Revision 10

While you can play SpaceCraft solo, much of its scale comes from playing with others. The game supports multiplayer, including online co-op, and lets players band together into Corporations.

Teamwork

True power lies in teamwork. By working together, players can take on far larger projects than they could alone, pooling resources, labor, and ships toward shared goals.

Corporations

You can create or join Corporations and collaborate on a larger scale. Within a Corporation you develop interplanetary production and logistics by assigning roles, dividing tasks, and managing everything from small crews to vast commercial empires. A Corporation can grow from a handful of players into a major force in the economy.

How Corporations Operate

Solo and Co-op Play

SpaceCraft includes single-player as well as multiplayer and online co-op, so you can choose how social you want your game to be. You can explore and build alone, team up with a few players cooperatively, or commit to a large Corporation.

Corporations tie directly into the wider systems: shared trading on the marketplace and automated logistics let an organized group operate at a scale no individual could match.

Requests

Corporations take on Requests, time-sensitive contracts offered by specialized NPCs located in space stations around the galaxy. The Requests themselves are the same for all Corporations, but each NPC offers a different selection. A Request asks you to produce or collect large quantities of a specific resource or item and deliver the cargo; this rewards well-organized automated production and logistics. Failing to deliver in time loses the goods already delivered. Completing one rewards the Corporation with valuable currencies.

Corporation Currencies

The developer has described three Corporation currencies (names subject to change):

Roles and Shared Assets

A Corporation Manager assigns roles to members, each with its own permissions, from managing assets and activating Corpo Permits to inviting or removing members. The current structure is a simple hierarchy with a single Manager, with more leadership models planned. Corporations can own shared ships and bases that are not tied to any one member; the maximum is currently 12 bases and 12 ships, raised through Licenses and Corpo Permits, and this is on top of every member’s personal ships and bases. The experience paths feed into this: high-level Explorers extend a Corporation’s reach, Technologists build bigger automated bases, and Scientists supply exotic materials. See Progression: Permits and Experience.

Solo Play and the MMO Question

Even a solo player can found a one-person Corporation and use the same mechanics, just with more work. The developer describes SpaceCraft as an online multiplayer game but deliberately avoids calling it a traditional MMO. The whole game runs on official servers (there are no private dedicated servers), with the aim of supporting several thousand players per server. The game must be online, but it is fully playable alone: your factories keep producing and market prices keep changing even while you are offline. Official servers are deployed by region for Europe, North America, Asia, and Mainland China.

Each server is called a Quadrant. Because the universe is split across quadrants, you and a friend need to be in the same quadrant to play together. You can move to another quadrant by talking to a dedicated NPC near the elevator at the Space Stations hub of Raqmu. When you change quadrant you keep your in-game progression, including your inventory, your current ship, and your credits, but you lose access to your bases and your galaxy-map exploration, and any unfinished missions reset as if they had just started. Quadrant transfer was temporarily disabled shortly after it was introduced, when a progression issue was found with the process. A later update fixed the case where a transfer could lose progress, but as of the current build the in-game NPC still reports that changing quadrants is unavailable, so for now you and a friend must already be in the same quadrant to play together. The developer plans to make the transfer usable once the remaining issues are resolved.

Solo Offline Mode

Alongside the always-online multiplayer galaxies, SpaceCraft added a separate Solo Offline Mode after Early Access launch, in response to player requests. It lets you play the whole game offline, at your own pace, without sharing a galaxy with other players. You switch to it from the menu under Options, then Change Region, then Offline Mode.

Because the offline mode is not a persistent online world, the systems that depend on other players are turned off in it. Nexus Trading and Corporation Rankings are unavailable offline, as are the other multiplayer-connected systems. Your trading in offline play is limited to what you can do without the shared marketplace.

Solo Offline Mode and Multiplayer Mode are completely separate experiences, and progress cannot currently be shared between them. A solo offline save stays exclusive to offline play, while your multiplayer progression stays tied to the online galaxies.

To keep solo progression at a satisfying pace without a persistent server, a few systems are tuned for offline play: Assemblers in space bases craft faster, Extractors in space bases run faster, and production facilities pause when you leave the game and resume when you return to the save.