SpaceCraft preview: Satisfactory with a dose of EVE Online

Although the automation genre has always been – and still is – quite niche, games like Factorio and Satisfactory have transformed it into something of a trendy category. That’s partly due to its versatility — as a developer, you can combine automation elements with pretty much anything. 

I mean, look at Arknights: Endfield, an anime-style open-world gacha RPG that features regular automation mechanics as a core component of its gameplay. Compared to that, Shiro Games is keeping things more traditional in its upcoming title, SpaceCraft.

Consider SpaceCraft a mixture of Satisfactory, No Man’s Sky, and EVE Online — similar to the upcoming Interstellar Utopia from Tencent Games. Speaking to the developers at Gamescom 2025, they were very eager to emphasize that SpaceCraft is not a survival game, so when I’m comparing it to NMS, then I’m referring to the scale of its exploration and seamless traversal.

While there is the usual warp jump to speed up space travel over vast distances, you could fly from one solar system to another with your sub-light drive, the developers tell me. Not that any automation genre fan would ever do something so inefficient.

Planets, naturally, hold all sorts of useful resources. You don’t need to land and get your hands dirty on the surface to mine them, though, as your trusty vessel’s mining lasers handle that from the air — at least at the beginning. Later on, the developers explain, you’ll encounter resources that are more complex to mine, requiring different tools or multi-stage processes. “We want to make the process of getting resources enjoyable,” they say. 

Shiro Games ensured that resource placements are relatively player-friendly, so as to not waste people’s time searching for singular nodes somewhere in the boonies. And, of course, once you have the initial resources to produce whatever infrastructure you’re currently targeting, you can leave the mining to your bases anyway. Progression is fairly straightforward: You mine materials, turn them into infrastructure, tech up, get more advanced resources to turn into improved bases, and so forth.

Some things are still very much in flux. In the build I’m seeing, players need to watch the crafting screen while processing materials on a public space station, which is the only place to do that if you don’t have a base yet — an obvious waste of time the developers aren’t sure about keeping.

Automation doesn’t go quite as deep as in some other prominent titles from the genre. Conveyor belts, for example, are not something the developers are currently planning on including, as the transport of resources inside your factories is handled by airborne drones. This is intended to make the game more accessible to players who may not already be massive fans of the category — an approach Shiro Games has always used in its strategy games as well.

What stands out to me from the demo is actually SpaceCraft’s ship designer, which allows you to put together the various modules your factories churn out with a lot of freedom to specialize and customize vessels, depending on what you need. From mining vessels over bulky freighters and heavily-armed escort ships to fend off pirate attacks, you can build anything.

“The ship editor is definitely one of the main components of SpaceCraft,” one developer says. “You can easily spend an hour just building a single ship if you really want to.”

“If it’s a bigger ship, you can easily spend an afternoon,” another developer throws in. It’s not all about statistics either, though it looks like you can certainly min-max things. Shiro Games treats the ship designer like SpaceCraft’s character generator, so it needs to allow players to build the vessel of their dreams, aesthetics and capabilities being both served.

This ability to specialize your ships plays into the game’s major multiplayer component. You are not alone in the galaxy, as both other players and NPCs inhabit the galaxy — and not everyone is friendly. Piracy is a threat that needs to be dealt with, because players will ultimately depend on the galactic economy in some way.

Here’s the thing: You can only own a certain number of bases. This means that you’ll never be able to produce every component or good available in the game yourself. You’ll need to engage with the market. Trade – as well as transporting resources between planets for further refinement – isn’t done through teleportation. Stuff needs to be carried from A to B — hence piracy being an actual threat. While automated cargo ships usually carry out that task, a player can take over this duty whenever they want.

Of course, groups of players can band together to form corporations, specializing in producing and trading certain goods or trying to be an allround powerhouse. That’s where specialization is useful: Corporations need some members to act as scouts and defense forces, while others get more advanced resources and ensure that production facilities are expanded. Since the world is persistent, production – and the universe’s existence in general – continues while you’re offline, so it’s advantageous to have people from other timezones on your roster to keep things running.

Shiro Games hopes that the player-driven economy and the ability to form these corporations will lead to a thriving, engaging community that generates its own narratives, similar to what’s been happening in EVE Online.

Combat, however, is restricted to PvE battles. You won’t see any corporations raise massive fleets to fight their rivals. In space, it’s mostly about destroying NPC pirates, while planets are often infested by insectoid creatures that need swatting.

“We are thinking about PvP, but just to be 100% clear with our intentions: We want the game’s competitiveness to stem from production and economy and industry,” the developers say. “PvP is a massive subject already within the community – some want it, some don’t – and so for us it’s all about consent.”

There might be an option to opt in or out of PvP, but the developers are exploring alternatives to make the system a bit more fluid than that — in any case, it doesn’t seem like something that’ll be ready in time for Early Access launch, which will focus on the economic competition, allowing big fish to eat the little fish through the power of space capitalism.

SpaceCraft is targeting an Early Access launch on PC in 2025.

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