Tramplers

A Trampler is a gigantic walking mech that serves as a player's mobile fortress on the planet Sophie. Tramplers protect the player and their squad from environmental hazards, defend against rival scavengers, carry loot, and bring destruction to enemies. The design of Tramplers is inspired by 1870s construction vessels fitted with folding legs adapted for traversing desert terrain.

Trampler Editor

Players build their Trampler from scratch in the Trampler Editor before deploying into the world. The editor allows customization of the Trampler's size, layout, and placement of its engines, compartments, storage units, and weapons. Completed designs can be saved as blueprints so the same Trampler can be rebuilt if it is destroyed during an expedition. Blueprints are shared across all of a player's characters, so a design saved once is available no matter which character or region you play.

Editor Readouts and Build Validation

The editor keeps a live readout of the machine you are assembling. A panel to one side names the Trampler and lists its maneuverability, its energy efficiency, its current weight against a maximum, its stability impact as a percentage, and its top speed. Maneuverability and energy efficiency each show a second figure for what the machine would manage with its engines or its compartments enabled, so you can see what powering a part will cost before committing to it. Underneath sit counts of the crew places, cannons, cargo holds and engines fitted, and the total building cost across four resources.

Every component carries its own card. The card names the part, its category and its tier, the footprint it takes up on the build grid, and then its health, its weight and its energy consumption, followed by the resources needed to fit it. A tier three steering module called the S.Trs K81v Pilot Bridge is a good example of how much setting these cards carry: it is described as an S&H design that folds marching, turning, sidestep and emergency braking into a single control point, adds extra layers of armour, and was commissioned by the Imperial Army for its military Tramplers. It also has a horn.

The editor checks a build before it lets you leave with it. Two validation readouts sit above the save control: a count of core compartments fitted against the number required, and a reachability check that flags parts of the machine a crew would not actually be able to get to. The building tools cover deleting, copying, undo and redo, rotating the camera around the hull, toggling the upper layers of the structure out of the way so you can work underneath them, and editing the wall connections between compartments.

Customization Options

Roles During Expeditions

When playing in a crew, different players can take on specialized roles aboard a shared Trampler. One player may pilot while others man weapons stations or manage inventory. A well-coordinated crew can make the Trampler far more effective in both exploration and combat. Because a crew of up to six shares one machine, the Trampler must be built with enough crew rooms to house everyone. Tramplers that are destroyed during a Storm Dive or Voyage Mode expedition result in the loss of carried loot. However, because designs are saved as blueprints, players do not have to start from scratch when rebuilding after a loss.

An update on August 10, 2026 made a Trampler keep running while any player is aboard. Before it, a machine would stop or power down when its owner stepped away, even with crewmates still standing on the deck. The same update stopped two players from mounting the same turret at once, and made a turret come back into your hands when you pack it up.

Build Stability and the Tower Meta

Trampler builds are governed by a vertical center of mass. A conventionally proportioned machine moves normally, but a top-heavy "tower" design that stacks height without enough support at its base takes increasing movement speed penalties, with the slowdown growing the more unstable the build becomes. The Trampler Editor's fifth building level was also removed after the developers found that more than 90 percent of builds used that level specifically to gain tower-meta advantages. The intent is to keep balanced designs viable without forcing every player into the same silhouette.

Field Equipment and Customization Extras

Beyond its core layout, a Trampler can mount boost rods that temporarily accelerate the machine to escape pursuit or close the distance on a target. Cannons can be swapped out during an expedition rather than only in the editor, letting crews adapt their loadout to a run as it unfolds. Players can also name their Trampler.

Reactors and Armor

A reactor powers the machine, and it is also one of the more rewarding things on it to shoot at. Since the August 20, 2026 update a reactor shows its condition instead of hiding it: it reddens as it loses health, and the smoke pouring off it reacts to the gear the machine is in, whether it is boosting, and what state the reactor itself is in. The same update gave every reactor 50 percent more health, so wearing one down takes longer than it used to, and made shots into the back of a reactor count as critical damage. A crew that can work its way behind a rival machine therefore has a far quicker route through it than one trading fire head-on.

That update also added three new armor sets for Tramplers, unlocked through the tech tree, and reworked the Trampler Editor so it could handle the new armor types. Both the armor and the reactor figures are Early Access values, so read them as the state of the August 2026 build rather than settled balance.

Movement and Maneuverability

The developers balance Tramplers around a maneuverability stat, which sets how quickly a machine turns and accelerates. On flat ground every Trampler shares the same top speed, so a larger build is not slower in a straight line. Over rough terrain, a more maneuverable Trampler handles the ground better and can pull away from a less maneuverable one. The developers had described a final piece of this system in which the propulsion rods would also grant acceleration scaled to maneuverability, and that change shipped on August 3, 2026. The boost an energy rod provides now scales with the Trampler's maneuverability: it stays at full strength while maneuverability is at 30 percent or above, then declines steadily to half strength at zero maneuverability. Fitting extra engines to raise maneuverability cancels the penalty.

The developers continue to add new components and compartments during Early Access. A July 2026 update introduced the Crow's Nest, a new Trampler compartment. Shortly afterward, a follow-up update made the Crow's Nest require structural support beneath it, and any Trampler whose Crow's Nest breaks that rule is automatically sold with its resources refunded. The team has said it is building new specialized compartments and a new turret with a new mounting system for a future content update, and is exploring boarding alarms or cameras for the Captain's Quarters, the Trampler's command compartment.

Leg Damage and Stuns

An August 2026 update tied leg damage to the same maneuverability stat. A Trampler whose maneuverability sits below 30 percent now suffers a stun when one of its legs breaks, and the lower the maneuverability the longer that stun runs: it scales from no penalty at 30 percent maneuverability up to five seconds at zero. While stunned, the machine's top speed is capped at 20 percent. Because engines raise maneuverability, a build that compensates with extra engines both shortens the stun and avoids the energy-rod boost penalty described above.

Capturing Tramplers

Tramplers can be taken from their owners. A player who boards a rival machine and breaches its command compartment can seize control of it and drive away with whatever it is carrying, which makes an enemy Trampler one of the most valuable prizes on the surface. Two of the game's achievements track the practice: one for capturing a Trampler at all, and one for capturing five in a single expedition. See Achievements for the full list.

The feature was switched off on July 12, 2026 as a stopgap while the team dealt with cheating that relied on teleport and no-clip exploits. The developers were explicit that this was not a permanent removal: they described it as buying time to gather reports and improve detection, and they held the reactivation back through late July while internal testing kept producing false-positive bans. Capture returned on August 3, 2026, and the team stated that it does not plan to deactivate it again.

The same update changed how ownership survives combat. The ownership device is no longer destroyed along with the Captain's compartment, so a Trampler can still be captured even after that compartment has been wrecked. The developers have separately said they are exploring boarding alarms or cameras so an owner knows when their machine is being boarded.