This FTL-inspired BattleTech mod boils the campaign down to 8 hours

A new BattleTech mod out this week condenses the mech strategy game's lengthy campaign down to a bite-size maximum of eight hours by giving you a 120-day time limit to build up your fleet and reach the campaign finale. If you die in the process, that's it: game over.

It's inspired by FTL, which means the star map that you play on will be randomised each time, and will be a lot smaller than the base game's map. The idea of fighting through seven hours only to fail at the last sounds daunting, so it's not for the faint-hearted, especially as every faction in the game will dislike you from the start.

A revamped XP system will encourage you to specialise your mechs more than you normally would, so expect to make tough choices about what equipment to bolt onto each one.

To help speed up progress, you'll get more salvage at the end of missions, and you're more likely to find rare weapons. You'll also start with the Argo, a ship you only usually unlock later in the campaign.

Modder Delta Angelfire plans to add a barebones story, randomised final encounters and tweaked skill trees in the future.

If you fancy it, here's the Nexus page, where you'll find full installation instructions.

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.