A deep dive into the Arma Armatura Starsector mod, by IroncladLion: youtu.be/Yq16EzJ-jQo Arma Armatura looks absolutely amazing and the amount of detail is wild, animated mechs that even somehow have legs (!!!), and it goes so much deeper than that. Genuinely impressive stuff, wow!

Super fun game with excellent board-game-like systems that tell a story, with art from @dgbaumgart.bsky.social, and judging from the number of reviews, it criminally undersold

In the vein of "real concept art looks like crap", here are some #Starsector concepts for remnant/explorarium ships It's basically just dumping a bunch of shapes and colours and swapping bits around and seeing what hits the right vibe. (Some small ideas even get used way later in other places!)

New Starsector blog post: Extended Mode fractalsoftworks.com/2026/06/14/e... A new game mode that's a lot more challenging without being a new difficulty level. Rather, it aims to change the pacing and focus of a playthrough!

Working on a new blog post - at a bit over 5k words, so definitely on the long side, but doesn't feel like it would make sense to split it. Hoping to put it out tomorrow or Monday! (Random screenshot from recent playtesting, just for fun.)

149 Luddic Path Hounds vs Church Invasion Fleet. @amosolov.bsky.social i'm still trying to understand why 21 of my hounds immediately rammed themselves into a venting invictus and then exploded (gloriously) (for no damage) but I stopped playing to just laugh at it. youtu.be/1snVqxMG02M?...

I gotta say, I'm having SO much fun playtesting some of the recent additions! This is ~6 hours into a fresh playthrough, trying hard to grow the fleet and get ahead - make of that what you will :) Going to talk about this in a new blog post, just need to get more testing done first!

Happy #GoblinFriday! Added interactions to another area today: the Windy Path (I love the double meaning. Could actually draw it to be windier though, come to think of it.) This location is a transition zone meant to be a moderately dangerous/costly place to linger. Encounters reflect this.

A work in progress - removing individual d-mods from ships using "Domain-grade Parts". Makes more sense in the context of a much larger set of changes; not 100% set on it but it's feeling pretty good so far. Also: this may end up replacing the normal "Restore" functionality entirely!

Fixed: Orcus Rao would keep giving the player credits as a reward for serving the Hegemony in an infinite loop until the game crashed #starsector

Follow your dreams y'all; circa ~2001 (I somehow conned this school program into giving me credit for making Counterstrike maps.)

LAUNCH ANNOUNCEMENT Forbidden Solitaire is out now! We are immensely proud to release this awesome game made by two veteran indie studios and we hope you really like it. Steam: tinyurl.com/ywj43ptj GOG: tinyurl.com/2s3sv45j Itch: tinyurl.com/3k4bjt8m Please share, many thanks! #indiedev #FakeOS

Working on a dialog sequence related to the finale of the next #Starsector update. Don't screw this part up, captain!!!

I hate to ask, but Meso - you might know him as a Starsector modder/community member, and he's also a contributor to the game - is in debt after caring for his sick mother, and now in real trouble. Any help would be amazing. Thank you for reading this. www.gofundme.com/f/help-me-ca...

Had a longstanding item to redo the "fog of war" feature, so I did that today. Had to wrap my head around just a little weird math and some shader coding. (And still need to make the location circles & connection lines go under the fog.) Also redid font rendering. Everything looks weird!

[Back on my hex bullshit.] Basically: had some thoughts on terrain hex assets over the past ... (god, 12?) ... years I've been selling these things. So these have: smaller size, all seamless tiling (not all done in image) (thus fewer biome variants), flat top/bottom, less visually noisy style.

Starsector 0.98.5a in-development patch notes: fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.... A conclusion to the Sindrian Diktat storyline, alongside a number of smaller features and QoL changes. (Not yet available for download; this is just a preview of what will be in the next release!)

Happy #goblinFriday! Working on Scenario 2: "The Small Escape", where the game becomes a lot more freeform after some linear tutorial scenarios. Need to write a TON of content for locations - much of the 'meat' of the game is random events hit while running around. (more in alt text for images.)

Changed the Carrier Group skill to substantially reduce damage to fighters. This feels pretty good so far, you really get a sense of how much it contributes and some fighter/bomber support that *really* sticks around!

Not quite there yet, but to give an idea of what's been cooking in @amosolov.bsky.social's #Starsector ...

How playtesting is going:

It is #GoblinFriday! Diving (back) into the third scenario "The Small Escape". It starts w/ Wormsy escaping from a caged wagon. Or not. I'm diving in & fixing anything broken, slightly broken, or annoying. Example: big gob of weird execution order/timing problems at game start (more in alt text).

These guys turn 2 today. <3

Apparently, the fix for the <local4> crash that's been happening for some people is to uninstall "Intel Graphics Command Center" (which is apparently outdated?) and update the graphics drivers. A bit more info here: fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index....

Changed up how the basic personal bounties work - there's more of them with a spread of difficulties, and their average difficulty follows which ones you're completing, rather than just going up as you do them. So, just naturally, you'll keep getting more of the kind of bounties you do!

Working through a list of assorted notes I've got; currently: buffing/changing up the Polarized Armor skill. The top speed bonus is flat (rather than a percentage), meaning it'll be especially impactful for larger ships when they need to back off.

Folks, it's once again the first Friday of the month, i.e. "Frecommendation Friday" (I think that name's locked in by now), where I recommend a game that I like and I think you should play. Today that game is #Starsector by @amosolov.bsky.social, @dgbaumgart.bsky.social et al. 1/4 #indiegames

Goblin Friday! ... ugh, whew. Spent part of last night and most of today entirely rewriting the scripting memory system. Fixed some old structural errors (and added news ones - fixed, eventually). It's cleaner, more efficient, easier to use. Also here's an "item gained" dialog element! (Turnip.)

Question: has anyone been noticing the forums hang for like... 10 seconds to a minute when refreshing, *very* occasionally? Trying to figure out if this is a me thing or more general; wasn't happening pre-upgrade.

This game is SUPER fun and has art by @dgbaumgart.bsky.social, which is an added bonus!

Reminder:

Just a heads up that there'll be a web server upgrade doing on early Monday morning. Hopefully all will go well but the site and the forums will be down for a few hours at least. Everything's backed up etc but if stuff *doesn't* go well, it could take some time to sort out. Fingers crossed!

An extremely cool fan-made 3D render of the Conquest! I love all the detail here, the interpretation of the greebles (and the rest of the design) in 3D. And it's even an asymmetric loadout, so you know it's legit :) www.artstation.com/artwork/oJVnPm

Having a little too much fun putting together an (optional, though it might come looking for you) battle. Might be the toughest fight in the game; at least *my* endgame fleet isn't up to the task right now - and it's not even at its full strength yet.

Re. last repost: yeah. My thought re this was about the idea of ambiguity, specifically in media/art (specifically Starsector 'cause I'm writing it right now). LLM's output is tuned to deny ambiguity -- it confidently supplies answers. It teaches users that there ARE easy answers to all questions.

Alex: It's also in line with your tradition for every next mission chain etc to be about 10x more complex than the previous one 🙂 (Feeling called out by @amosolov.bsky.social) (But, but- it's going to be *so good*!) #starsector

Got an actual #Starsector thing to talk about: revision to the dialog for giving weapons to Moyra Standfast, insurrection grandma. I've redone this so instead of being an open-ended resource dump you make 3 one-time deliveries to fulfill the needs of the Volturnian Self Defense Covenant... (cont)

Happy Goblin Friday - and a new Goblin Year! Today: among other things, shifting around locations to fit adjustments to how bridges work (they need two sides) in order to fit in the ending of the tutorial scenario on Troll Bridge, West. (I should not have drawn the map so detailed so early, argh!)

Happy Goblin Friday! My approach: play the game until I hit something that breaks or annoys me, or hit a spot that still needs to be written. We're up through stealing the turnip (though need more fail cases), and now the NPCs aren't triggering their events (which will probably explode, also).

New Starsector blog post: Support Fleets! Calling in friendly fleets to help resupply or for combat support, and: a side bonus of pawning off all that useless metal to a scavenger. fractalsoftworks.com/2025/12/08/s...

Happy Goblin Friday! Easy morning: messed w/ visual effects & story script review. Set up "vibes mode" button that turns off the UI so you can just hang out in a location and chill. Thank you to @mesotronik.bsky.social / soundcloud.com/mesotronik for the sound loop! vid: youtu.be/17diA0A4kzw

Looks like the website is down, some kind of SSL issue, checking into it - my apologies!

In Fun Art Land, I've been working on finishing up this swamp painting, which is where the goblins live. Because it's sticky and stinky?

Writing new Starsector story things: There's always room for Finlay Siyavong to show up! (And yes, you can also bring this to Arroyo if you want to give him a headache.)

This mod adding controller support to Starsector is very cool! Really impressive work. fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index.... i.imgur.com/OlhhzeM.mp4

Here's a fun short interview podcast with my dad about winning a Spacewar tournament in 1972: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/w... The irony? throughline? of me working on Starsector now is not lost upon me. And the sheer historical accident of that event happening to be a 'first' is not lost on him.

Pictured: a planet used to be here, until a bug let me "break it for salvage". Backing out of a menu made the game think the planet was a comm relay, and, well. At least I got some scrap out of it!

I released an update to my icon pack "Food, Spices, & Drinks"! Added 12 icons people requested in the comments over the past year or so. dgbaumgart.itch.io/icons-food-s...

The console commands mod just got one heck of an update, courtesy of @lukas04.bsky.social. Super impressive stuff! fractalsoftworks.com/forum/index....

testing new Starsector content at the minimum supported screen resolution