The full story
What Starlift is
A real-time, no-combat 4X about getting humanity off a dying Earth in 2236 — and building the machine that keeps them alive on the way out. You don't fight anyone. You beat the clock.
- Real-time
- No combat
- 4X rescue
- Nearby real stars
The chain
One loop, four moves.
The classic 4X — explore, expand, exploit, exterminate — bent toward rescue. It runs as one continuous chain, and it only counts if every link holds.
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Lift
Get people and mass off the surface and into orbit. Launch capacity is your first bottleneck, and every kilo you burn arguing with gravity is a kilo you don't get back.
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Survey & convert
Turn raw orbital mass into working industry — ore into hulls, sunlight into power, hydroponics into food, labs into research. This is where a scrap heap becomes a supply line.
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Survey the stars
Scout the nearby real systems, read what's actually out there, and stand up convoy routes that can carry colonists across years of dark without breaking.
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Settle
Land people on a target world and keep them alive without a lifeline home. A colony that still needs Earth isn't a rescue — it's a countdown with extra steps.
Systems in depth
What you're actually managing.
Six systems, all feeding each other. Pull on one and you feel it three moves later somewhere else.
Evacuation & orbital lift
Everything starts at the surface. You decide who and what goes up, in what order, and how much launch mass you spend to do it. Lift is scarce and it stays scarce, so triage is baked in from the first minute — you will not save everyone the easy way, and the game never pretends otherwise.
Industry & throughput
Orbital industry runs on four flows: ore, food, power, and research. Each feeds the next, and the whole thing moves at the speed of its tightest bottleneck. Over-build power and starve on ore and you've just made an expensive paperweight. Reading throughput — and unclogging it — is most of the game.
Fleets & convoys
Ships are modular: you bolt together the hull, drive, cargo, and life-support you can afford for the job in front of you. Then you commit them to routes that take real time to run. A convoy in transit is capacity you can't touch, so every dispatch is a bet on where you'll need mass by the time it arrives.
Scouting the nearby stars
The map is our actual stellar neighbourhood: Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, Ross 128, and TRAPPIST-1. Scouting tells you which are worth the crossing and which will kill a colony quietly. Real distances mean real lead times — you're choosing destinations years before anyone lands.
Settlement & self-sustaining worlds
A landing isn't a win. A colony has to close its own loops — food, air, power, people — with no resupply from a planet that may not be there anymore. Standing up a world that survives on its own is the hardest thing you'll build, and it's the only thing that actually counts.
Pressure & triage
It's real-time, so the clock never stops to let you think — but there's no army coming for you either. The pressure is logistics: dwindling launch windows, convoys mid-flight, a colony one bad harvest from collapse. Every hard choice is a triage call, not a battle. That's the whole point of it.
Why it's built this way
Rescue, not conquest — and no combat on purpose.
Most 4X games end in extermination. The victory screen rewards you for wiping someone off the map. Starlift throws that whole verb out.
When the enemy is time and physics instead of another faction, the interesting decisions change. There's no one to conquer, so the tension moves into logistics — throughput, lead times, launch mass, closing loops. That's a fresher problem than "build a bigger army," and it's the one we wanted to make a game about. Victory isn't a body count. It's a working rescue chain: people lifted, industry running, convoys flowing, a world that stands on its own.
And when it ships, it ships once. Starlift is a premium, buy-once game — no in-app purchases, no season pass, no live-service hooks quietly deciding how hard your colony fails. The full no-crap pledge is ticked, the same as every YKYMF game. You buy it, you own it, you play it. That's the deal, in development and at launch.
Straight answers
Questions, honestly.
Is this out yet?
Not yet — Starlift is in development. There's no store page to buy it on today. Follow development from the Starlift page and you'll hear about it when there's something real to show or play.
Is there combat?
No. There's no combat, no enemy faction, and no army to build. The challenge is entirely logistics and time — lift, industry, convoys, and keeping colonies alive. That's a deliberate design choice, not a feature we haven't gotten to yet.
Are the stars real?
Yes. Your destinations are actual stars in our neighbourhood: Proxima Centauri, Barnard's Star, Ross 128, and TRAPPIST-1. The real distances between them shape the whole game — long lead times mean you commit to a target years before anyone arrives.
How will it be sold?
Buy once, own forever. Starlift is a premium game with no in-app purchases, no subscriptions, and no ads. You pay for it once and get the full game — the same no-crap pledge that applies to every YKYMF title.
Do you track players?
No. No data mining, no tracking, no selling your behaviour to anyone. That's a hard line across the whole studio, and Starlift is no exception.
Before the window closes
Follow Starlift as it's built.
In development now. No hype cycle, no pre-order traps — just updates when there's something worth showing.