SUNFARERS

Drift and Thrust

Momentum-based flight. Your ship carries its velocity: thrust forward, cut engines, drift. The nav computer plots acceleration curves, cruise phases, deceleration burns, and orbital approaches. Take manual control and that calculus is yours. The system is vast enough that patience and fuel economy matter as much as raw thrust.

What the Drive Costs

The entropic drive folds space. Weeks of travel compress into hours. But the passage leaves its residue: voices in frequencies that shouldn’t carry sound, a lingering unease that doesn’t fade immediately after arrival. Crew focus governs transit speed; a sharp, rested crew pushes through faster than an exhausted one.

The Queue

Stations have limited docking bays. Approach, queue, orbit while you wait. Merchant haulers circle alongside you, some loaded with Ximeng steel, others running medical supplies to Sancturia. Sancturian purifier corvettes hold formation nearby, scanning for contraband. Privateers idle at the edge of sensor range. Civilian transports carry passengers between worlds. The system runs on traffic, and every berth has a queue.

The Wall

At the system’s edge, where reality thins: instruments begin to disagree with each other. Range finders return contradictory numbers. Crew report hearing their own names spoken in almost-familiar voices. The stars ahead shine in colors that don’t correspond to any known spectrum. Ships that cross the boundary broadcast increasingly incoherent transmissions, or go silent entirely. None return. The system is finite, and the boundary is not a metaphor.

Keep Them in Sight

The EVA person remains part of your crew, outside the hull. The Pilot must hold manual steering, range, view cone, visibility arc, and a clear watchline while debris moves through the field. Drift too far and the tether becomes lethal. Point the main thrusters the wrong way and the exhaust plume can hurt the person you sent out.

The Field Pushes Back

Careful extraction is slower and gentler. Forceful work is fast and raises pressure. Thresholds launch directional debris waves that threaten crew, pods, shields, and rivals. During the Listening, the watchline tightens and controls may invert, but the impossible conditions can leave more material intact.

Someone Else Has a Claim

Rival salvagers arrive with their own contracts and their own idea of ownership. Some can be paid. Some steal the named cache and run. Rarely, the wreck still holds a previous salvager: recruit them, carry them home as a passenger, hand them to a rescue network, or make a choice the Chronicle will remember.

The Spiral Bazaar

Nova Maracaibo’s market occupies the system’s only neutral ground: a station carved from an old Artery node. The Spiral Bazaar rises in tiers, every faction trading openly under the Accords. Cargo from all seven worlds changes hands here. Pirates operate from Maracaibo’s margins too, hunting trade routes between stations, interdicting cargo haulers, and selling looted goods back through the very bazaars their victims were heading toward. Violence inside the station is bad for business. Outside, the lanes tell a different story.

Crises and Incentives

Entropy blooms disrupt supply chains. A surge near Sancturia damages agricultural infrastructure; food prices spike, morale drops, and the cascading effects ripple outward through connected trade routes. The system generates delivery incentives: premium contracts for hauling relief goods where they’re needed most. Humanitarian traders accept losses to run those routes. Others wait for prices to peak. Your choice shapes which stations recover and which ones spiral.

Hands on the Guns

Turrets calculate intercept trajectories. But someone has to sit in the chair. A rested gunner reads the lead, compensates, lands the shot. An exhausted one watches rounds sail past the hull. The math is the same. The hands are different. Multiple turret stations let you mount a broadside, if you have the crew to staff them. Request direct control and every ready barrel follows your aim; if the seat is empty, the order waits while someone runs to take it.

The Command Deck

Fourteen abilities span weapons, flight, engineering, sensors, and signature control. Crew dispatch, reactor health, local entropy, station power, cooldowns, and the person in the chair decide what is actually ready. A shield can save the hull. An Entropic Slip can put it somewhere else. A Dead Letter can leave the target carrying a problem that outlives the missile.

Pulled from the Fold

Ships in threshold space leave a wake. The interdiction array locks onto that signature, charges, and pulls the target back into real space. Freighters, patrol corvettes, pirates running with stolen cargo. The array takes time to charge, and the window is narrow. Miss it, and the target is through. The same applies to you: fly a trade lane near hostile space and listen for the charge whine that means someone else’s array has found your wake.

Every Ship Fights Differently

NPC ships don’t line up and take turns. They orbit at range, joust through your firing arcs, kite away from your turrets, break and evade when the hull gets thin, or adapt their approach mid-engagement when they realize what you’re doing. Every encounter reads differently.

Autonomous Routines

Set work priorities and your crew figures out the rest. They walk to stations, sit down, do the work, break for food, find a bunk when they’re exhausted. If the hull takes damage during a meal, the engineer puts down the fork and runs. You set the priorities. They make the judgment calls in between.

The Listening

Every 7.3 days, entropy effects intensify across the system. Shadows deepen where no object casts them. Sensors log readings that contradict each other. Matter blurs at the edges of perception. Crews report hearing their own names in almost-familiar voices. Duration: eleven minutes to six hours. Ximeng suspends permit processing. Sancturia chants the Litany of Angles. Chloamy throws parties. Light’s End celebrates. Everyone else waits it out.

It is not only a change in the sky. Reactor output can sag or surge. Turrets turn without firing. Drones leave the hull and come back as rebuild orders. Cargo appears, vanishes, or becomes something else. Planetary incidents begin under the noise, and ordinary ships find reasons to attack each other. Some readings are false. The consequences are not.

The System Remembers

Bounties follow attribution. Cargo you deliver appears on station shelves. Planetary incidents alter prices, production, enforcement, entropy pressure, and the contracts people are willing to offer. Salvage survivors remember whether you carried them home. SNOAS Airwaves tells the public version; the Chronicle keeps the version your ship lived through. Your reputation reaches the next port before you do.

Every compartment carries its own ambient layer, proximity-gated and mixed in real time. Walk past engineering and hear the coupling lattice thrum. Pass through the mess and catch the low murmur of crew between shifts. The cargo hold echoes differently full than empty. These layers stack, overlap, and thin out as you move through the ship. The music responds to state: docked and loading, drifting between worlds, locked in combat, or passing through the fold where the drive’s voice drowns everything else out.

From the Soundtrack

All music composed in-house. Four pieces from the game.