceCraft is categorised as “massively multiplayer” on Steam and in announcement materials. Each server houses a few thousand players, with the exact number still TBC. In our reveal post from the PCGeoffies, I called the game an MMO. While I think that was a fair framing, based on the information I had at the time, SpaceCraft isn’t an MMO in the “classical” sense, and Shiro are keen to avoid the association. In practice, it’s more about asynchronous than real-time interaction, and while collaborating with others is a focus, Cannasse was at pains to stress that you can do everything in the game by yourself – though you can’t play offline.
“We put a lot of emphasis on the cooperation aspect,” he explained, “and not cooperation in terms of a lot of real time cooperation, like doing dungeons with your friends in World Of Warcraft, but more asynchronous cooperation, in the sense that when you create a corporation together, and you have several space bases, you will have an overall goal as a corporation to improve this or that aspect, develop our base further, build specific buildings or find specific resources.”
Members of a corporation may benefit from exploring and building together, but you can always break formation if you fancy: the absence of classes means that you aren’t locked off from certain ways of playing. “If you want to go very deep into a single aspect of the game, then it’s better to collaborate with other players who will be better in other aspects that complement you,” Cannasse said. “But it’s a choice that you have.”
There’s also the prospect of PvP, though the game isn’t PvP-focussed; mostly, you’ll be fighting with NPC banditos and, presumably, those villainous Tripod aliens. Ship engagements take place in third-person view – Shiro are considering a cockpit perspective, but it’s not guaranteed – and are comparable to MMO skirmishes. There’s no real-time dog-piloting: your ship flies itself while you assign targets and execute ship skills with cooldowns, supplied by your equipment. There’s not much else to share at this point, but it’s this aspect of SpaceCraft that I most trust Shiro to nail, given their previous accomplishments with Wartales and Northgard.
I’m less convinced that the game’s distant planets and their inhabitants will be intriguing to uncover, given the unceremonious way Shiro are positioning this as a game of imperial extraction and production, but you won’t just be landing on chunks of rock and getting out your laser-shovel.
Asked to specify “something weird” players might encounter while planet-hopping, Cannasse gave me an example of how a random mission might spill over into resource collection. While approaching a planet, you receive a distress call, and trace it to a ruined base. While exploring it in first-person, you craft an item to repair a door and rescue a trapped NPC. As you take off, you realise that the planet has extensive oceans. So you pilot beneath the waves in search of plunder, only to discover that you need to head home and upgrade your ship to withstand the pressure.
As you’d hope, the ship customisation seems pretty elaborate. It needs to be, because it’ll be critical to the in-game economy. Cannasse compared the construction yard element to assembling LEGO blocks, with editor options ranging from choice of engine drive or weapons modules to the paintjob and decals. Having devised an absolute banger of a frigate, you can sell your blueprints to other players for in-game currency, though they’ll need to dig up the requisite building resources themselves.
Were SpaceCraft a spacecraft blueprint inside SpaceCraft, I’m not sure I’d be reaching for my space-wallet, not for the moment. Again, none of this sounds particularly novel, and while I enjoy space sims, I do not enjoy their current abundance. Given that outer space is, as Douglas Adams says, a lot bigger than a trip down the road to the chemist’s, I often think that we really only need one space sim that houses all the others. It would save a lot of time reinventing the hyperdrive. Perhaps it could be a publicly funded project, with galaxies freely awarded to developers providing they can meet some simple admissions criteria, like proving beyond reasonable doubt that they aren’t Todd Howard.
Shiro are, in fairness, upfront that SpaceCraft is a cunning compound of bits and pieces from many other starfaring digital distractions. The hope, of course, is that the final dish will taste more exotic than the ingredients.
“Several games have been very focussed on the simulation aspect,” observed Cannasse. “Some of the games have been focussed on the economic aspect, or on the combat aspect. And I think what SpaceCraft brings is a unique mix of these. So we have a big focus on exploration, and also it’s a persistent world, where you play in a community with other players, and you can build cooperation and collaborate together in a player-driven economy. I think there is no game at the moment that has this specific mix, that puts all these things together.”
“It’s a very much a Shiro game, in the end, because I think Shiro tends to blur the lines between genres,” François Roussel interjected. “And I think SpaceCraft is very much that. We’re going to borrow a bit from several games, but we’re going to offer a very unique experience, something that is really standing out, that is in-between existing games. I think this is one of the challenges that we have, to carry that message to the player.”
Shiro are planning to hold a private SpaceCraft alpha in the first half of 2025, with a possible early access launch later this year. Find out more via the developer’s FAQ.