Starbound Settlers

A colony sim about a small crew on a station a long way from anywhere. You plan the station and give the orders. They have nine needs, sixteen traits and opinions about each other.

Nothing works until you connect it

Power, water, air and heat do not reach anything on their own. You paint wires, pipes and ducts across the floor, and a machine only runs while it sits on a live line.

Nine needs, 16 traits, 100 backstories

Every settler tracks nine needs, from hunger to hygiene. Traits and backstories decide what they are good at and what upsets them. Push them too hard and they break.

13 crops, and room for more than one farm

Grow food for the kitchen, Hush Herb for medicine, Synth Spore for fibre. Some are never harvested: Breathleaf makes oxygen, Dreamfern helps the crew sleep.

Eight kinds of livestock

Chickens, cows, sheep and pigs, or space beetles, crystal lizards and moon rabbits. Breed them, feed them, quarantine the sick ones.

Set a recipe, then keep it supplied

Machines run one recipe at a time. The crew fetch the inputs, run the machine and haul the output away.

Ore in, bars out, electronics after that

Smelt ore into iron, copper, titanium and gold, then turn bars into electronics. Electronics are what the next tier of machines costs.

Air and water you have to make

Melt ice into water, recover what the crew have used, pull oxygen out of the atmosphere. All of it needs power, so life support is the first thing a blackout takes.

Fires, floods and hull breaches

Fires spread from hot machines. Pipes burst, and the hull opens. The station keeps running while you deal with it.

Mine the belt with a drone fleet

Send drones out for ore you cannot make. Scouts go further, where there are derelicts and signals to look at.

How you unlock new things

A scientist at a research console earns research points. Spend them in the Star Atlas, 89 technologies laid out as a star chart, and each one unlocks the machines, ships or rooms attached to it.

Your colony, your story

You set the goal yourself. Build it how you like and keep it running.