HEXPANSE

Feature List

A 100% AI-made experiment. Hexpanse is built end to end with AI — code, art, voice and translations. In Early Access, your feedback drives it: I keep the most relevant suggestions and fold them back in with AI to grow the game together with its community.

About the Game

Hexpanse is a real-time space strategy game where you build an empire one system at a time. Start with a single station and a single ship, mine the asteroids, design your fleet part by part and spread across a galaxy generated anew for every game.

A whole galaxy

Spiral, star, central or random: up to 61 star systems, each with its sun, its planets and its asteroid fields. Every system simulates all the time, even when you are looking elsewhere, and you zoom from the galaxy map down to a single hull without a loading screen. The fog of war gives nothing away: what your ships have not seen stays black.

Design every ship

Nothing is imposed. Assemble ships and stations block by block on a grid: hulls, engines, thrusters, generators, weapons, shields, drills, holds, docking ports, factories, laboratories — 231 parts over four tiers, from iron to titanium. Form dictates behaviour: without a maneuvering thruster a ship must move forward to turn, off-centre engines make it drift, a fixed cannon only covers what lies in front of it. Mass, power, command points and crew are yours to balance.

No time to draw?

The plan generator builds a valid ship or station for you: pick a tier, a role, a shape — spindle, T, U, V, A, X or ring — how much armament, armour, shields or cargo you want, and generate as many variants as you like. Keep the one you prefer and finish it by hand.

A fleet that follows your doctrine

You don't fly every hull. Give each class of ship a role — fighter, guard, sentinel, miner, hauler, scout, support — and a temperament, and it decides on its own: it mines what your stations ask for, protects your miners, falls back to repair, rearms, scouts the unknown. Take manual control of any ship at any moment, or play the "no ship AI" mode and fly everything yourself.

A mining economy

Everything starts with the asteroid. Your miners extract eight raw resources, your station factories refine them into steel, circuits, carbon fibre or ammunition. Stations publish what they need, miners and haulers bring it, depots soak up the surplus: build a supply chain that runs itself — and find out what happens when an enemy cuts it.

Dry docks

Queue a plan and watch it come together: the whole ship appears in green over the dock, and its parts are paid for and assembled one by one, as fast as your stores can feed them. Missing iron? The dock pauses and calls for it, and your miners answer.

Combat, part by part

Every shot hits a real part of a real hull. Shield generators cover one flank or the whole ship, armour depends on the material you built with, and each destroyed part breaks off — leaving wreckage you can mine. Cannons, lasers, ion weapons that paralyse, guided missiles and torpedoes, drifting mines, decoys, point defence, boarding airlocks, and nuclear reactors that take their neighbours with them.

From one station to an empire

Your constructors jump through hyperspace, pick a site and assemble a new station piece by piece, right in the void. A system belongs to whoever is the only one to hold a station there: conquer enough of them to win. Hyperspace beacons speed up your jumps, enemy anchors pull you out of them.

Research from iron to titanium

Laboratories turn resources into research. Each lot unlocks a family of parts for the next tier: better engines, heavier weapons, bigger dry docks. Your rivals research too — and the AI factions play by exactly the same rules as you: same fog, same research, same economy.

Survival

Fifty levels against the Horde, a boss every ten. Waves arrive on a timer, not when you're ready. After each level you pick new parts from a draw of cards, and your stations carry over from one level to the next. Alone, or in co-op.

Play together

Multiplayer over Steam or local network: classic, no-ship-AI or co-op survival, with text and voice chat and private messages. Everyone sets their own game speed and the game runs at the slowest one; a player who drops out finds their faction waiting when they come back. Solo, pause or speed up time ×3, ×5 or ×20.

A universe made in code

Every ship, planet, asteroid and sound is generated on the fly in pixel art. The whole soundtrack — 75 effects and 10 tracks — is synthesized live: zero audio files in the download, one coherent art direction from the first menu to the last shot.

In short

• Real-time 4X: mine, build, research, expand, conquer
  
• Part-based ship and station designer — 231 parts, 4 tiers — with a plan generator
  
• Mining, refining, factories, dry docks and self-running logistics
  
• Ship doctrine: 7 roles, 3 temperaments, manual control whenever you want
  
• Part-by-part damage, flank shields, ion paralysis, missiles, mines, boarding
  
• Procedural galaxy up to 61 systems, 4 shapes, shareable seed, fog of war
  
• Rival AI factions that research, expand and wage war with the same rules as you
  
• Survival mode: 50 levels, bosses, part cards, solo or co-op
  
• Multiplayer over Steam and LAN, text and voice chat
  
• Built-in encyclopedia, tutorial, multiple saves, accessibility options
  
• Playable in English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian and Simplified Chinese

An experiment: a game built with AI

Hexpanse is a solo developer's experiment: how far can one person go building a complete game with AI tools? Code, graphics, voice-over and translations were all created with AI, then directed, shaped, tested and assembled by one person. No AI runs while you play: everything in the game is produced by algorithms running on your machine. Early Access carries the experiment on — I read your feedback, keep what I find most relevant and build it into the game. You don't just report bugs: you help decide what Hexpanse becomes.