The working title is Dwarf Trek: Weyland-Yutani Hammer 40k. Every word earns its place. Every word would also get me sued into oblivion by a different media conglomerate. So: still looking.
Why this exists
I wanted to play a roguelike that could actually surprise me. Most games can’t, because they’re not deep enough — the surprise budget runs out fast. If I build it myself, I know the systems, but I don’t know what they’ll do. Emergent behaviour has always been one of my favourite parts of programming: it’s like diagnosing the psychology of a thinking stone. Unexpected outcomes aren’t bugs to fix, they’re the point.
So procedural generation isn’t a feature, it’s the premise. The whole point is exploring lore in a universe I didn’t write, because the math wrote it instead.
The reference points are Rimworld and Cosmoteer. Grimdark survival and ship-building, with Stellaris-style ancient mysteries underneath. The design philosophy, if you want to call it that, has mostly been: how do we keep things feeling liveable? Which sounds at odds with the horror and psionic elements, but isn’t really. The horror is more interesting when you have something to lose.
The simulation problem
It started as a turn-based game. That didn’t last.
Once you try to simulate a full universe in a single turn — faction movement, resource extraction, NPC decisions, ship physics — you realise it’s impossible. So I started thinking in terms of bubbles of simulation fidelity. Different parts of the universe run at different tick rates: system level, planet level, inner POI playfields. And systems that don’t have a player in them don’t tick at all. Why run the simulation where no one’s watching?
The honest version: the player doesn’t know what they don’t know. We’re writing their story, and their crew’s story. The rest of the universe is a backdrop. It doesn’t need to be real — it needs to be plausible.
How the gaps get filled
When you leave somewhere, we store a seed: the broad-stroke state the region was in when you departed. When you come back, we rapidly replay the world’s history for that region from that seed. Deterministic replay means we can regenerate a plausible current state — spawn the right NPCs, trigger the right build events — without ever having simulated the intervening time.
You only need to store enough to reconstruct. Player-built structures and special POIs get static storage as an escape hatch, because if you built it, you can figure out a way to store it. Everything else regenerates.
The implication: you’re not the only thing out there. Shit changes while you’re gone. Don’t forget to grab the good stuff before you leave.
What this means for lore
The simulation being lazy isn’t a compromise — it’s the design. Emergent stories coming from deterministic math is the whole reason this exists. I love lore. The idea that an ancient mystery or a faction war or a weird psionic event could just fall out of the procedural systems, without anyone writing it, is what makes this worth building.
The horror lives in the gaps. Not because we put it there, but because that’s where randomness does its best work.
Current state
Active development, non-linear because jumping between systems frequently reveals better orderings. A proper linear roadmap is on the list. Next milestone work is focusing on getting the simulation replay system solid enough that the world feels consistent when you return to places you’ve been.
The name remains unresolved.