SpaceSlog

Some games are content to borrow a formula. SpaceSlog wants to out-simulate the games it learned from. Produno Games Studios — one person, working from clear love for RimWorld, Dwarf Fortress, FTL and The Expanse — has built a colony sim where your colony is a ship, and where the ship itself is the most complicated character on board.

Simulation with actual teeth

The depth here is not marketing language. Electrical power is genuinely modelled: you lay cables, place generators and batteries, and hang solar panels to harvest energy off nearby stars. Atmosphere is its own system, with gas generators, scrubbers, tanks, ducting and vents — and if you breach the hull without the right gear on, that matters. Temperature is simulated too, so drifting near a star means scrambling to install heat extractors. Even lighting is modelled, with stars throwing real light into the dark.

Layer on crew moods that can tip into outright rebellion, a grim anatomy system where you sever alien limbs and let them bleed out to harvest meat and hide, and a galaxy that regenerates every run, and you get something with the emergent-story engine these games live or die by.

When five systems fail at once and your crew is suffocating in the dark, SpaceSlog delivers exactly the disaster comedy the genre is famous for.

Mod support is a real strength too: everything lives in JSON files, Workshop support shipped immediately, and the developer spent over a decade building A World of Ice and Fire for Mount & Blade — a track record that makes the long-haul promise more believable than most.

The catch is time and money

Now the hard part. SpaceSlog entered Early Access in April and the developer’s own estimate for leaving it is February 2028 at the earliest — nearly two more years. The roadmap is enormous (ship-to-ship boarding combat, away parties, derelicts, taming, hydroponics, a full economy) and explicitly not guaranteed. Presentation is spartan, there are five achievements, no Turkish support, and Steam sits at Mixed, 64% of 42 reviews.

At $24.99 that’s a lot to ask, and the $14.99 DLC that puts a custom character in the game sits awkwardly next to a base game this unfinished.

To the developer’s credit, they say the quiet part out loud, twice: buy this based on what’s in it now, not what’s planned. That’s more honesty than most Early Access pages offer, and it should shape your decision.

Verdict

If you’re the kind of player who reads wikis for fun and wants the most systems-dense space colony sim available, there’s already something special here — and the modding foundation means it could become a genre staple. But it’s early, thin around the edges, and priced like a finished game two years before it will be one. Try the free demo, wishlist it, and check back after a few major updates. The bones are excellent; the body isn’t built yet.