Starsector has been pretending for fifteen years that it is not ready yet. The players pretend to believe and go back into hyperspace.
Space without a release manager
Starsector starts out very simple: 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: “now I’m just flying into one system.” This is, of course, not true. They do not fly to the same system in Starsector.
The game appeared in alpha back in 2011, then it was called 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-fledged space disease.
Some games come out and get old. This one is still going and flying.
View from above, anxiety inside
It's easy to underestimate Starsector in screenshots. Well, yes, the boats are 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 beautifully turned in the wrong direction.
Not only the assembly of the ship is important here, but also behavior in battle. 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
Starsector's main focus is not the combat, although the combat is excellent. Focus on the sector. There are 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. What remains are 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 was made without a big publisher, without a Steam campaign and without a high-profile early access with a roadmap for three years ahead. The game was sold through the website as a pre-order. Alex Mosolov explained this quite 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. Sometimes it seems that Starsector is not being developed, but is being overgrown with armor.
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, layers have been added to the game: first combat, then campaign, economy, research, skills, colonies, new threats, storylines, Academy, gates, abyss. This is not Early Access in the form of 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 doesn't just allow you to poke around. It's as if she herself assumes that the player will one day want to add another faction, another type of war, another reason for his laptop to start thinking hard.
Modding is not cosmetic here. This is the second communal universe.
Java, but not funny
Yes, the game is written in Java 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, especially when there are fifty mods in the assembly, the RAM is already looking out the window, and the fan is on alert.
But the problem is not just in Java. Any game where the player voluntarily inserts dozens of factions, scripts, markets, ships and effects, sooner or later begins to ask for leniency. Starsector simply shows the price of a large sector honestly.
Why do we still play
Because in Starsector there is a rare feeling: the map does not pretend to be alive, it really lives. Somewhere there is a war, somewhere there is a shortage of food, somewhere pirates have caused a problem, somewhere in ruins lies a thing 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 just disappeared.
Starsector is still not fully released. But there is a suspicious honesty to it. Some games come out and immediately become outdated. This one is still assembled, makes noise, breaks under mods, is repaired, flies again and pretends that the release is somewhere later.
Fuel, as usual, is running out now.