Startopia

Did You Know?

• Startopia sold approximately 110,000 copies.
• A remake titled Spacebase Startopia was announced at Gamescom in August 2019 by Realmforge Studios and Kalypso Media.
• Spacebase Startopia was officially released for all platforms on March 26, 2021.

Gameplay

In Startopia, you take on the job of rebuilding and running a series of damaged space stations after a massive galactic war. The game hints that these stations are among the few surviving space habitats, with most others destroyed in the conflict. You don’t directly control the aliens that roam around. Instead, your role is to build rooms and hire aliens to work in them. These rooms cover basic needs like food, sanitation, and health care, as well as recreation and even love, which encourages visitors to stick around and spend money. Each alien type is best suited for certain jobs, and individual aliens have stats that affect how good they are as employees. Your goal changes depending on the scenario: sometimes you need to hit an economic target, other times you must convert a set number of aliens or take over the station by force. There’s also a sandbox mode for free play.

The station itself is shaped like a torus and split into sectors. You can open new sectors by spending energy on repairs. If two players’ sectors end up next to each other, you can open them up so visitors can move between them. You can also start a war, using security droids to hack an opponent’s sector door and conquer their territory. The station has three decks. The engineering deck is the largest and lets you build the most types of rooms. The pleasure deck is where you put buildings for fun and love. The bio deck handles nature and religion needs, and you can harvest plants there for supplies. You can also terraform this deck by adjusting temperature, humidity, water level, and height.

From the start, you can trade with a merchant named Arona Daal. To get better prices from other species’ merchants, you need to build a star dock and have an active communications center.