For fifteen years, Starsector has pretended not to be ready. The players pretend to believe and go back into hyperspace.
Space without a release manager
Starsector starts plainly: you have a ship, some money and a sector that is not going to be friendly. An hour later you already have a fleet, debts, suspicious cargo, an officer with character and the thought: “I will fly into one system.” This is not true. In Starsector nobody flies to one system.
The game appeared in alpha back in 2011, then bore the name Starfarer. Development began even earlier, at the end of 2009. Then the name became drier, the world became larger, and players gradually got used to the strange situation: the game still had not been formally released, but had been living for a long time as a full-blown space condition.
Some games come out and get old. This one is still going and flying.
View from above, anxiety inside
Screenshots make it easy to underestimate Starsector in screenshots. Well, yes, the little ships viewed from above. Well, yes, shields, guns, missiles, overheating stripes. Then the battle begins, and it turns out that this is not an arcade game about “who shoots faster,” but nervous tactics about angle, distance, flow, retreat and the moment when your cruiser turned the wrong way with tragic grace.
Here, ship assembly matters; behaviour in battle matters too. You can install heavy guns, you can fill everything with missiles, you can make a neat escort fleet. And then some fast frigate will come in from the flank, and your plan will look like a document that no one signed.
The sector where everything is bad
Combat matters in Starsector, and it works. But the sector matters more: factions, markets, smuggling, pirate bases, abandoned stations, ancient ruins, colonies, expeditions and hyperspace gates that once connected humanity to the greater Domain.
Then the gates fell silent. More than two hundred cycles have passed. Left behind: the Hegemony, Tri-Tachyon, Luddites, pirates and other organizations that are trying to portray civilization on the ruins of civilization. Everyone has their own style of trouble. The player has the opportunity to become another one.
The sector is not friendly. But I’ll be honest: if everything is bad, it means you’re already inside.
The old way of doing indie
Starsector grew without a big publisher, without a Steam campaign and without a high-profile early access with a roadmap for three years ahead. The developers sold the game through the website as a pre-order. Alex Mosolov explained this soberly in an interview in 2014: money from pre-orders allows work to continue, but control remains with the developer.
Translated from indie language, this means: less presentations, more code. Less “we heard the community”, more patches that change the economy, skills, colonies, storylines and sector behavior. At times Starsector feels less developed than armoured over.
Why is it still alpha?
A normal game has a release, version 1.0, a press release and the feeling of a closed door. Starsector instead has a version history, a forum, mods, and players who have long since stopped waiting for permission to enjoy.
Over the years, the game gained layers: first combat, then campaign, economy, research, skills, colonies, new threats, storylines, Academy, gates, abyss. This is not early access as an empty hangar. It’s more like a ship that has been flying for a long time, but the mechanic is still standing next to the open hatch and says: “wait, I’ll screw another thing in here.”
Fashion: separate sector
Modding for Starsector is not cosmetics, but a second life. Without mods, this is a dense author's game. With mods, this is already a communal universe, where new factions, libraries, ships, combat systems, colonial add-ons and decisions live side by side, which sometimes rest on your word of honor, Java and prayer before launch.
This is why the game has such a devoted audience. Starsector expects you to poke around. The game seems to assume that the player will one day want to add another faction, another kind of war, another reason for the laptop to start thinking hard.
Modding is not cosmetic here. This is the second communal universe.
Java, but not funny
Yes, Java powers the game and runs through LWJGL. In the 2010s, this was a smart choice: cross-platform, easier development, easier modding. Now this sounds like an old technical biography, when the build contains fifty mods, the RAM is already looking out the window, and the fan is on alert.
But Java is not the whole problem. Any game where the player voluntarily inserts dozens of factions, scripts, markets, ships and effects, sooner or later begins to ask for leniency. Starsector shows the price of a large sector.
Why do we still play
Because in Starsector there is a rare feeling: the map does not pretend to live; it lives. A war runs somewhere; food is short somewhere else, somewhere pirates have caused a problem, somewhere a thing lies in the ruins that made it worth flying across half the sector.
And also because the game knows how to make small personal stories without cutscenes. You bought an old ship, fixed it up, installed a strange build, survived the battle, lost half the fleet, found an artifact, escaped a patrol with contraband. No director tapped you on the shoulder. The evening disappeared.
Starsector is still not fully released. But there is a suspicious honesty to it. Some games come out and date at once. This one is still assembled, makes noise, breaks under mods, gets repaired, flies again and pretends that the release is somewhere later.
Fuel, as usual, is running out now.