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Starsector 0.98a

Released: 02/04/2025

Website: https://fractalsoftworks.com/category/releases/

Blurb: “The story of Starsector concerns a dense region of space in the Perseus Arm left remaining after the calamity which presumably destroyed the Domain. For over 200 cycles, humanity has been losing its grip on interstellar civilization and struggling desperately to hang on to what is left.

What will you discover in the ongoing development of the world of Starsector?“.

I have been on a bit of a space game binge lately, and this arrived at just the right time for that. You see, with it not being light at 5am any more, I go to bed a bit later, and I usually have an hour to spare, what better to fill it with?

What exactly is it, you may ask? Well it is a space sandbox game, where you get to play the way you want to. Want to be an explorer like Captain Kirk? You can! Do you want to be a bounty hunter or a smuggler, like Han Solo, go for it! If you like or have played Endless sky or Naev or Space Pirates and Zombies, or even Sunless skies, this should be on your list.

One of the main changes is that the game has been updated to Java17, and should now run much faster and smoother. The modding API has also been improved, yay! (It is still scary how many mods there are for this game!).


Since the game has not been released yet, you can download and play for free, but you can also pre-order the game at $15 USD. If I remember correctly, you can just ask for a serial key, or just search for it in your web browser. I have had mine for a few years now, so I have not been down that road again, but I recall that even with it being free, you needed a key to play. 

Since the game is written in JAVA, you don’t need a fancy PC, I used to play it on the potato, which had 1366x768 display an IGP and 4GB of memory. However, I would recommend a beefier CPU (I’m playing on a dual-core i5, 2.5GHz with IGP), *not a Celeron with two cores and 1.2GHz speed. My Potato has a 1.8GHz 4-core i3 (I think!), so let’s use that as a minimum. I was playing the game on battery power on my laptop as the power plug came out slightly and I never knew!

There is no installation; to run the Linux version, unzip the file, cd starsector, and then run ./starsector.sh

The latest version, the download is 233.5 MB, zipped.


On your first run, just enter your key and you are off to the races.


You should now be hit with that brr-brr grr-grr soundtrack, then you know you are ready. If you are on a potato, there may be a second or so before you see anything displayed, but once it is up, it should play nicely without any delays even on office hardware.

For this article, I am just going to show off and talk about the Vanilla game. If you had any issues running the game, I suggest launching it from your terminal. If you had previous mods, I suggest checking the compatibility matrix. The ‘mods’ for this game is another rabbit hole that will eat your free time for breakfast, you have been warned. :)

How not to get lost in this amaze-balls game? Sorry, I cannot answer that, since it has been three days since I wrote the previous paragraph. The game will suck you in so deep, you will forget what day it is.

If you have never played before, do the tutorials, it will save you a lot of frustration later. If you have played before, the keys are slightly different in this release, so check the bindings.


Speaking of keys, you play with WASD and SPACE, but left(A) and right(D) rotate you around a central axis. The mouse will move the viewport. This may feel weird in the beginning, but they will grow on you.

You guys know me by now; if a game has a kick-ass soundtrack, my ears perk up and the game has my full attention. Luckily with Starsector, you can listen to the music in your media player. You navigate to the sounds folder and find ‘music.bin’, don’t worry it is not really a binary file, it is a zip archive, pretending to be something else. If you are new to Linux, you can use the “type” command to find out what a file is. Unzip it with your archive manager and you should have a whole lot of awesome .ogg-files. Starsector does not have an outstanding soundtrack, but it has an appropriate one, one that fits the game. (Sounds space-y?).

In the current iteration, there are sixty seven (67) different music files that will play in accordance with your place in the star system and your allegiance. I cannot tell you which tracks are new, without finding my backup drive where I backed up to, before my second OS install this year, but I can definitely tell you that there are. Since the game is not complete, I suspect there will be more groovy sounds in the future. Currently there is only one battle tune that plays when combat is initiated and it definitely needs more (or maybe not... as you “hear” danger before you recognise it by the sound that plays), and the same is true for going to and leaving home base. As I play on a craptop with tinny speakers, it sounds like pins falling at a bowling alley. I’m not judging, the game supports Linux out of the box and is not complete yet and gets more new sounds with every release! ***When I say this, I mean it may as well be complete and just enter the polishing phase, if we consider only the way it plays. Some people have complained about missing triggers, but as a casual gamer, I cannot say I have found any such issues. If I look at all the bug fixes and changes (for the better), in every version, I am amazed, as I have never had any issues playing the game. Not one! It is true that I have only been playing since version 0.91 (but remember, that 0.91 was even before the scamdemic!). This obviously does not excuse my bad game-play, losing most of my fleet on my last run... :)

Let’s talk turkey as the Yanks say. The game-play is smooth and has always been smooth for me, even when there are other space battles happening around me. The progression is also at just the right pace, to make you feel like you have accomplished something. Mmm... Dopamine...

You start off with just your ratty old ship and before you know it, you have your own base and a fleet of vessels where you have to drag tankers with them, just to have enough fuel! If you are new to the game, the game does require you to have fuel to travel places, so keep an eye on yours, you can get stranded! In the beginning, this is a major thorn in your side, but it adds to the stress of being a new pilot making you “feel” more invested.

You can be a bull in a China shop and simply try to fight everyone, or you can trade. Buy and sell and then buy and upsell. The game features a ‘live’ economy too, so you need to be smart about trading. You can also smuggle. Hell, I became an accidental smuggler when I took drugs and organs from a pirate and sold them to another pirate, jumping me two ranks at a time. Dealing in contraband is a high risk, high reward scenario and will put a target on your back. 

The western spiral arm of the Milky way is huge. (Sorry, Perseus arm!), so I still play with pen and paper next to me, as there is no way I can remember where all the good prices are. Hint: You can’t go wrong selling lobster, hahahaha. Though the game has a fast-travel system, it still takes time to travel inside star systems, so make sure that you have a few hours and change when you play this. Do your homework first, or tuck the kids into bed first, whatever you need to do. 

The game world is also ‘alive’ with people liking and not liking each other. If you are chased by pirates, head for the police and if you are chased by police, head for the pirates. There is nothing more satisfying than introducing the two and watching them fight it out and then you make your getaway near the end. If both like you, even better, but if neither likes you, you can turn off your transponder and sneak around. I think it is that feeling, that the universe is a living breathing thing, that makes me like it so much and I would like to see it expanded on, before the final release.

There is also always the feeling of the unknown, I mean, I have taken on a Hammerhead with a Kite and come out on top. That said, I probably got wasted ten times as much. :) The game-play does feel a bit repetitive after a while, but no game loop is perfect and getting enough money to start your own faction is not something you will achieve in a day. While the game is not as in-depth as dwarf fortress, I get the same vibe whilst playing it. (Or the old “Pirates!” game from long ago).

With the 2025 release, there’s a bunch of new ships for you to try out. You also now get the ability to manufacture alpha cores, over time, which can be a boost to your defence (late game). This also means that when you build your own empire (yes, you most certainly can!), there will be things that will drain your coffers like nothing else, so you *will need to manufacture them. (I just realised this may be part of Ashes of the Domain mod (https://www.ashesofthedomain.info/) and I apologise if it is, as I said before it will take more than a day to reach your own empire level, and I want to get this to Ronnie while it is fresh!). The new ships are in the Vanilla update, and I have even spotted new weapons, and the UI has been improved when surveying planets. I have not tried out any of the new story missions, but I am burning to do so. There has also been some rebalancing, some weapons hit harder and take longer to recharge/fire, so if you were used to a certain build, check your recipes. The mass drivers have definitely been affected.

If you can afford to, go and buy this game for your Ubuntu machine. If I could get it for fifteen local dollars, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. Sadly, there is no local pricing, so it is 300 dollars here, so it’s not affordable. Even if you don’t play it immediately, this is one of those ‘rainy day’ games you can have a lot of fun with, without realising it!

If you think I missed something or I was unfair towards the game, you know what to do, misc@fullcirclemagazine.org