Chucklefish to publish space station sim Starmancer

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The Stardew Valley publisher likes the look of the Kickstarter-backed game.

Dwarf Fortress-inspired space sim Starmancer caught Austin's eye last month with its promise of modular space station building and deep colony management, and he wasn't the only one to take notice. Chucklefish Games, which published Stardew Valley, has picked up the project, it announced on Twitter this week.

As well as Stardew Valley, the company has published games like Risk of Rain and developed Starbound, the procedurally-generated 2D space sandbox game. It has decided to back Starmancer after playing an early build, developer Ominux Games said in a blog post. 

Starmancer's Kickstarter campaign has been a huge success, raising the $40,000 it was after in just three days. It's just hit its $90,000 stretch goal, which will allow it to hire an additional programmer, and it no doubt has its eye on the two remaining stretch goals, which would add a creative mode and lots of robots.

The premise of the game is that the Earth was destroyed and humanity fled into space on ships called Arks. Those Arks are controlled by Starmancers, hybrids of humans and AIs that are formed when volunteers fuse their brains with a machine. You're one of them, and you wake up to find your Ark in need of tidying up.

You do that by adding rooms, keeping your colonists happy and mining planets for resources. Those colonists are all grown in a vat, which allows you to determine their skills and traits. And if they die, oh well, you just grow another batch.

It definitely looks like it's worth knowing about, and although it's inspired by Dwarf Fortress it looks much more accessible. The Kickstarter page has a free demo if you fancy jumping in. And if you want to see the game in action, watch the devs take you through that demo below.

Samuel Horti
Samuel Horti

Samuel is a freelance journalist and editor who first wrote for PC Gamer nearly a decade ago. Since then he's had stints as a VR specialist, mouse reviewer, and previewer of promising indie games, and is now regularly writing about Fortnite. What he loves most is longer form, interview-led reporting, whether that's Ken Levine on the one phone call that saved his studio, Tim Schafer on a milkman joke that inspired Psychonauts' best level, or historians on what Anno 1800 gets wrong about colonialism. He's based in London.