Finally, A Space Sim That Gets What A Starship Actually Is

Added: 2026-05-13

[00:00:00]Every space game in the last 40 years has given you a ship, but very few of them have given you a truly functional starship. And this is a really big deal because it's something many people have wanted for decades, but we've never really been given. That's the ability to command a massive Enterprise class ship, to be in charge of a full crew, to explore dangerous worlds, or to discover strange new anomalies. And let's be real, for many of us, this is the dream space game. Starship Simulator then is trying to build this very game. And this is way more than a ship with a cockpit.

[00:00:32]What we have here is a space game that understands what the inside of a ship actually means and why so many of us really want that type of game. That's because it's a workplace you can live in. It's a crew that you're a member of and sometimes you're the captain, sometimes you're the engineer, and sometimes you're just a person looking out of the window at the stunning views.

[00:00:54]Starship Simulator then is currently in heavy development and a lot of what I'm going to describe here is a part of that development process. But even with that in mind, this is something that is very interesting indeed. But perhaps more importantly than that is it's a look at what one developer thinks a real space exploration game should actually be and why nobody else is trying to build it.

[00:01:17]Now, here's the thing that makes this game genuinely different from anything else out there. And for clarity, just so you know, there's been a lot of development updates on this game. So even if you are aware of the title, there's a ton of new stuff to discuss.

[00:01:29]So in a late No Man's Sky in Starfield, you are the protagonist. Maybe not in the central character sense in all the titles, but in the sense that your ship needs you. Without you, your ship does nothing. You'll tab out and your ship loses its pilot. But Starship Simulator has a very different take. Here, the ship doesn't need you. At least not in the ways that ships do in other games.

[00:01:53]You see, there's an NPC who can sit in the captain's chair and issue standing orders. They can find Earthlike worlds, make peaceful first contact, all that kind of thing. And then there's an NPC at the helm who flies a ship. There's an NPC at the sensors who runs the scans.

[00:02:08]They all talk to each other and they pass orders down the chain of command.

[00:02:11]And this whole bridge loop runs autonomously. And the developer has shown these on the live stream development process where we can see it all working in concept. And even on the latest build, the ship can explore a star system, find a target candidate world, move to the next one, and keep on going. No human in the chairs. Now, before any of you think, "But that is boring Obsidian." Well, that's kind of the point, but possibly in a very different way to your imagining. And that's because this is a central focus of the game because what it does is unlock something amazing for you as a player. And that means, well, you get to choose who you are and what you do. You can be the captain making decisions. You can be the engineer fixing a 40 cable that the engineering task board just flagged, or you can go and be the cook in the galley, the scientist running the sample through the contamination scanner. or and this is the part that we don't really see it in any other game.

[00:03:05]You can simply be nobody in particular, just a person on a ship. You're walking around looking out the window. You're sitting in the bar and you're just watching what's going on on board the ship. The game here has been built so that all of those are completely valid play styles as are many other activities as well. Now, that does sound ambitious, of course, and that's where the biggest risk in this game does come from. The game is being built effectively by a solo developer. They've had a successful Kickstarter campaign and what I will say is they're doing tremendous work on this. They're always doing development live streams and most people who are following it know exactly what's going on at any given moment and the developers both very happy to show what's being developed as well as discuss those things as well. But this is an ambitious project and of course that does come inherently with a lot of risks. It does mean that possibly it's a bit too ambitious and it might mean that some of these things don't get don't get fully shipped as envisioned. Time will tell on that of course, but right now it's all looking rather nice and I really do feel a large part of that ambition is the developers really quite smartly chosen where they want to place the protagonist at and that is the ship itself. I mean let's face it, what would Star Trek be without the Enterprise? At least the original two series, both the Star Trek Kirk era as well as the card one. There the Enterprise is the main focus because without it the crew can't do any of the things they actually do.

[00:04:29]And this is the fantasy that Starship Simulator is going to enable. At least that's the plan here. And whilst ultimately understandably that the game itself is not packaging itself in the Star Trek packaging in the Star Trek wrapper, it is quite clearly very heav he heavily influenced by that. And I think many of us have always wanted, especially those of us that grew up on Star Trek, have always wanted to live in this type of game. I want to talk about something that the developer is continuously mentioning in various different streams. The idea that failure means gameplay. What do they mean by that? It sounds a little bit clip, shall we? We say it doesn't sound uh great, but there's actually a very keen design focus to this. So, if we take a look at the science labs in the ship, we got one example here. Each of these has an airlock to the entrance. Hazmat suit lockers, decontamination shower, are sealed in a door. And each of these uh lockers, these air locks also have a bathroom. And that's inside. inside the airlock. Seems a bit strange, right?

[00:05:28]Well, that's because if a sample turns out in the science lab to have been contaminated or some other emergency goes on in there, well, the lab goes into lockdown. And the people who might be stuck inside the locker, inside the airlock, or inside the lab, well, of course, they're going to need facilities, aren't they? So, the dev with that in mind has built bathrooms into locations that make actual logical sense. And that's the level of thought that's been going into this game. It's not all about what would be cool. It's about what would actually be needed if this were real. And that of course, I guess, can lead to quite some interesting and cool situations. And that the ultimate thing is that the bathroom isn't the point. It's just really an indication of where things are going. It's telling us that the lab itself can go into an emergency lockdown. And it means samples that are brought in can be contaminated, which in turn means that even though you've got a contamination scanner, it might miss things. Maybe pathogens can escape onto the ship, and that is a deliberate design. The way this might work then is you have a pathogen detection system, and that's gated by your science team's skill level. If you've got a level 12 biology team, for example, and a level 16 pathogen, well, your team might not catch it. That means that the containment might look safe until well, until the virus escapes. And then you've got a situation where the pathogen is escaping through the ship's atmosphere.

[00:06:51]And you've got the rest of the crew starting to get sick. And this is what the developer means by failure states actually being interesting and being at the entire point because what it does is give you gameplay. And you can actually extend that idea anyway. For example, an aladium plants your bot team brings up from a planet that maybe it's faster to grow in. Maybe it's more nutrientdense than earth crops or it might be hallucinogenic and your science team doesn't have the skill to detect that.

[00:07:16]You don't know until your crew starts behaving oddly. And that's what makes this game very different to what we've seen before. But it's also, like I say, quite a risk because it's very ambitious. Ultimately though, it's not on its own in the things it's trying to achieve because we could make an argument, quite reasonable one, that it's closer to Dwarf Fortress than a typical space game, at least in the sense of the game being somewhat dynamic without things going on under their own steam. And of course, here you'll be living amongst it. Now, it's also worth pointing out that most of these systems are only partially built at the moment, if that the contamination architecture, for example, does exist in design and graybox. The pathogen propagation logic is real and working, we've been told, and the science skill levels are in there, but they're conceptual. The dev has a year or maybe two of work ahead to bring all of this together. So, treat what I'm describing here as what this game is trying to be, not what it currently is. But here's the thing about all of that. None of this is happening behind closed doors. It's not the type of thing that we often see with marketing team just saying what they think the game would be, what they'd like it to be. What we have in here is a build that's publicly available at least to those who back to a high enough level on the Kickstarter as well as regular live streams from the developer where he's showing all of this in action and showing himself actually programming and developing the game. So, we know the intent is real. We know that they're actually trying to get this out there and we've seen a lot of these loops actually there in progress. For example, one of the most recent streams just a day or two ago is the NPC captain. If you're interested in this, it's well worth taking a look at because it's highly uh informative. You'll learn a lot about the game. And a few months ago, we saw work in progress concepts of the probes going down to planets and returning. And of course, earlier on, we've seen uh conceptual footage of atmospheric walkarounds on the planets.

[00:09:08]Here the uh well, you can actually get out your ship. You can go down to the planetary service and walk around. The developers been very clear that there will be a loading screen there. It's not seamless, but even still, it gives us pretty much everything we might want from a truly Star Trek classic space game. And that's something that we haven't really seen before. But even in its current form, there might not be a lot of playable activities there, but it's a good insight as to what the game is trying to be. We have a ship that's very functional. A lot of the rooms are gray box at the moment. Some are quite empty indeed, but we see the concept of what's there. The bridge is working very well. You can navigate from place to place. You can sit at the scanning place. You can sit at the helm. You can sit in the captain's chair. Overall then, it's been really nice seeing this come together piece by piece and well, all the plans and implement implementation ideas slowly taking form.

[00:10:00]So, ultimately, if this is the kind of game that you've been waiting for, then this is definitely one to keep an eye on, even if it's going to take a bit longer than we might otherwise hope for.

[00:10:10]Let me know what you think about this in the comment section below, cuz I'd love to hear from you. There is another video on screen right here if you want to check that out. Do take care and I'll catch you next time.