There are three ways in. The Prologue is a roughly 20-minute scenario that folds in the tutorial and hands you to the campaign — the developer's own recommendation for first-timers. The story campaign is a finished narrative with multiple endings where your decisions are meant to be genuinely hard. Sandbox 2.0 is the freeform mode, and in 1.0 it gained a starting-position picker, varied resource compositions, Custom Game settings and seeds. Pick the Prologue if it is your first run, sandbox if you only want the factory.
- Prologue
- ~20 minutesTutorial built in
- Campaign
- Multiple endingsCompleted in 1.0
- Sandbox
- Version 2.0Seeds and Custom Game
- New maps in 1.0
- FourLandscapes and craters
- Leaderboards
- In the base gameMonthly board from 1 Oct 2026
- Multiplayer
- NoneSingle-player only
The Prologue: the free on-ramp
After 1.0 the Prologue was rewritten. The announcement says it now “combines tutorial elements”, has become “simpler, clearer, and more convenient”, and received visual improvements. It is described as a scenario about 20 minutes long that introduces the essential basics and lets you transition smoothly into the story campaign, with an explicit recommendation to start there if you have not played before.
Two practical consequences. It is the fastest honest way to find out whether the colony loop grabs you, since there is no demo build on the store. And it is where the game teaches the systems that the beginner guide covers in written form, so the two work as a pair.
A small official detail worth knowing: a hotfix note records that the option to choose your subsequent difficulty at the end of the tutorial was added. In other words, the Prologue is not just a tutorial — it is the point at which the game asks you to commit to a difficulty setting.
The story campaign
The 1.0 announcement describes the campaign as “a complete story with multiple endings and thought-provoking questions for reflection and discussion, which put the player in front of a tough choice more than once.” That is the developer’s own framing, and it is deliberately light on specifics — they are not going to spoil their own story in a patch note.
What we can confirm about the campaign from first-party material:
- It has more than one ending, and the choices that decide them are described as hard rather than as a morality slider.
- It includes faction politics. The store copy commits to trading “with rival Earth factions” and to decisions that “have the power to shape their political landscape”.
- It contains named quests, several of which appear verbatim in official patch notes.
"In the Wake of the Disaster"is the one official source quotes directly; the notes also refer to the Hope-2 crew rescue quest, the Aurora quest, theNew Horizonsquest and the Mutually Beneficial Cooperation quest. - Reputation is a campaign currency. Two official 1.0 lines make it mechanical rather than flavour: the pool of colonists available to hire now depends on reputation, and how many Organizations will help build the laser cannon and the interstellar ship — and how much they help — depends on reputation too.
The story choices page goes deeper into what is confirmed about the branching, and separates that from what only the community has recorded.
Sandbox 2.0
Sandbox was rebuilt for 1.0 rather than patched. The announcement lists four changes that together turn it into a proper generator rather than a fixed map:
| Setting | What it lets you change |
|---|---|
| Starting position | Where on the Moon your colony begins |
| Resource composition | The resources your map actually contains |
| Custom Game settings | A new set of tuning options introduced in 1.0 |
| Seeds | Seed the settings and the starting generation |
On top of that, four new maps were added for sandbox, described as landscapes and craters. If you bounced off sandbox before 1.0 because every run started the same way, that is the specific complaint this addresses.
Difficulty: what is confirmed, and what is not
This is the part of the game most likely to be misreported, so here is the split.
Confirmed, quoted from official patch notes:
| Fact | Official wording |
|---|---|
| Difficulty changes Base CPU in the campaign | “Balance Base CPU on medium, hard, and very hard difficulties in the story campaign increased by 25 units.” |
| Two lower tiers exist and were softened | “Made the easy and normal difficulty modes more forgiving.” |
| Difficulty changes map resources | “Reduced the number of ice veins based on difficulty: 9, 8, 7, 6 → 8, 7, 6, 5.” |
| Difficulty changes quest support | “Added capsules with modules to support the start of production in the quest ‘In the Wake of the Disaster’. The number of modules depends on the chosen difficulty.” |
| Difficulty is picked at the tutorial’s end | “Added the option to choose the subsequent difficulty at the end of the tutorial.” |
| The laser cannon should not scale with difficulty | “Fixed an issue where game difficulty incorrectly affected the amount of resources required to build the Laser Cannon.” |
Not confirmed — and we will not invent it:
- The exact list of tiers. Official text uses easy, normal, medium, hard and very hard across different entries. One balance note lists four values on a ladder. Whether that means four tiers, five, or a rename between patches, we cannot say from official material alone.
- Per-tier multipliers for anything. No official source publishes a difficulty table.
- Whether difficulty can be changed mid-campaign.
Which mode should you actually pick?
| If you want… | Pick | Why |
|---|---|---|
| To learn the systems without losing a colony | Prologue | It is the tutorial, it is short, and it ends by asking you to choose a difficulty |
| The story, the factions and the endings | Story campaign | The campaign is where the narrative and reputation systems live |
| To build a factory without narrative pressure | Sandbox 2.0 | Starting position, resource mix, seeds and four new maps |
| To chase the leaderboards | Either, but plan for scale | Boards track base capitalisation and its growth rate, which rewards a large, efficient base rather than a fast one |
What this page does not claim. No per-difficulty numbers, no tier count, and no mid-save difficulty switching. Those are the three things readers most often want and the developer has never published; the community's only attempt is tagged to a pre-1.0 build and marks itself unconfirmed.