Planned Release Date: To be announced

About This Game

Sunfarers is a space life sim about an interplanetary ship and its crew. 688 years ago, the network of wormholes that connected the galaxy abruptly collapsed. No ship, probe or voice from another star has reached this solar system since. Its six worlds had to get by alone, whilst the stars took on unnatural colors and reality-defying phenomena gnawed at people's sanity. But civilization endured, and crews like yours are the reason why; they brave the void and the dangers of warped space to keep those who remained after the Collapse connected and anchored in reality.

A ship people live on

Your hull starts mostly empty. Place every bunk, hygiene unit, ship system and light. Make a home out of cold, soulless steel. Your vessel operates best when your crew is kept sane and morale is high. The way you furnish your ship has a great impact on both; far away from solid ground, sunfarers thrive when they are surrounded by the familiar and are given opportunities to unwind and interact with each other.

Beware, your ship may get polluted by entropy, the name for the bizarre phenomena regularly rattling the solar system. The further out you go, the worse entropy corruption becomes. Machines onboard may start acting in unexpected ways. Crew members may suffer mental breaks. Others may get used to entropy, and even start worshiping it.

The ship's operations and the well-being of your crew are also dependent on the ship reactor's output and the air and water systems it supports. It powers the guns, engines, shields, auxiliary systems and the comforts of home, so when power runs short, you need to decide which systems the crew can do without. 

Your crew

Everyone has a home world, a career and a personality. Hire crew at each planet's orbital station, or pull survivors out of shipwrecks and convince them to stay. Their skills improve with the work they do. You set a timetable for work, sleep and time off, and they handle the rest: whether it's operating a vital station, breaking for a meal or finding relief in watching a silent star field when they're exhausted from keeping watch at the helm for one day straight.

Your crew keep diaries, make friends (and clash over spiritual differences) and grieve the ones they lose. Some of them may hold strong opinions on the dangers of entropy, and the ongoing clash between the ideologies practiced by the inhabitants of the system. A cultist from Light's End may try their best to establish corners of entropy on the ship, whilst someone who grew up on Sancturia may wish to install chanting drones, operating periodically to cleanse the ship of any such influences. A crew made up of like-minded people is easier to manage, but also results in missed opportunities: some advanced ship functions can only be utilized by crew with the correct metaphysical attitudes.

Trade and smuggling

Every crossing, every journey has to pay for itself. Sunfarers features a fully simulated economy where every price move is caused by a real ship's actions and planetary changes in production and consumption, governed by a dynamic event system. It is up to you to find the most profitable routes, be they legal or part of a planet's black market. Each trade station's price history shows where each good usually sells best, but hundreds of other captains fly the same lanes; if you're too slow or read market signals wrong, your crew ends up with a loss.

Worlds in crisis pay well for relief cargo. News feeds inform sunfarer crews about ongoing economic instabilities. Every faction has its own list of illegal goods. Dabble in these and a fortune awaits you... but when border patrols scan you with something banned aboard, you may just end up in a world of legal pain or find yourself on the receiving end of the station's defense turrets.

The Listening

Every 7.3 days the Listening comes. For up to two full star days scanners hold contacts that never show in the viewport. Or maybe the reactor's output sags and crew hear familiar voices call their names from empty rooms. Some of what you see is false, but a mindful crew can observe and anchor what is real. If they don't, real damage may happen at the same time. Then it's on you to tell real and illusion apart.

When a Listening of higher severity is forecast, many crews return to port to sit out the worst, but high rewards await those who dare to navigate the event in open space.

A universe of opportunities

Hauling cargo is only one way to make a living. Hunt pirates for bounties, or turn pirate yourself and scoop up the cargo of the ships you destroy. Witnesses can report you, and a faction's navy may come looking. Cut salvage from ancient wrecks on spacewalks, now and then discovering long lost survivors who may choose to join your crew. Or perhaps join the brave souls who scan reality-defying entropy blooms for dangerous crystals and race scavengers to them. Sancturia's Purifier Fleets, in their attempts to keep reality safe from such entropic abominations, warn harvesters off and mercilessly hunt those who would practice heresy.

Crewed ship combat

Whether your shot lands depends on who's in the gunner's seat. Your crew run the turrets, shields, repair and point-defense drones as well as all the other ship functions, so a fight goes better when they've slept, when they've eaten, and when they're not minutes away from suffering a mental breakdown from prolonged void exposure. If a vital seat is empty, you will have to react quickly and command crew to work on the systems most important for the fight at hand.

You pilot manually or tell crew how to fly: orbit at range, joust through the enemy's firing arcs or kite away from their guns. Powerful ship abilities, some gated by your crew's proficiency, others by their spiritual leanings, support you in your struggle to stay alive.

Seven factions

Six peoples (and one independent free hub) share one sun. Sancturia's Unity Church fights entropy with fire and prayer. Xingmeng gives authority to whoever scores highest in its examinations, while Chloamy runs on private money and reputation. Each faction sets its own laws, prices and shipyard stock. What the solar factions think of you decides what you pay for their goods and whether you may dock at their ports at all.

A crisis on a world changes its stance visibly: prices may spike or collapse, patrols may increase to keep the trade lanes safe, contracts may pop up to undercut a rival faction's grip on the system, and sometimes, the faction's hub may have to shut down to prevent worse.

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

- Graphics in the game are human-made, however, some of those are color-graded and re-coloured with AI tools.
- All in-game text is proof-read by AI to safeguard against typos and grammar issues.
- Sound and music volume(db) balance, as well as mixer balance, was handled by AI tools.