This starship sim looks like FTL meets Rimworld, and it's been in the making for over a decade

pcgamer.com:

If you're anything like me, your favourite part of any game is when things are spiralling out of control. The best stories happen when half the world wants you dead and the infidels are at the gates in Crusader Kings, when the lower levels flood with lava in Dwarf Fortress, or when your crew are split evenly between suffocating, possessed, or on fire in FTL. 

So naturally my interest is piqued by the scale and variety of catastrophes that seem possible in Cosmoteer(opens in new tab), which leaves early access this autumn. It's been in development for 11 years by indie studio Walternate Realities, and bills itself as a «starship design, simulation, and battle game» that will let you create any size and shape of starship you want before getting everyone aboard it horrifically killed in the game's «physics-driven» combat.

It sounds very much in the vein of a Rimworld or a Drox Operative: one of those small but impossibly dense, systems-heavy games that only ever seem to get made by tiny and fanatical dev teams. The game's description promises an «easy-to-learn yet incredibly flexible» starship designer, and in the trailer it looks like your personal starship Titanic can take whatever layout you're able to draw before you start layering modules on top of it. 

But the part I'm really interested in is the crew system. Starships can get as big as your PC will tolerate, but require crews to match. Guns have to be loaded and shields have to be kept charged, which means every torpedo and battery pack has to be schlepped across your ship by a member of staff, which can number «from half-a-dozen to a thousand or more individually-simulated people». 

To me, that sounds like a system that's going to generate endless stories. The best