Star Merchant: The Long Way Home

The relay jump went wrong. Catastrophically, beautifully wrong. It took your jump drive with it, and it took the answer to one fairly important question: which way is home.

What you have is a cone. A wedge drawn on the star map, eighty-three degrees wide, that always contains home and never lies to you. It only ever gets narrower.

It narrows when you take a fix, and a fix needs three readings from three different kinds of place:

• ⏱ Timebase: a flight recorder, a cracked relay satellite, a station time-sync
• ✦ Reference: a pulsar, a collapsed star, a monolith. Fly close and hold E
• ∴ Solution: a research station, a shipyard nav shop, or your own scientist

Six fixes takes you from eighty-three degrees down to five, and then the front door is an actual point on the chart.

Credits buy the ship that survives the trip. Only knowledge buys the direction, and the two do not convert into each other.

The road runs somewhere different every time

Six stretches of inhabited space, five walls between them. A wall is a band across the route with no stars in it. It reads as terrain, not as a rule, and the next star is simply a very long way off.

Each wall makes a different part of your ship load-bearing: jump range, then a signature damper, then a scanner that works in dust, then hull and shield, then a tank big enough to cross the Dead Reach. None of them is a fail state. Every one of them is a not-yet.

The route axis is rolled from the galaxy seed, so where home lies, and with it every wall, every market and every reach on the way, is different in each galaxy. You are not shown a wall you have no heading toward. The road unfolds as you travel it.

Leads are rumours, not waypoints

Nothing you find hands you progress. It hands you somewhere to look: a bearing, a rough range, and a circle on the chart, with the target deliberately not at the centre.

◌ Something spinward · UNCONFIRMED about 0.7 sectors spinward · search the marked area

Fly into any system in that circle and the lead sharpens: found it, or not here, and the circle tightens toward what is left. Two or three candidates, ruled out one at a time.

Also aboard

• 157 goods. Ores, metals, reagents, components, knowledge, curiosities, and six kinds of contraband that customs would rather you did not have
• Eight workshops, 105 recipes. Each bench is a module you fit, and each one runs its own queue. Fit the same bench twice and it runs two jobs at once
• Crew who stay. Two aboard from minute zero with their own reasons for going home, plus one recruit per reach who can actually read that reach for you. Your base moves with you
• Traffic rolled per visit, so the same star has different ships in it every time you come back: freighters, prospectors, patrol cutters, runners, and in unsafe space, people who are none of those
• Customs sweeps, raiders, outlaw berths, and standing with the sort of people who do not file paperwork

Controls

W / S	thrust forward and back
A / D	turn
Shift	boost (burns fuel)
Space	mine, collect, gather
E	interact · dock · hail a ship
C	sensor sweep for contacts
click	scan a world · mark a course to a station or wreck
hover	identify anything on screen
F	send the away team down
T	cycle nav lock
M · I · H · J	star map · your ship · trader's codex · captain's journal
Esc	menu, or close the panel you are in

The journal (J) always says what is open and what it wants. If you are lost in the other sense, start there.

This is a playtest build

A prototype, and it is looking for holes. Three save slots, autosaving every ten seconds. Saves live in your browser, so same browser and same machine.

What I would most like to hear about:

• The first twenty minutes. Did you work out what you were supposed to be doing, and how long did it take?
• The cone. Did taking a fix feel like progress, or like paperwork?
• Did you ever want credits and knowledge to be the same thing?
• Anything you bounced off, got stuck on, or gave up on.