Avorion

My 200 Hour save file got corrupted on a crash, no big deal I'll load a back up.

The crash also corrupted all my backups.

How does this even happen? Thank god I made manual backups. You shouldn't have to though.

Update 20 hours later; seems every time i close and reopen my save file all the sectors in that save completely change, what was once an asteroid field is now occupied space, what once was a pirate sector is now empty. Tragic.

Calculating jump route for over 5 minutes now. 8 threads on an epyc server.
that was a matter of seconds a few years ago.
And all that wait just so it can show me a completely irrelevant sector I'd skip in a second, if I could.
But I can't.
Its a roll of a dice of 5 seconds to 5 minutes every jump.
Strongly recommend, great game.

Honestly this game is quite fun. It definitely feels like a small dev-team style game, and the wiki for inner-working information is lacking, the in-game wiki and documentation is far superior to honestly most game i've ever played.

I would wholeheartedly recommend this game, and the gameplay length is truly for however long you want it to be, as you can see with my own playtime. All of these hours were spent by modding, doing test worlds, building, and on only one story world. I do play games slower than most, but if you enjoy simulation, RTS, and management games - you'd love this game

Game used to be fun, Now each tier is gated, and it sucks.

This game is fun and in depth. The quests are fun and there are many different aspects to enjoy an enhance the gaming experience. Get to know the workshop if you aren't good at complex designs, it will greatly increase your enjoyment.

Excellent little space sim. Freedom, creativity, quirky story, just the right amount of content, fun, single/multiplayer, expansive if you need or not at all if you'd rather not, plenty of action, plenty of automation with a solid economy. Some comparisons: vs Space Engineers - not as overly technical and enough scope to allow you to create whatever you want. vs Elite Dangerous - a healthy level of realism so distance/time to get anywhere is not tedious and plenty of action. vs Starmade - more cohesive and sensible ship and station building. vs Minecraft - more meaningful and interact-able creativity. vs most other space sims - you can build your own ships and stations. vs. Sim city/Civilisation/Anno/Settlers - you can build your own own community/base/empire if you choose and to any extent, or not if you choose; each station type is meaningful and useful on its own. vs Baldur's Gate or any party based RPG - you can create as many ships as you want, assign captains, give them tasks and watch them process either in the same sector as you to reduce your workload or send them off on autonomous missions. You can play the game as a manager or just get stuck in as a first person agent, and both approaches are just a good and meaningful to progress through the game.

Oh, and PS - Ignore Operation Exodus until you can't (7/8 of you'll find out what). While it is a great and an essential part to the story, you'll barely use the reward, the journey is tedious and takes you away from the more interactive fun part of the game so the higher jump range/time/efficiency you have the better (wait until after Bottan at minimum), don't bother trying to solve the "clues" by combining them mathematically - this quest line isn't worth exploring the rabbit holes; you'll know when you get a valid pair.


Things I'd personally like to see (bit of a day dream dump here, not game review material, so irrelevant if you're figuring out whether to play this game - it's already highly recommended at this point btw... or I suppose you could consider this part as reinforcement that the game can grab your imagination by the nuts - it is also moddable, so maybe some of these exist already!):
1. Some sort of LLM link up to create non-static conversations with NPCs including a tool-use API to go beyond simple conversations, i.e. persuade an NPC trading vessel to actually trade, request NPC support for payment etc, hiring captains, intuitive quest conversations, changing outcomes through discussion, general negotiation etc. and most definitely for interactions with your Captains and their task assignments. Dynamic Bulletin Board quests! High Level NPC faction goals and control each with their own quests as such - maybe Swoks' 5th cousin 75 times removed is their Nemesis. Granted the work to integrate this is immense...
2. Meta-stations - add station specific blocks which allow a single station the ability to build different module types within it, so you could have combinations of, for example, a Resource Depot, some sort of mine or extractor and Turret factory; Equipment Depot, Research Depot and Military; or well any combination - availability of expansion of modules based on Processing Power so it might be better to have several 3 or 4 module stations rather than a single one with everything. Importantly this should reduce CPU demand in the sector and hopefully make it more playable for some.
3. VR support, just because.
4. Cockpit building block - because you need somewhere to position your camera if in first person (and VR development). I guess the Flight Recorder block is somewhat relevant.
5. Some elements of character levels, talents/perks, experience for an added sense of personal progress/investment - see 7 Days to Die.
6. More reason to use lower "level" sectors, and spread out back to Iron/Titanium areas rather than everyone gather as close to the middle as possible. So a strong reason to keep gathering older materials, like maybe some way for iron to become a fuel for some new technology; Naonite for medical uses, etc etc. Alloys of Titanium and Trinium for some types of construction - make everything desired. Perhaps unstable wormholes could be used to prevent an edge-of-the-galaxy base from being undesirable in terms of travel time.
7. Gate "stations", i.e. build your own gate network between sectors. Also, a gate that can link into the Ancient Gate network to allow your established base more integration into the galaxy and actually give more relevance to completing Operation Exodus.
8. Station Captains - plenty of scope for all sorts of perks here including types:
9. A management Captain, or I suppose Admiral, who can autonomously send your other captains back on missions while maintaining a certain level of risk and maximising the resources.
10. An Armourer Captain who can ensure all your captained ships are using the most upgraded turrets and systems, while leaving your favourited ones free for you to use. Turret and system upgrades would take place when Captains return in between missions etc., all used items should still show in your inventory with an in-use tag, so you can request it be returned in between your Captains' missions, or know where to go to get it back in an emergency.
11. A Researcher Captain who will automatically "research/consume", Petty/Common/Uncommon items, and suggests sets of unused items to be researched giving you a smoother decision process for that whole aspect of the game. This captain may also send you notifications of random Legendary/Exotic productions from their own experiments.
12. Inventory filters to trim the list in more than just one way. Including filters for Material, type: armed, unarmed, defensive; use-case: salvage, repair, mining, force, r-mining, weapon; damage type: Physical, Plasma, Energy, Anti-matter etc. I know there's a search bar and sort option, but these do not categorise as well.
13. It could do with a few long standing personalities/characters in the game, not just your initial guide - both larger than life "face" characters like Jim Raynor, Kerrigan, Boba Fett, Rainman, Han Solo, but also specific faction characters, like ships carrying the leaders, dignitaries, generals, personalities, celebrities, notable scientists, doctors; also freelancers not associated with factions etc.
14. Dynamic faction projects, such as colonising areas, war campaigns, exploration campaigns, etc etc.

Incredibly addicting, complex and fun gameplay, my favorite sandbox by far

My spaceships look like Neoplasticism and Brutalism had an illegitimate child. I don't care, I like all my creations as long as I can fit enough turrets on them.
Pew pew pew!
Space!

Probably the worse waste of time. Never played a game that does not respect the players time as much as this.

The game could do with one or two interface improvements but otherwise it seems good enough.

Great game with pretty intuitive but complex mechanics. The time horizon for a play through is pretty long so you get your money's worth.

I WAS thinking about giving this game a positive review as despite some flaws few games do what this one does and I have sunk a good bit of time into it. HOWEVER that was before I had an interaction with one of the devs calling out they way they set up a game file in the forum. I will post what I said verbatim

"Necroing this thread because the comment about changing the scenario to 3 helped me and as was said should be in the read me at minimum. Honestly the devs comment is just retarded. If there are settings that will break a save PUT THEM IN A DIFFERENT FILE. I am not even a developer and the solution is obvious enough that even a layman can see it. It is absolutely retarded to have these setting set aside and then unable to be changed."

The post is referencing some game settings that are generally set up when you make a new save file but most of them are safe to change mid game but the only way to do it is to go directly into the file where the settings are established. However the game will literally set the file back for no real reason with basically everyone else in the thread calling out the devs reasoning as nonsensical and its still an issue a long time after the thread you should not be surprised when someone calls the setup retarded and frankly I have seen way worse than what I posted above in various game forums. What the dev did in response is remove the post for being "disrespectful" but as I said I have seen way worse than that and if you are going to be this much of a cry baby at some harsh words I have to wonder what other criticism you might be censoring hence why I am writing a negative review about this.

EDIT: I assumed the post was deleted as part of the warning and it was wrong and rather than remove my mistake in the interest of honesty I believe it best to leave it with this correction. I still find the warning in bad taste for the reason stated at the bottom of the review but my opinion is slightly less harsh than at the time of writing. The thread in question can be found here. https://steamcommunity.com/app/445220/discussions/0/6193093297599124227/?tscn=1747031414

And in the interest of not acting butt hurt myself I will give the game a fair review. The game itself has some warts but if you are willing to work through them theirs a decent game underneath. As a space sim it has all of the framework you would want, combat, trading, mining, boarding, diplomacy, building a fleet and factories, but it suffers from what I refer to as the minecraft problem where it has everything it should and its decent enough on its own but every feature could have more depth.

The worst offender by far is the commercial aspect of the game with having no way to check prices outside of the system you are currently in making finding good prices nearly impossible without mods or fairly late game items that give a large radius to a hot/cold map for prices rather than actual numbers (at best this is a tiny blip on the map even with the best system you can get when the map is 999 by 999 systems wide the best subsystem might cover like 20 sectors around you and does not save it when you go to look at the map again) Setting up production lines is also extremely expensive to get even tier 2-3 goods such as steel and plastic let alone actual finished products. I literally had to make a flow chart to figure out how much of each point in the chain I needed to make the end product as there is no simple way to figure this out.

Another system I would say that is underutilized is boarding that can best be described with "it exists" as theres not really a reason to ever uses it as its not very profitable when it should make you way more for the added effort and risk. Ships are basically worthless with the amount of damage done to them to the point you are better off starting from scratch and while you get a 50% discount repurposing a captured station this is generally not worth the effort as you will lose a good chunk of your boarders and they are expensive.

Diplomacy isnt really worth the effort ether as you only get some minor bonuses from factions and theres not really any benifit to going to war with a NPC faction.

fleet management is mostly ok except for the fact theres no way to set up permanent trade routes and mining operations, Had to download a mod for trade routes as the game has you only trade in a set area rather than set up a longer more profitable route.

Lastly combat is simple but satisfying and you can automate your turrets to fire at the enemy automatically if you want and there is a good weapon varaity as well as fighter craft. The only real downside here is it is very dependent on RNG particularly with end game weapons basically requiring you to feed found turrets into a gattcha machine and hope it spits out something good.

It should also be mentioned that save files in this game can bloat to dozens of gigs considering I have less than 10% of the galaxy explored in my main save file and it currently sits at 3.5 gigs. The game is also hard on your CPU often stuttering for 15 seconds at a time later into the game.

Now with all that said is the game good? Yes, I would actually say it is as the loops and mechanics are all satisfying enough if you work with them a while and use a few mods. You can get lost for hours in the ship builder fine tuning your ship and the game play loop does keep you hooked once it gets going but it does take a few dozen hours to really get into it. The reason I mostly talked about the negative is that is where you find out if a game is for you or not. If I didn't mention it then it should be considered to be good.

If it wasn't for the devs actions this would actually be a thumbs up rather than down but I consider developer conduct with players to be the most important factor in a game. A dev that engages clearly and rationally with their player base on a regular basis and is clear about what is going on behind the scenes can sell a literal turd and I would still consider it to have the possibility of turning into a decent game so long as the dev remains consistent and engages well and often with their players. A dev lashing out at criticism of any kind is a MAJOR NO NO in my opinion even if I admit my comment was strongly worded it is better to just ignore it than show you are willing to hide opinions you dont agree with.

game literally tells you that you don't need an internet connection to play single player, but that the game will reach out to the server it installs on your local computer. then when you run it, its attempting to reach out to 30+ IPs between the server and the game itself and won't run if you don't allow it. I allowed access to the loopback address which it was trying to reach and should have been all it needed for single player but that wasn't enough for it. the game itself was reaching out to IPs in denmark and the server to IPs all over the place. couple that with the obnoxious issue with the mouse pointer disappearing as soon as the game starts.... and this is a refund for me!. reading other posts, it has been quite a while since that became a known issue and they haven't bothered fixing it. some of the workaround suggestions are to turn off features I have turned on for a reason. I'm not turning them off just to play your game. fix your stuff!

Like this game a lot. Been a while since I've stayed up late for a week straight to play a game.

Little rough around the edges but damn its good.

I often come back to play this again!
Such an addictive game play loop and some nice depth to the ingame systems!

Definitely get some mates and give it a go!

Very good but also quite complex. The complexity of it is what makes the game so amazing, but I'd only recommend getting the game if you have the time and patience to learn all the systems

This game is one of those games where a college degree is required to play it. Realistically you will find yourself watching tutorials on this game. Especially if you're the average gamer that plays multiple games and forget the controls. Don't be fooled by the trailer. They make it look easy but the game is difficult.

At first, the game is interesting and fun. Flying around, discovering things, mining, hits the spot.

Yet, after awhile, things get tedious and that will really hinder the 'fun' experience.

You'll spend way more time trying to find parts and components for weapons, mining equipment, and all that stuff.

The UI is terrible, for example in this game once you start building stations and supply chains, your ship/station interface will fill up to the point where its a struggle to even find what you're looking for.

Trading is tedious. Hard to find where things are, half the time you 'search' for something in the map interface, nothing shows up unless you've found a specific factory/station.

Honestly, I could go on. The game is good, it's fun, but after your first like.. 12 hours, it's just a fuckin pain in the ass. I think I've spent most of my time just looking for rocks to turn into mines, to supply my factories, and then the other half of the time I've been flying around just trying to find very niche and specific things, to build turrets out of.

And the building system? Yeah. Enjoy 'piling' 30 stations in one sector, and feeding them to each other just to make a 'basic' factory run.

This game is truly the hidden gem of space sandbox games. Completely unique ship building, excellent upgrade & loot, and enough systems of progression in the game to keep it interesting. I had several failed attempts at getting into X4, and this game just blows it away both in terms of simplicity AND complexity.

Start off in a tiny little ship and no back story. Mine some ores, do some trading, run some missions, fight some bandits, build more and better ships, fight bosses, build space stations, build carriers, establish diplomatic relationships, declare wars. It's got all of the basics to make it a game while still being a sandbox.

If you're a little hesitant because it looks like Minecraft in space - the building consists of blocks and a few shapes, all of which can be resized and rotated. Your first ship is going to look silly, but that'll pass as you start getting better at building.

Build spaceship, blow up spaceship, repeat

Fun little game that gives you everything you could ask for in a spacefaring open world environment.

Great space game with a robust ship design system. Great multiplayer, though better multiplayer support would be appreciated, this isn't like Satisfactory.

I feel like I just started playing and figured out my next play through's strategy, 35+ hours in. Addicting game loop. Lots to do and lots of fun! I love how this has all the best elements of several space games packaged into a very flexible story and event driven space sandbox. You have to try playing this on Veteran mode, such a fair game once you figure out where to look for upgrades, drops, etc. The mods are also amazing. Tons of ships! Love the block systems!!! Can't believe I didn't know about this game until last week.

Absolute blast. Will play again when the cycle comes back around. If it looks appealing, give it a try.

Build a ship or more,
upgrade your ships with better materials,
fight,
trade,
make fleets,
last time i played this game was 2018, since then they have made tons of new content, that i have not tried yet.
i have 327 hours atm and i dont regret it.
at first it will be a bit of a learning curve, but give it time, and you will see how complex it is.

Slow start, but when you get to mega ships and fleets it starts to kick off real nice.

great game! design ships and stations, build economy, have wars and the grind parts are skippable if that's not what you want.

This game has a really great physics system that is fun to fly and shoot in. The UI is messy but usable, the resource and trade system is deeper than you might expect but still has its limits.

The only reason I cannot recommend this game is because it is sold as offering co-operative play and while you can form an alliance and shoot pirates with friends you cannot progress in the game unless you play it single player. And the game doesn't even tell you this, you just fail to complete any missions if you happen to be in an alliance ship.

Interesting game. Felt like ships were a bit like Lego block (a bit too blocky). It did not suck me in, but was not terrible. 6 out of a 10.

I love this game! and the endless possibilities. Doesn’t require much from your PC, and yet it manages to bring me to awe from the beautiful scenery.

Play with friends! or do it alone, its perfect for both.

The tutorial still has an impassable bug (apart from completely restarting the tutorial) that was reported 2 years ago.

A polished Skinner box with destructible ships. Play it to feel like a space god, but remember: you’re just a rat pushing a lever for Avorion pellets.

Recommend for: artists/designers and people who enjoy to be creative
Not Recommend for: space fight/industry lovers and people who want a good progressing curve

The game offers: trading, simple fighting and commanding, kinda detailed hull building and visually weapon designing, 6 ("tiers") different materials to build with, simple story
The game does not offer: deep tech tree, interior building (as some people expected), crafting/refining resources into components


Good game idea, kinda bad done.
The game is more like a "design your dream spacehip hull" game than a good space fighting game. The weapon amounts you can mount are very limited, however you can build the ship as big as you want.


Please notice that my I played only 91 mins, to not bypass the 2 hours for refunding, I watched some further videos about Avorion to get a deeper idea of the game. This review is based on my experience and those videos.

You build a ship and then you can build a ship. Once you've built that ship, you build a ship before building a ship.

The game is really cool for building ships and building, and ships, and all that.

Avorion is really addictive. It eats your time without you noticing.
The gameplay is simple enough compared to other space games. The economy is simplified, and so is diplomacy. But the building is awesome, as you can design whatever you want, or just download cool ships from the workshop. Also as you begin to build up your fleet, it turns into the cosmic strategy game. You begin to spend more and more time in galaxy or sector overview mode, sometimes just piloting your main ship while multitasking other ships in your growing empire. Only you can bring peace, freedom, justice and security to your new Empire!
But grind can be annoying. Sometimes you’ll lack the equipment you need. Stronger turrets or systems to upgrade your ship, you can either get them from stations or random enemy drops, so prey to RNG gods
TL;DR

Pros:
Unparalleled ship-building freedom.
Huge, universe with lots of possibilities.
Great modding community.

Cons:
Steep learning curve.
Resource grinding.

Highly recommended.
So much fun building ships and space stations.
In essence its a mix of RPG and RTS, but it is also a Space Opera and FPS. And economy simulation! And you can choose which you like the most, so you can focus on any one of those and ignore others.

Build ships and stations, grow your fleet, shoot pirates and aliens until you get fat and build a star destroyer.

Win.

Great time killer game solo, and can get pretty crazy even on private servers with PVP. Fun all around.

Underrated game. Small team doing an amazing job - this game needs to be publicized more so the community grows.
Very approachable space empire simulator while still having plenty of depth.

Avorion is probably one of the biggest miss that i have ever played. No game is no near what i want, and yet so far. In a few words, Avorion is the X universe, but multiplayer. And bad. This game compared to many other competitors loses on every side exempt construction, and yet, after 2.0 update, it's terrible. And this is manly because of the devs who did not balance it.
If you are going for an economy built, don't do it. This game is so utterly broken on that that it does not make sense( Do you like spending 100 M for a factory that outputs less then 20 per day while your MINES makes 60M per day?). The economy of the game is NOT simulated, as many other factions pop out of nowhere goods, and therefore creating a weird feeling of being cheated on. Then there is the loading, if it's not loaded the station( and i mean as in sector), they will give you some many problems. There is no economy to do here, as the devs after 6 system say: you know what, we don't care about your production, and the litteral 100ms spent on it.
And what about mining, trading ecc? Still terrible. If you want to understand what Avorion is really about, you can check the DLC Rifts. This is a combat game, with your constructed ships, with somewhat of an economy, which was made probably by someone who never entered even in a Eco study hall

oh its damn good. everything about it is special. from the building to the way you fight or being a carrier its just amazing. and to owning entire stations or be able to take over entire sectors its really fun

Despite its brilliance, Avorion remains criminally underrated. It offers an experience that rivals or even surpasses many big-name space sims, yet it still flies under the radar for too many players. The developers have consistently improved the game with meaningful updates, proving their dedication to the community and long-term quality.

If you love games like X4, Space Engineers, or even EVE Online but want something that blends their best elements into a truly unique and rewarding experience, Avorion is the game for you. Give it a chance—you won’t regret it.

I love this game and just learned abt it a few days ago! Been doing multiplayer servers and it’s amazing!
There isn’t really a game like it out! Very complex ship building makes it very exciting and help from the workshop is even better for prebuilt ships.
Hope to see more content and wish marketing was there to make this game bigger!

[30+ hours later. A slight edit to my review: the game is utterly fantastic, but it has one glitch. For some reason, the game badly craps out on framerate for seemingly no reason at all. Hours of troubleshooting, reinstalling files, validating windows, etcetera won't change a thing. It doesn't matter if you're on a brand, spanking new 1mb save file or a 500 mb savefile; it is irrelevant. The framerate drop effects you regardless of which save file you're on, so it doesn't have anything to do with the saves, or your system... the game just... LEAKS. There's some kind of weird memory leak happening somewhere and I'm not the only one who's encountered it. Google is rank with ''???'' responses from people on higher systems than I possess. So that's it. Maybe I'll come back to this title in a week and see if anything's changed, but right now I'm just burned out trying to fight this glitch.]

Quite bluntly, an incredible game.

There's so much I can say about this title. I'll likely have to come back and edit this later once I'm 300+ hours in. The things that astound me the most are:

- You can man more than one ship at once. You can have a flotilla--no--a whole fleet, and to use Todd Howard's words: it just works.

- The game scales up. The deeper you go towards the planet's core, the rougher it gets. This is something I dismissed once, then never again after being blown into sub-atomic particles by an alien with a 332 pound cannon.

- Ship AI is... great? If you tell three members of your fleet to escort you, they do so without fail. If you tell your miners to mine... they just get to it? I actually prefer setting my ships on auto-pilot for important fights because the auto-pilot is amazing at blowing things out of the sky.

- You can play the whole game from the menu/galaxy map. This might sound jarring, and you don't have to, but if you want your ship to dock somewhere whilst you go and get a drink, you can. By the time you get back, it will be perfectly docked at the space port--no questions asked.

- The game's scaling is so well done? You start with--I shoot you not--a titanium square BLOCK, then end up with a frigate and a small flotilla of destroyers after 40-50 hours? You literally feel your presence grow within the galaxy.

- The game just doesn't get old. Finish one smuggling mission, oh look, a distress call. Finish one expedition, oh I'll explore this asteroid field--and if I use my object finder I can spot a secret stash! OH, airwaves over the scanner; someone's coming!

- I don't know what to say, man. This game just seems bottomless and yet isn't in any way overwhelming. If you just patiently take your time exploring the buttons and mechanics, it all clicks together like a well oiled machine.

- There's a search function for literally everything too. If you've lost something in your inventory, just do a quick in-game ''Google Search;'' boop, there it is. Same with the guns, the encyclopedia, the building system, everything can be narrowed down and made easy; it's simply a matter of getting used to the menu system.

I could go on and on; the quests are atmospheric and well-written, the music is chill ASF and doesn't get old, the ships look insane 24/7. I think if I was to ask for anything, it would be that when you blow up enemy ships you can occasionally gain a blueprint which allows you to rebuild their vessel. I feel like that would be dope.

I'm excited to get to the late game too. I haven't even begun making ships which're big enough to deploy their own fighters, mining vessels, etc. It's going to be nuts.

Last thing: when you get your first cannon and blow your first spaceship to ribbons, it feels insanely good. They really nailed the upwards trajectory of going from tiny machine guns on your starter ship to plugging things like a 1 million tonne battle-cruiser. I think that when I get done with this playthrough, I'm going to start again on the second to hardest difficulty and just really take my time grinding this game out.

Looked like a fun game. Cant launch in anything but windowed mode 1280x720 resolution... All other options crash on launch. Shame. 0/10 for game functionality at native 1080p resolution...

If devs fix this i'll update review...

This game scratches the itch that some of us have and i love that about it.
Its so simple and yet so complex in its mechanics :)
If you love space and sanbox games than i recommend this one.

Very extensive custom ship building.
Combat is fun with a lot of weapon types/defenses/modules.
The pacing of exploration and action is well-balanced.
There are some odd design choices here and there but it's a minor issue.

I've barely played it, but it's good fun so far. (Will edit to be more descriptive once I've played more)

This is a good game. Me and my buddy restarted our server and wanted to use cheat engine to get back to the same point in the game we left at. Anyways, be careful about that one - turns out you'll get a vac ban. Ask me how I still
know years later. Still a positive review though.

This game is my favourite space-sim. It's a bit similar to the X-series in that you can have a fleet of ships with different functions. You can pilot the ships yourself, or give commands while they are piloted by AI. The more unique aspects come from the ship-building, which is more akin to something like space engineers, albeit much less complex. There are a lot of functions that seem like clever QOL-solutions to problems that arise when building ships.

If you prefer to not interact with the building because it might be tedious or take too long, the game lets you copy designs from your previous ships, community designs or randomly generated ships that you can purchase from the NPC-factions. You can scale these to your liking and edit them as you want, so you have control over what materials are used and what size your ship is.

The next aspect are weapons and mods of different rarities, that are randomly generated. Mods change your ships characteristics beyond what is already affected by the systems you put on the ship and materials you use. There seems to be a large variety of each and they seem to be designed to let you modify your ship for a specific playstyle.

The game is great at letting you do what you want. You can be a daring mercenary and hunt pirates in your decked out ship while your AI miners and scavengers hunt for ressources. You can build an empire of different space stations with production lines that feed into each other (although this aspect is on the lighter side feature wise). You can command a fleet of ships and fighters from your dreadnauht or carrier as you watch the battle and occasionally give commands. Most of the time it will likely be a combination of these (or all at once).

While the development on the game has slowed down a lot, the existing game is great and entertaining for a long time. Some of the DLC are a bit underwhelming and add features that might just not be my cup of tea and some of the updates have added and removed elements that might have been a sidegrade or arguably a downgrade sometimes. In the late game you can struggle to find meaningful tasks to do and might spend too much time waiting for ressources with nothing else to do. A couple of features are designed to be used with friends playing on a server, but the game is perfectly complete without that.

In total this is a well coded and competently built space game that gives the player plenty of freedom to do their thing. It is one of the best at what it does (a more hands-off approach unlike a game like Elite:Dangerous) and I have struggled to get as much enjoyment out of any other space-game outside of maybe X4 (although the games are different enough to exist alongside each other).