Starmade asteroid how to#
Starmade asteroid full#

I have somehow painted half of the teleporter room dark red and left the other half garish grey. Light envelopes me and dumps me into the bowels of my new ship. I christen my new spaceship the ‘Stroppy Garcia’ and set off to find a teleporter, so I can finally board him and go for a spin. People don’t mess with you if you’ve got spikes. I add some engines to the back, thrusters all over the outside and finish off with some decorative spikes. An amorphous hunk of disordered cubic metal, cursed with submarine-like corridors and an engine room with all the essential machinery jammed into the same twenty metres. Good work, Interstellar Rift.Īnyhow, I design my ship. I love these types of screens and sci-fi games are where they belong. The kind that you don’t ‘zoom into’ like in most games but navigate them while retaining your first-person perspective all the time. It’s worth stopping here to say that the computer screens are lovely, almost ‘touchable’. Up in a control room, above the bar, you can design and construct a ship from another type of terminal. Eventually, I create enough copper and iron for what I’ll need.

Starmade asteroid full#

You can only carry a limited number of boxes and the warehouse was already full to the brim, so for a while I end up playing a rubbish first-person version of a Sokoban game.

Starmade asteroid how to#

I spend a good while figuring out how to do this, even though the stores of the room are already filled with boxes of materials (mined by who? where is everyone?). From there you haul the boxes into the next room and dump them into a hopper, where you can process the ore into delicious metal. Here you can use the computer terminals in one room to teleport asteroids aboard and slice them into boxes of copper and iron ore (or water if they are an ice asteroid). I head to a ship called ‘miningstation’ where I find a bar with a jukebox playing light jazz. Once I realised you can use the teleporter to get from one ship to any other within range, I hopped out and started exploring. But luckily you can pass right through the door, like some kind of horrible toilet phantom. The doors to the toilet cubicles do not open. A hangover from too much Alien: Isolation. On the bridge of the ‘starter station’ I instinctively avoid a vent on the ceiling. But everywhere I go it is creepily empty. The ships have that clean Star Trek aesthetic, shiny chromatic surfaces rather than the rough-and-tumble of metal grates. The first moments of the game are almost eerie. And there is, thanks to its first-person wandering and delightful machinery, a lot of sweetness to it. But that is what comes of being in the earliest of early access. It’s rather ‘light’ on other planned features at the minute (combat, trading, functional vending machines). It falls somewhere within Starmade or Space Engineers’ remit of building big, mad space-things and then flying those space-things around with a desperately understaffed crew of fellow players. But it is also a game about stacking boxes and trying to figure out why you are suddenly asphyxiating. Interstellar Rift is a game about making spaceships and mining asteroids. A time of scientific glory, a time in which anything and everything is possible. Truly, this is a magnificent time to be alive. The ship’s corridors shine with the glow of futuristic pride. The doors part with a welcoming breeze of pressurised air. The computer terminals flicker on and off as I walk past, chirruping for attention. We are floating among asteroids and surrounded by a flotilla of other impossibly advanced spacecraft. I spawn on an impossibly advanced spacecraft. But this week he's on holiday, and so in his stead Brendan Caldwell has played Interstellar Rift, a multiplayer starship construction sim. Each week Marsh Davies battles the overwhelming urge to flee, struggles through an Early Access game, and comes back with any stories he can find inside.