Starjaunt

You start with a shuttle.

Not a warship. Not a legend. A shuttle, a modest hold, and enough fuel to reach somewhere that isn't here.

What happens after that is genuinely up to you. Starjaunt is an open galaxy of forty-four star systems, nine factions with their own grudges and their own ships, and a war that keeps moving whether or not you're involved in it. You can spend the whole game hauling grain and never fire a shot. You can spend it taking systems by force. Most people do something in between and find out what that makes them.

[hr][/hr]Pick a life, or don't

• Merchant. Buy low, sell high, watch prices move as the war strangles supply lines. Trade up from a shuttle to a freighter to a hold that pays for itself.

• Miner. Work the asteroid belts, sell ore to refineries, stay out of everyone's politics.

• Bounty hunter. Hunt people who don't want to be found, across a six-part arc that gets more complicated the closer you get.

• Spy. Thirteen missions of intelligence work - planted evidence, two-stage extractions, freighter interdictions, and bribes that show up in your ledger as negative pay. Nobody stays clean.

• Combat pilot. Fly for a flag. Take contracts, take systems, take losses.

• Fleet commander. You don't need a carrier to stop flying alone. Make friends who fly your wing for nothing, hire guns at the bar who fly it for a fee, or earn enough trust from a faction's command that they stop handing you contracts and start handing you berths.

Nine factions, and none of them are simply right

• The Federation - order and duty, expressed as slow ships with too much armor and a tariff schedule for everything.

• The Rebel Alliance - speed as armor, freedom as a grievance, captured tech held together with conviction.

• The Free Frontier - farmers, ice-miners and free-port harbormasters who want to be left alone and are squeezed by everyone. They fight defensively and they remember who helped.

• The Helios Combine - a megacorp that owns the mines, the patents and the foundries, sells arms to both sides, and does not want the war to end. Drone swarms, because people are expensive.

• The Artifact Order - monastic zealots who hold the Precursor ruins sacred and will ram your hull to prove it.

• The Federation Bastion - the hardliner splinter that thinks the Federation went soft. Siege doctrine, scorched earth, no negotiated peace, ever.

• Pirates, the Merchant Guild, and the Independent worlds that keep their heads down while everyone else fights.

Each faction's mission arc unlocks its own hulls, one ship at a time, behind its own missions - fifty-four ships and forty-three weapon and outfit systems across the roster. Fly Federation long enough and you'll be trusted with a carrier. Fly for the Order and you'll be trusted with something stranger.The war moves without you

Systems aren't decorations with a flag painted on. Control is a live number, and player missions push it. Take enough of a frontier system for the Rebels and it turns green on the star map - and then the markets restock from Rebel suppliers, Rebel patrols replace Federation ones, prices shift, standings follow, and the contracts on offer change with them. Contested systems spawn both sides at once and let them fight it out in front of you.

Nothing about that is scripted. It falls out of one number per system, and it means the galaxy you're flying through in hour forty is not the one you started in.Nobody out here flies on rails

The pilots you fight weren't handed a patrol route and a state machine. They were trained - a neural network taught to fly by reinforcement learning, in simulation systems built for the purpose, until pirates learned to hunt traders and patrols learned to protect them.

What comes out the other side is pilots with personalities. Some are reckless and some won't commit. Some break off a fight they're losing and some absolutely will not. They misjudge, they overextend, and now and then they do something you wouldn't have thought of. You end up reading them the way you'd read a person, because in the only sense that matters at knife-fight range, that's what the training produced.Land, and step out

Docking isn't a menu. Set down and you walk the world on foot - desert outposts under prefab domes, forested colonies with lakes and lumber, company towns, garrisons, free ports. Find the fuel depot. Argue with the mechanic. Sell your haul at the warehouse and learn at the bar what's worth carrying next.You don't have to fly alone

There are three ways to stop, and they cost you different things.

Make friends. Twelve companions can be earned across the storylines - a cashiered Federation ace who flies angry, a homesteader who doesn't forget a kindness, a smuggler paying off a debt in escort hours. They fly their own ships, talk to you in combat, walk beside you when you land, and each has their own mission arc.

Hire guns. Every bar has a wingman desk. Pay the fee and a veteran, a rookie or a mercenary flie…