Watching Firefly and writing about space criminals in my free time, it probably isn't surprising that a game like Starsector has been so compelling to me. If you haven't seen Sseth Tzeentach's excellent review of this game, then you can click this link to find it here. Not only is it entertaining, but it will also give you a free copy of the game so that you can know what the heck I am talking about. Piracy is wonderful and ethically justified.

That's a statement that my two characters would have strong opinions on. In Starsector piracy doesn't take the form of downloading software nor does it take the form of real life piracy where you intimidate the other ship's crew into giving you all of their cargo. Nope. In starsector, piracy consists of blowing the other ship into pieces and then looting the scattered bits of scrap metal, cargo, and human organs from the cold void before freighting it over to the nearest planet to convert the ill gotten gains into cold hard cash. Is that realistic? Well sort of. Pirates in Starsector are less like real pirates and more like the raiders in the Bethesda Fallout games. Man. I'm not doing a good job of selling the game. Okay.

Ahem. You should play Starsector because of the subtle differences in how you can do the same thing. It's not the only life sim game that lets you choose how to make a living. The choice between making money from trading, combat, colony management, or missions is cool but not really super unique. What makes it so cool is how doing the same thing can feel so different between characters.

Example time! In my current install I have two characters I main - Jullie Goode and Ixchel Canek.  

Don't let Ixchel's adorable appearance fool you. She's the worst kind of monster in the setting. Drugs, guns, and human organs are her trade goods of choice. In the beginning she subsisted off of pure black market trade. The ancient and dangerous space station known as Kanta's Den was a reliable source of cheap drugs, which she could sell at a consistent profit that she spent on guns or organs. Organs, sourced by growing them in genetic vats or vivisecting captives, always provide excellent profit but are in short supply. Guns, on the other hand, are incredibly expensive and their price fluctuates pretty wildly depending on just how much of the sector is at war. So once she had a sufficient supply of one or the other, she would go around the sector in a big circle selling the illegal trade goods until she had a big pile of money. 

She really had more money than she knew what to do with, so she bough battleships until she had a fleet that rivaled most militaries. She's honestly pretty unstoppable. With unlimited money, she just sort of decided to waste it by buying a bunch of marines and leading a campaign of raids and orbital bombardments against her hated rivals of the Persean League.

In starsector raiding nets you free items at the cost of some of your marines. As your marines become more skilled you lose less and less of them per fight until it basically becomes free money as long as you can avoid or win any engagements with enemy fleets.

While raiding Ixchel made a discovery that would change her career forever. Raiding affects the prices of whatever you steal on that planet. Organs are the most consistently expensive trade good. By going to a planet with a very high population and leading raid after raid, harvesting the organs from every hapless unlucky and terrified person she can capture, she drives the price of organs up very very high. Then, she can come back and sell the planet its own organs at inflated prices.

At this point, she only ever dabbles in guns and drugs while she is waiting for the planets she raided to give in to her threats and let her trade with them again. Terrifying right?

Well Jullie Goode has a much different and more ethical lifestyle. Not once has she ever considered breaking the letter of the law. She would probably be considered a smuggler though. She skirts the law by going to planets where things are legal. Also, she deeply cares for the sanctity of human life and would never buy organs or drugs, although she will sell guns on worlds where that is legal. 

In the Persean Sector, every nation imposes crushing 30% tariffs on all legal trade.  Since Jullie would never break the law, she has to actually pay this instead of simply selling the goods on the black market like Ixchel. She has to put in considerably more effort to make even a little bit of money, and often has to rely on contracts to transport pilgrims, or drop off beacons in the depths of space. 

Strange as it is, her life is way more fun to play as. She has to deal with a much wider variety of goods. She carefully watches as the prices of every single commodity fluctuates. She minimizes the game and utilizes her calculator on a routine basis in order to make sure that a trade is still profitable after the tariffs, which are applied twice because of buying and then selling. 

She has to watch and make sure that she doesn't have too much cargo space, strange as it sounds. Most colonies are not going to buy more than 2000 units of anything at the astronomical rate of profit she needs to scrape by, so any cargo space beyond that is wasted maintenance cost. She tries to get a high crew capacity so that she can ferry civilians from planet to planet which only nets her a few credits but is still a consistent way to make money. Volturnian lobster is also a favored trade good. People and lobster always fill her hull as they're the most consistent trade goods. 




As you can see, each character makes their money through trading and so they are each basically the same trade style, although they both feel very different to play. Star Sector feels uniquely immersive because of this. Truthfully, I would put it in the same category as games like Morrowind, Dwarf Fortress, and Fallout 2 in terms of just how much it sucks me in to the universe. As I have been writing Skylight Legends its been my biggest inspiration besides Firefly and the Ketty Jay books. Play it. Play Star Sector right gosh darn now. Its free if you just watch the video I linked you.