Station Keeper

Welcome aboard, Commander. Head office has handed you the keys to a modest station in low orbit: one core, landing pads, container yard and a crew who are already arguing over the good bunks. Out past the warp beacon, haulers from the Vesta shipyards to the Ganymede ice docks are looking for somewhere to unload. Station Keeper is a real-time space station management game. Grow a cramped outpost into a sprawling orbital hub, keep the traffic flowing, and turn a profit. And when the station swings into the planet's shadow, make sure there's enough power left to keep everyone breathing. Build Your Station, Piece by Piece Snap together hull nodes, corridors, trusses and adapters in multiple size classes, then fill your station with container yards, tank farms, gas sphere arrays, hazmat vaults, data centers, crew quarters, reactors and more. - Complex connections: Hatches carry crew and power, trusses carry power only. A module that isn't linked back to the core is just expensive scenery. - Manage resources: Energy, crew and life support all have to keep pace as you expand. Grow too fast and you'll find modules in the dark. - Scale up: Small, medium and large hulls, heavy spines and extra-large ports let a starter outpost become a mega station. Run Traffic Control Every ship that wants to dock asks you first. Accept or turn it away, pick its berth, assign a tug, and clear it to approach. - Ship navigation. Spaceships warp in at your beacons, hold until cleared, then follow planned, collision-aware flight paths to their berths. - Tugs and towing. Big freighters need a tug to reach the ports, and extra-large bulk carriers need two working together. - Limited traffic lanes. Only so many ships can maneuver at once. Build Traffic Control towers to handle the rush hour. - Maintain your reputation. Leave a captain hanging too long and they'll divert, and tell their company all about it. Multiple kinds of Cargo and Passengers Containers, liquids, gas, hazardous materials and data each need their own storage, pads and ports, and each pays differently. - Liquids pump in and out fast. Gas tenants pay a premium. Data clients rent server space and planetary uplink bandwidth. - Hazmat pays the most, and punishes you if a vault loses power. - Scheduled passenger lines run to a timetable: late arrivals cost reputation. Premium lines only sign on if you've built the lounges and hotels they expect. Contracts, Tenants and the Bottom Line Companies apply to lease space aboard your station for a set number of cycles. - Read each offer: what they'll store, what they'll pay and what ships they fly. Make sure you actually have the room. - Rent arrives every cycle and docking fees with every ship. Create special modules to charge for fuel or attract high paying passengers. - Happy tenants raise your reputation, which brings bigger and better offers. Unhappy ones take their business elsewhere and breaking a lease early costs you. Research Your Way Forward A tiered technology tree across cargo, structure, power, operations and corporate branches. Build research labs to open new tiers, and unlock new cargo families, faster ports, larger hulls, twin-tug towing, better contracts and more. A Living Orbit Your station circles a planet through sunrise, full daylight, sunset and eclipse. - Solar arrays go dark in the planet's shadow - make sure you have enough batteries to keep the lights on. - Watch the sun rise over the planet's edge through the station haze, floodlit berths cut through the dark, and engines flare as freighters jump to warp. ..and more! Station Keeper is in active development. Features on the roadmap include: - Industrial buildings: Migrate from a cargo station to an orbital industrial powerhouse - Career/Story mode: Take a story-based guided approach in your journey from a small space platform to an interstellar HUB. - Space weather and hazards: Scenarios and sandbox mode with higher difficulty and the modules to counter anything the dark void can throw at it.