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The Campaign is the single-player heart of ZeroSpace, a cinematic war story told through real-time strategy missions and role-playing choices. You command the Protectorate during humanity's seventh phase of expansion beyond Sol, navigating the politics and conflicts of the Orion Sector and its roughly ten alien civilizations. You play as Prefect Aster, the Protectorate officer whose decisions carry the story, and Act 1 of that story shipped with the Early Access build on July 20, 2026.
Between battles you operate from the Mothership, where you upgrade your forces, talk with crew members, and decide how to respond to the people and factions you meet. Choices play out through interactive dialog and branching story paths, and they can change which Factions stand with you and how your crew feels about your leadership. The approach takes after classic narrative-driven role-playing games rather than a fixed, linear plot.
Mission Structure
The full ZeroSpace campaign is organized into three kinds of missions. Act 1 shipped with 12 of them at the start of Early Access, with the rest arriving on the road to the 1.0 release.
Mission Type | Count | Focus |
|---|---|---|
Main Story Missions | 15 | The central narrative of the Protectorate's war effort |
Hero Loyalty Missions | 10 | Personal missions that deepen ties with individual heroes |
Side Story Arc Missions | 15 | Optional arcs that expand the setting and offer extra rewards |
The table above lists the complete 1.0 campaign. The Early Access build opens with Act 1, a 12-mission slice of it, and further main story, hero loyalty, and side story missions are added through Early Access updates until the full count is in place at 1.0.
Missions Named So Far
The patch notes name a mission whenever something inside it changes, so a partial list of Act 1 has become public without the studio ever publishing a mission roster. Ten missions have been named this way since launch.
Mission | First Named | What the Notes Recorded |
|---|---|---|
Operation Moby | July 21, 2026 | Identified as mission 2. A rare objective-trigger bug that could softlock the mission was fixed. |
Grey Horizons | July 21, 2026 | Music and sound updated for the finale cinematic, then mission setup, balance and allied unit colors revised through late July. |
Containment Breach | July 21, 2026 | Victory timer adjusted, an Embassy build-timing bug fixed, and a lock on the victory screen resolved. |
Fractured Veil | July 25, 2026 | Camera focus after the mid-mission cutscene fixed, and the boss tuned to move around less and attack more. |
Strider Layer | July 30, 2026 | Set dressing added, including a holographic strider, and a commando dialog issue fixed. |
Dead City | July 30, 2026 | The second flux crystal moved to a new location. |
Liability Waiver | July 30, 2026 | Wave balance tweaked and cutscenes improved. |
Hostile Takeover | July 30, 2026 | Fixed a prototype mech that could defend itself when it was not meant to. |
Celestari | July 30, 2026 | Intro cutscene fixes and a correction to dialogue playing on the wrong sound class. |
Touchdown | August 6, 2026 | Units added to the final attack wave, and you now have to walk to the pickup area to end the mission. |
A Planet Killer objective also appears in the notes, with its localized objective text corrected on August 19, 2026. Treat all of this as the set of names that have surfaced publicly rather than as the running order of Act 1: the notes only identify a position for Operation Moby, which they call mission 2.
Difficulty
You can match the Campaign to your comfort level by choosing one of four difficulty settings: Casual, Normal, Hard, or Brutal. Casual eases the pressure for players new to real-time strategy, while Brutal is tuned for veterans who want the stiffest fight. The setting affects how hard the missions push back, so you can focus on the story or on the challenge as you prefer.
Changes Since Launch
Campaign content has kept moving since the July 2026 launch. The changes below are the ones the studio has recorded in its patch notes. See Update History for the wider record across every mode.
Date | Change |
|---|---|
July 30, 2026 | New emails and codex entries added, expanding the story you can read aboard the Mothership between missions. |
July 30, 2026 | Campaign artillery gained 33% more damage and 25% more attack speed. |
July 30, 2026 | The Valkaru Beast had its damage cut from 195 to 100. |
July 30, 2026 | Hero health bonuses adjusted to produce even numbers. |
August 6, 2026 | Exhausted Gold Hexite mining rate raised from 40% to 50%. |
August 6, 2026 | Artillery Platforms now require a Research Lab before they can be built. |
August 19, 2026 | The victory screen now waits for dialogue that is still playing, and text clipping and layout problems in the ship menus were fixed. |
Choices and Consequences
Decisions made in dialog and on the battlefield ripple outward. Crew relationships, faction alliances, and story outcomes all respond to how you play, which encourages more than one run through the Campaign. Recruiting and developing your roster of Heroes and Commanders is central to progress, and several of them come with their own loyalty missions. See Crew and Recruitment for how your team grows.
