Belt Zero: The Long Drift

You are stranded. Your jump went wrong, your ship is a wreck, and the only thing still connecting you to the rest of the galaxy is a drill that somehow still runs. Belt Zero is a space idle game that carries you from a crippled one-man miner to an empire of stations, colonies and trade fleets. It keeps running while you are away. Exactly as it would have run with you. Almost everything is broken at the start. The cargo airlock is jammed — you cannot sell a thing. The engine is dead — you cannot even reach the next ore. Workbench, drone bay, navigation core, onboard computer: all of it dark. Every part is repaired with ore you mine yourself. And every part that comes back online opens up a piece of the game: first selling, then travel, then drones, then modules. You unlock your own game step by step, out of what you pull from the rock. No click counter, no progress bar that eventually fills up. The drill works continuously and knocks chunks off the asteroid that drift freely in space. Only what you collect counts. - Tractor beam — hold a key, pull chunks in. Free, always available. - Collector drones — five tiers, gathering chunks automatically. Offline too. - Quality tiers — every chunk is rolled: Common through Flawless. - Drill depth D1–D10 — the deeper you go, the more valuable the ore and the hungrier the drill. Past D4 the belt turns dangerous. - Thermals — Normal, Boost, Overdrive. More yield, more heat. Overheat and output drops until the cooler catches up. And the asteroid itself is never the same twice: ten types, from the golden motherlode through the gas pocket to the decaying chunk that puts you on a timer. Some open a brief window where a click at the right second pays off. 17 upgrade lines, ten tiers each — and none of them is just a number. What you build, you see on the hull: the crippled pod becomes a miner, the miner becomes a mining cruiser with four drill heads, cargo containers and three times the size. On top of that, a power grid of your own: emergency reactor, fission core, solar sail, plasma burner, fusion core. You split the output across drilling, systems, cooling and charging — and decide whether to burn fuel or run on starlight. Better drones, scan probes and generators are not handed to you: you research them in the lab, with operating hours as the price of entry. Those who have drilled a lot get to take the next step. The Alpha Belt is only the beginning. Every other sector has its own star, its own colour and its own ores: a white dwarf over ice worlds, a red giant over lava planets, a pulsar in the ion veil — and in the Core Splinter sector a black hole with a glowing accretion disc. You do not unlock sectors by level, you find them with a scan probe: build it, launch it, wait. Then you map every ore individually with a deep scan. And each sector carries a signature — in the Cryo Field no chunk is ever lost, Basalt yields giant rocks, at the Core Splinter your drill depth grows faster. Changing sectors is a journey: engines charge, stars smear, a tunnel tears open — and you come out under a different sky. Every sector holds a trade buoy. It does not pay the same everywhere, and it does not pay the same at all times: prices move in layered waves — a slow sector cycle, a fast ore rhythm. Those waves keep rolling like tides while you are away. You can read them (and with the market scanner even forecast them), store ore in the cargo depot at the low and sell at the high. Dump too much at once and you push your own price down. - Delivery contracts — 38 jobs with loot you get nowhere else: blueprints, materials, jump fragments. - Trade routes — freighters sell in distant sectors for you, offline included. Far markets pay more, but cost cargo to pirates. - Escorts and insurance — against exactly that risk. - Wandering markets — rare special buoys that briefly pay absurd prices. Raw ore is the beginning, not the goal. The transmutator turns it into refined materials over time — in three-stage chains where each stage devours the one before it. Materials become components, components become assemblies. And all of it gets used: high ship tiers demand refined goods, station modules demand components, the great structures demand assemblies. Mine only, and you stall — refine only, and you run out of things to refine. Nothing in the hangar appears at the click of a button: drones, probes and freighters need a workbench, materials and time. You see what is being built, and you can cancel it. A derelict structure drifts in every sector. You can go and look at it — your ship visibly flies over, and in front of you stands a wreck many times your size. And you can salvage it. The wreck becomes a factory: reactors, refineries, assembly works, storage, market docks, research labs, shipyards. Every module eats power, and when power runs short the grid throttles by priority instead of simply stopping. A logistics network moves goods between your stations; one designated hub pulls surplus to where it is needed. From here you launch research expeditions to 52 destinations: you send a drone or a whole ship, it travels, and what comes back is decided by a roll. And once your works are big enough, you begin a megaproject in six build phases — the largest structure in the game, swallowing everything your factories can produce. A habitat on your station brings the first settlers. From there you settle the planets of the sector — agrarian, mining, industrial, tech, each type with its own output and its own needs. And then it gets big. Every colony carries a full economy: 66 building types across six systems (power, housing, agriculture, production, services, infrastructure), 17 goods in production chains, a power grid, labour, logistics. You build one at a time, by tens or by hundreds, and research tiers per building type. An outpost of a few hundred settlers becomes a world of millions. At night you can see their lights from orbit. The buoys are not ownerless. Behind them stand five peoples with their own territories, their own tastes, and a web of relations in which the Cryo Conclave and the Magma Forge cannot stand each other. Trade with one and your standing there rises — and falls with their rivals. Standing buys better prices, then contracts, then treaties (trade pact, neutrality, alliance), then exclusive blueprints and a token shop with its own currency. You can send envoys who quietly build standing on site, send gifts, and mediate in conflicts — or take a side. Broker peace between two hostile peoples and you open alliances with both, and may take their settlers into your own colonies. That is a goal for many hours of play. Wealth draws attention. The fuller your warehouses, the sooner pirates show up — as an announced raid with a warning window you can intercept. A defence grid and a garrison keep them out. If you want, you go on the offensive: nine warship classes with ten tiers and installable modules, raids on pirate targets, sieges of pirate nests — with the odds shown before you commit and a real risk of losing ships. Go far enough and you declare war on a people, take their outposts and negotiate peace later. And if you would rather not, you do not have to. One switch in the options sets the game to peaceful: no threat, no raids. Everything else stays playable. The belt holds more than ore. Your scanner uncovers anomalies — 18 kinds in five categories, from salvage fields through signals to phenomena. You send a probe, it works over time, and at the end you make a choice that can go more than one way. Deep down lie precursor relics: twelve finds in three sets, each with a permanent bonus. The deeper you drill, the more likely you are to find them — the complete third set rewards players who really go down. On top of that, salvaged AI cores you assign across twenty posts where they grow with you, ore mastery with specialisation paths per ore, and 303 achievements — from your first repair to goals you will work at for weeks. Sooner or later your FTL core is whole again, and you jump onward. The jump resets your upgrades — but everything you carry in meta upgrades, achievements, relics, AI cores and knowledge stays. The next run starts faster, reaches further and opens ores that were out of reach before. Five meta lines grow across every run. Past the tenth drill depth waits the abyss with finds of its own. And cards you slot before jumping reshape the next run: more yield against more consumption, more value against more risk. And for anyone who has wrung all of that dry, there is a New Game+ — with a species that was not selectable before. Offline counts exactly like online. Not roughly — exactly. Same maths, same results, verified by a dedicated test run that computes both paths against each other. You are never punished for closing the game. - No FOMO — nothing expires while you are away. Pending decisions really do wait for you. - No dead ends — starter ore is always minable, maintenance always affordable. You can never soft-lock yourself. - A welcome-back report showing what your empire did in your absence — from the ore hauled in to the colony that gained a level. - A logbook with history graphs across your entire play time. - Full English and German, every text and every menu. - Buy once. No ads, no microtransactions, no energy bars. And if you do stick around, the game pays you for it: active moments like overcharge, resonance hits and the tractor beam give you more than idling ever could. Belt Zero: The Long Drift — mine your way back to the stars.