Pre-alpha demo · in development
From Stones to Starships
A first-person survival and base-building game about harvesting a world, building the machines that do the work for you, and upgrading your way from hand tools to the space age.
The Steam page is not live yet. This button will be enabled when it is.
The premise
Your shield generator recharges on its own — pour that charge into a machine to kick-start it. Gather resources, get a burner running, build out a power grid, and the machines stop needing you.
Every upgrade is a rung: shield charge to burner to solar to stored power. Hand tools to power tools. One robot to a shift of them. The climb runs from the first rock you break to a starship.
What you do
Everything starts physical. A harvest beam chips stone off outcrops, strips biomass off bushes, and takes wood off trees. What you gather anywhere can be spent anywhere, so there is no hauling crates back to base to make a recipe work.
Then you stop doing it by hand. Raise a camp, an Assembler, a burner that runs without you standing on it, a Robot Fabricator that prints workers. Building becomes a decision about what to automate next, and each machine is one more button you never have to hold down again.
The Robot Fabricator asks three questions: which unit type — Scout, Worker or Heavy — what goes in the two module bays, and how far to push Frame, Servos and Tooling. Then you name it, and it is yours.
Set one to autopilot and it takes the nearest job it is qualified for. Tell it to prefer mining and it only touches rock. They carry their own mining, woodcutting and building levels, so two robots with identical parts still diverge — and when something hostile comes over the ridge, you can put them on guard.
The progression is deliberately incremental. Shield charge to biomass burner to solar to stored energy. Hand tools to power tools. One robot to a shift of them. Every rung exists because the one before it ran out — and the climb runs all the way from the first rock you break to a starship.
Some upgrades you level into. Others you have to go and find. Scanning the island's plants, animals and minerals fills a discovery journal and earns Discovery Points, a second currency that buys branches ordinary levelling never reaches. You can climb without it. You climb faster with it.
Status
Stones to Starships is a single-player game in pre-alpha, built in Unity. Worlds generate, robots build and fight, the power grid runs — and plenty of the art is still standing in for itself.
There is no public build or release date yet. A Steam page is on the way, and that is where a playable demo will be announced first.
Questions
A first-person survival and base-building game with heavy automation. You harvest raw materials by hand, build the machines and robots that take that work over, and climb an incremental upgrade ladder — shield charge to burner to solar to stored power, hand tools to power tools, one robot to a shift of them — that runs from the first rock you break to the space age.
Yes, and you generate it yourself before you play. You choose a world archetype and tune continents, ocean level, coastline roughness, mountains, rainfall, desert belts and deposit density, read the result across seven map layers, then pick where to land. It is seed-driven, so the same settings and seed give you the same world again.
Not yet. The game is in pre-alpha and there is no public build to download. A Steam page is on the way — that is where a playable demo will be announced first, and wishlisting there is the single most useful thing you can do for a game at this stage.
No. Stones to Starships is single-player, and multiplayer is explicitly out of scope for the current work. That may be revisited after the single-player game stands up on its own, but it is not something to expect.
It is the destination the title describes, and the reason the name was chosen. Right now it is concept work and design direction, not a system you can play.
Unity 6 with the Universal Render Pipeline, by Stubborn Machine Games, a one-person independent studio.