Design a star ship and explore a massive galaxy with your friends. Fight space monsters and find some loot. Or be a pirate...

Wayward Terran Frontier is part space-trader and part exploration-driven ARPG, with a whole lot of functionality packed into the space between. The game takes place inside a procedurally generated galaxy filled with dynamic events, making each game a brand new adventure.

At the every galaxy’s heart is a handful of human worlds which act as safe havens, and commerce hubs with functional economies. The core planets are brimming with life, surrounded by space stations and NPCs going about their daily lives (yours to bother and exploit). Out in the wilds of frontier space, there is more opportunity for profit—but also far greater danger.

The Wayward Terran Frontier developer has launched a kickstarter campaign and is looking for $50,000 to complete the project.

Wayward Terran Frontier lets you experience content the way you choose. You can be an honest freighter captain, delivering cargo and winning the galaxy over with charm and diplomacy from the safety of the core planets, or take to the wild frontier as a pirate in pursuit of plunder and glorious explosions. WTF will initially be a Windows-only release, but a port for Mac and Linux are both long-term goals.

If Wayward Terran Frontier were a novel, then you are the protagonist. The galaxy is filled with dynamic events which react to your actions. The game server is the writer; it knows the history of the universe, all of its actors and their motivations, and its job is to make sure that you and the other actors cross paths.

As you explore the galaxy, the server tracks the movements and interactions of real characters and events, and subtly steers the action your way, encouraging you to explore these events. From suspicious derelict ships to responding to distress calls, you will decide the course of each engagement. Do you save innocent lives, or split loot with the raiders? The choice is yours.

The frontier is a living, breathing world, and its story unfolds whether you are the nearest actor or not. When a merchant vessel runs aground on an asteroid, and you’re nowhere in sight, an NPC or fellow player may be the first one to its loot!

Multiplayer is a huge feature of Wayward Terran Frontier, perhaps even the defining element. Cooperatively or competitively, the frontier has much to offer.

• Fly in a fleet The game’s travel system matches the speed of all ships in a fleet to that of the fastest ship, so that no man is left behind in the search for treasure. 
• Crew the same ship The Console system divides ship functions intelligently between as few or many players as you like. Design your ship with friends in mind, or play the lone wolf and fly solo. 
• Share in the plunder The world of Wayward Terran Frontier is vast and rich with resources, making data the only loot of real value. Free to reproduce, all loot is shared equally between your fleet.
• Build it together Although there are more technical hurdles to overcome, cooperative ship-building is a long term goal.

Wayward Terran Frontier is at its core a role-playing game, and character growth is an important measure of how far you’ve come. Your journey will drive you to unlock the secrets of the galaxy, but this wisdom lies far from the safety of the core planets. To meet the challenges of the frontier, you will need to continually upgrade your ship.

New technology, weapons, and ship hulls are discovered through exploration, or purchased from vendors for credits. Your budget for allocating ship components and assigning crew will be increased through your exploits. While your crew, ships, credits, and loot never stray from the reach of the cold hand of death, nothing in the galaxy can snatch away your budget or secured unlocks. 

Budget is an EXP-like currency which is rewarded immediately, whereas technology unlocks must be safely secured at a space station to become permanent. Finding treasure out in the black is only half the journey, the rest is making it back alive. 

Death is usually a permanent affair, but that’s your clone’s problem. You’ll control them from the warmth and safety of a cozy neural-interface pod on a distant planet. Whatever resources you haven’t tossed into storage when your ship violently explodes may be lost forever, but your character will live on.

Wayward Terran Frontier is full of tons of different ship designs. As soon as you unlock a ship hull, it’s ready to fly. But before you set off, you can choose to customize its insides. The game uses a modular tile-based system that lets you truly redesign the floor plan of your entire ship. This plays a key role in ship-to-ship combat, as a vessel is no more than the sum of its tiles. 

Customize your ship to overwhelm your enemies with brute force, or target specific subsystems and watch as the enemy is burned alive by hot plasma, or blown away by a hull breach.

The combat system will constantly be expanded and improved upon with the addition of new ship modules and effects. While the current version of the ship editor has a bit of a learning curve, this will be resolved in the final version.

Crew will have basic inventories and be able to make use of hand weapons and items like pressure suits to fend off boarding parties, invade enemy ships, and protect themselves even while your ship is falling apart.

I am also investigating the creation of a system for befriending NPC characters to use as crew. More expensive than standard crew, these NPCs would provide special bonuses to your ship. 

Space stations and inhabited planets will buy and sell commodities and luxury goods with fluctuating prices, allowing you to ferry cargo from one world to another for profit (or steal it from an NPC transport).

While I’d like to implement a much more complex, player-driven economy with real player-produced assets, this would require significantly more funding, and would likely be completed quite some time after the core game launch.