DREADNOUGHT TARTARUS is set in the year FC 2057. The fiction opens with the sudden appearance of an unidentified super-scale battleship in Earth's orbit, an arrival massive enough to threaten the obliteration of metropolitan areas in a single discharge. Before the world can decipher who built the ship or why it is there, a war erupts. The player commands the TARTARUS, a vessel of comparable scale, through the conflict. For the broader game pitch see the overview.
The Opening Premise
A few elements of the opening are consistently described across every piece of pre-release material. They form the world-state the campaign builds on:
Element | Detail |
|---|---|
Year | FC 2057, an internal calendar designation rather than a Gregorian year. |
Inciting Event | An unidentified super-scale battleship appears in Earth's orbit. |
Threat Scale | Sufficient firepower to obliterate entire metropolitan areas in a single discharge. |
Origin | Unidentified at the start of the story; humanity is not given time to decipher it before the war breaks out. |
Player Role | Command of the TARTARUS, a vessel of comparable scale. |
The War Itself
The setting is a devastating war that engulfs surface metropolises and the orbital theatre at the same time. Combat happens across the four publicly described enemy categories: occupied or rogue urban defence systems, conventional human military forces, gigantic monsters and anomalous lifeforms, and invasion units from extraterrestrial civilizations. Together they tie the war to a multi-front conflict that ranges from human politics on Earth to external threats from beyond the atmosphere.
Why FC 2057
The use of an internal calendar (FC 2057 rather than a Gregorian year) signals a fiction set in a future that has already diverged from contemporary timelines. It mirrors a convention common to capital-ship anime sci-fi, the genre readers most often compare the game to: stories with their own dating systems where the war is the present, not a historical event. The developer has not stated a source for the convention, and the comparison comes from outside the project. The exact meaning of FC has not been spelled out in pre-release material.
Script Status
The narrative is written even though very little of it has been shown. On May 31, 2026 the developer said the full story and script were finished, and summarised the result as an account of humanity's last decisive weapon, the dreadnought, and its fight for the survival of Earth. That is the most direct statement of the story's shape so far, and it frames the ship as humanity's own instrument rather than a captured or alien one.
It sits slightly apart from the storefront framing, which introduces the vessel in orbit as unidentified and its origin as unknown at the point the war begins. The two are not necessarily in conflict: the campaign's opening episode is described as covering how the player comes to command the battleship, so how an unidentified ship becomes humanity's decisive weapon may be the question the early story answers. No published material resolves it, so both descriptions are recorded here as stated rather than reconciled.
Open Premise Beats
Several elements of the fiction are deliberately left open at announcement, with no closed answer in any pre-release material:
Who built the TARTARUS and what civilization or era produced it.
Whose side, faction, or government the TARTARUS serves in the conflict (if any).
The identity of the player character and how they came to command the dreadnought.
Whether multiple factions inside humanity are fighting each other alongside the external threats.
Whether the extraterrestrial invaders and the unidentified orbital arrival are related.
Whether the war has a defined endpoint or is structured as an open-ended conflict.
How the unidentified vessel of the opening becomes the weapon the player commands, which the finished script covers but no public material has shown.
Tonal Register
The setting's tone is intentionally retro anime sci-fi. Capital-class engagements are framed cinematically, hard-surface mechanical detail is favoured over photorealism, and the interface design borrows from the early-to-mid 2000s console era. The result is a future war that looks and feels like a specific lineage of capital-ship anime rather than a modern military shooter.
Unconfirmed Details
Most lore specifics are open. Treat the following as not yet confirmed:
Named nations, states, or political bodies on Earth in FC 2057.
Named extraterrestrial civilizations or their motives.
Named characters beyond the player commander.
The chronological order of events in the war's opening weeks.
Whether the campaign tells a single arc with a defined ending or runs as an open campaign.
Whether the calendar designation (FC) is given a canon meaning in the game.