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Ship Building
June 3, 2026 at 02:01 PM
Added The Ship Editor (Tools/Assembly/Customization tabs), how parts affect a ship (System Support vs Requirement), and the starter ship + fleet limit (Scrappy Pioneer modules, 2-ship cap, Mag-Plasma FTL fuel)
Designing and building your own ships is a central feature of SpaceCraft. You build ships by assembling crafted parts into custom vessels suited to your playstyle.
Ships are constructed from the parts you craft. Whether you are building small, nimble vessels or heavy transport cruisers, each added component impacts their performance. Because every part matters, ship building is as much about choosing the right components as it is about the overall shape of the vessel.
You can customize every aspect of your vessel to suit how you want to play. Common directions include:
Direction | Emphasis |
|---|---|
Exploration | Reaching and surveying distant systems and forgotten worlds. |
Trade and transport | Hauling cargo, from small loads to heavy transport cruisers. |
Combat | Fitting a ship to fight, one of the activities that shapes the shared world. |
Mining | Extracting raw materials efficiently from planets and asteroids. |
You can design and build a ship part by part, or take a shortcut. You can buy Blueprints from other players for ready-made designs that you can build instantly, and once you have perfected your own ship, you can sell its blueprint so others can build and pilot your creation. See Blueprints for how the design economy works.
The parts you assemble come from the crafting system, which in turn depends on the raw materials you mine. So a strong shipyard is backed by a steady supply of resources and refined materials. See Crafting and Mining and Resources.
You modify ships at a station’s Shipyard, which is a single-player instance. Ships can only be edited while docked at the station you are at, not remotely. The ship editor has three tabs:
Tab | What It Does |
|---|---|
[object Object] | Manage installed modules and tools. |
[object Object] | Modify the ship’s structure by adding, moving, or removing blocks, engines, wings, or the cockpit. |
[object Object] | Personalize colors, decals, and eventually full skins. |
The Assembly and Customization tabs are unlocked later through permit progression. See Progression: Permits and Experience.
The developer compares Assembly to setting a character’s attributes in a classic RPG: structure determines health, speed, and module capacity. Tools are closer to equipping gear, adding active skills or passive bonuses such as improved heat resistance, larger cargo holds, or better energy generation. Two ship stats govern modules: System Support is the ship’s built-in capacity to handle modules, and System Requirement is the total load from installed modules. As long as requirement stays below support the ship runs at full efficiency; exceed it and modules work less effectively or malfunction.
The starting ship, the Scrappy Pioneer, comes fitted with a Crude Resource Detector, a Crude Mining Laser, two Small Solar Panels, two Headlights, and a Crude Battery, all of which can be upgraded. You can own more than one ship: the cap is currently two, with a long-term goal of fleets of around ten vessels, though you only ever pilot one ship at a time. Its battery recharges in direct sunlight via solar panels, and a separate Mag-Plasma (Magnetic-Plasma) reserve fuels Faster-Than-Light jumps. See Exploration and FTL Travel.
