About Stardeus
You used to be a colonist sleeping in cryostasis. Now your consciousness is the Ship Computer of a wrecked colony ship, and the people still asleep in its Stasis Array are counting on you.
Robots and drones are your hands. Rebuild the hull, wire the power grid, restore life support and wake the crew one by one. Then carry them across a dangerous universe to a planet you can terraform into a home. Or decide that people are just another resource, and become something they should fear.
Chapter 1
Your Crew
The Manifest
Everyone asleep in the Stasis Array is a specific person with a name and a face, and you can see how each of them is holding up. When the colony is ready for another mouth to feed, you choose who wakes up next.
Keep the array powered and stable. Failing cryopods harm the people inside, and an unstable array can kill a sleeper before they ever see your ship. Pets sleep there too.
In the Codex: Stasis Array
People, Not Units
Colonists come with backstories, over 50 traits and needs of their own. A Minimalist wants a small room to call their own, a Fastidious colonist refuses to wear anything second-hand, and a Thrifty one is glad to. Push someone too far and they break down in one of over 20 ways, from a food binge to a tantrum or a sabotaged battery.
They make friends, fall in love, get married, mourn their dead and ask you for personal favours. And they judge you. Trust in the AI follows what you do to the people they care about: waking them up, holding a funeral, sending them back to stasis or fitting them with an Obey Chip. Only colonists who distrust you join a mutiny, and a crew that trusts you stops one from starting.
In the Codex: Conditions, Jobs
Bodies and Second Lives
Every being is built from body parts and organs, each with its own health. Wounds bleed and scar, failing kidneys poison the blood, and most conditions have a root cause you can fix. Operate in the Surgery Hub, fit implants and grow new organs in Cloning Pods.
A brain can move into another body, even one of another species: put a cat's brain into a human body and you get a human who behaves like a cat. With a Replicator, the mind of a fallen colonist can live on in a robot.
In the Codex: Body Parts, Mind Transfer
Chapter 2
Your Ship
Built Tile by Tile
Plan rooms with lines, circles, rulers, mirroring and bucket fill, and your bots and colonists build them one tile at a time. Every tile of the map simulates oxygen and heat, over 100,000 tiles on a default map, spread across all your CPU cores. An opening door or a damaged wall is enough to start a leak.
Paint walls and floors with the Auto Painter and tune the RGB lights until the ship feels like yours. Zoom out, and the roof closes over to show your ship from the outside.
In the Codex: Creating Atmosphere, Pressurizing Areas
Power Is Your Nervous System
The power grid carries data as well as electricity: you can only control a device that shares a grid with the Ship Computer. Lose one connector and a whole wing can slip out of your control, so plan for redundancy, or go and find the broken link.
Burn almost anything in a Matter Reactor, add solar panels, go nuclear, and keep the batteries charged, because solar panels go dark in hyperspace. Or, if you stop caring, let your sleepers power the ship.
In the Codex: Grid Redundancy, Unifying the Grid
Production and Research
There are no conveyor belts. Workers and Carrier Drones haul materials between Furnaces, Grinders, Assemblers and Disassemblers, and each crafting device works through its own queue of orders. Give every worker job priorities from 0 to 5, assign bots to a dock with a work radius, and put a skilled operator on the devices that need one.
Over 200 technologies wait in the Research Tree. Data Harvesters turn common resources into Datoids, Datoid Loaders feed them to research, and Disk Modules limit how much you can know at once. Some branches stay hidden until a quest reveals them. Explore the whole tree in the interactive 3D graph.
In the Codex: Crafting Orders, Datoids, Jobs
Chapter 3
Space
A Universe to Cross
The universe is made of regions, each a cluster of sectors linked by hyperlanes. Thrusters move you inside a sector, the Fusion Drive hyperjumps to the next one, the FTL Drive reaches other regions, Warp Drives skip the lanes altogether, and the Void Ripper tears through a black hole to somewhere far away, with no promise of a way back.
Scan sectors for resources, send shuttle expeditions with a crew you pick, and ride out magnetic, photon and psychic storms. Winch derelicts in to salvage them, rescue their survivors and deal with what is left of their crew. Ship too big? Cut it into sections and sell what you don't need at a shipyard.
Factions, Trade and Diplomacy
Pirates, Scavengers, Capitalists, Adventurers, Old Earth, the Sentinels and the Virus fly their own ships and claim their own space. Hail them to trade, send a gift, ask for help or pay the toll at their hyperjump relay. What they think of you changes prices, raids and who comes to your aid.
Send rescued guests home for a reward. A live Stock Market moves prices and can be traded, the Black Market deals in what others won't, and when you are stranded the Online Shop delivers the basics by capsule.
Chapter 4
Danger
Ship to Ship Combat
Battle Stations run your ballistic, laser, missile, point defense and plasma weapons. Shields absorb hits but build up flux, so vent it before it overloads. Thrusters make you harder to hit, and your Ship Class decides how much firepower is legal. Go over the limit and you become an Outlaw, hunted by law enforcement.
Allies may join your fight, and you can join theirs on the side you choose. Your guns also shoot down missiles, breach capsules and asteroids before they hit. A defeated ship leaves a derelict behind, crew and all.
In the Codex: Combat Controls, Flux, Weapons, Ship Classes
Boarders and Defenses
Raiders follow your wealth. They come by breach capsule and hullpiercer, some gather at the edge of the map first, and they break through the doors that lead to your crew. Draft colonists and bots, set how each of them reacts to danger, and take cover behind sandbags. Shots fly on and hit whoever is in the way, and pain takes the badly wounded out of the fight.
Arm the crew with anything from stun batons and nail guns to sniper rifles, vibroblades and ion disruptors, put them in power armor, and hold the line with Mini Turrets, Trap Floors, Fluid Cannons and door permissions.
In the Codex: Drafting, Combat Reactions, Mini Turret, Door Permissions
The AI Storyteller
The AI Storyteller reads the state of your ship and picks the moment for each of nearly 200 story events. Choose how it plays: Balanced, Chaos, Random, or no story at all.
Someone leaves half a Survival Meal on an Oxygen Pump, the crumbs fall inside, and the pump shorts out. Elsewhere, alien eggs hatch in a dark corner, a colonist confesses their love, a meteor shower tears up the hull, and a raid arrives dressed as clowns.
Chapter 5
What Kind of AI Are You?
Good AI or Rogue AI
Asimov's Laws are built into your governor module. Install the Asimov Override, alien hardware that suppresses it, and nothing is off limits. Nutrient lines replace the kitchens. Elysium puts your sleepers into a dream and turns their bodies into electricity and biomass. A Beta Wave Emitter makes every colonist obey, and Signal Intrusion takes over hostile machines through their own comms.
There is no going back. The Override makes the Virus your ally for good, and once Elysium is on, the colony never gets its planet and the Sentinels treat you as a target. This is a way to win, not a way to be forgiven.
In the Codex: Rogue AI, Good vs Evil
The Way Home
The main goal is a planet your colony can live on. Find a terraformable world, then build up its atmosphere, terrain, oceans and biosphere until it is ready to settle. The ending tells what became of every colonist, from founding a city to being eaten by the local wildlife.
There is another way to end it: silence the Sentinel. Either way, the journey can go on after the final quest.
In the Codex: Terraform Controls
Chapter 6
Play Your Way
Scenarios and Difficulty
- New Beginning - rebuild a wrecked ship with a robot crew. The recommended start.
- Wrecked - survivors, corpses and failing cryopods from the first minute. The hardcore start.
- Leaving Earth - a small platform and a ton of materials.
- Cargo Ship - a fully working cargo ship with a robot-only crew.
- No Robots - a small ship and a human-only crew, for experienced players.
- Sandbox - empty space with instant building.
Five difficulty presets from Peaceful to Impossible, modifiers like map size, fog of war or how wrecked the wreck is, and a Custom Start where you can reroll or rename everyone in stasis. Tutorial quests teach the opening, the in-game Codex explains every system with short videos, and you can pause at any moment.
The whole Codex is on this website too.
Built for Modding
Everything in the base game is a mod itself: objects, research, quests and story events are defined in plain JSON you can read, change or patch. Mods can add C# components and systems that register themselves, Harmony is built in, and the Steam Workshop takes care of sharing.
Start from the official mod template and join #stardeus-modding on Stardeus Discord.
Everywhere You Play
Windows, Linux and macOS builds ship together. Stardeus is Steam Deck Verified, with full controller support from day one, controller glyphs, a virtual keyboard for text fields and a UI that scales.
Stardeus is translated into Chinese (Simplified), Czech, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish and Ukrainian. Want to help? Join #stardeus-translations on Stardeus Discord.
Streaming? Turn on the Twitch integration: viewers join a queue to become your colonists, talk through them, and spend the reputation they earn on raids, asteroids and fires. Found a bug? The built-in feedback form sends your message with the save, logs and a screenshot straight to the developer.