SAND CRUISER

Note: Sand Cruiser is in active development. All screenshots, videos and artwork show an early work-in-progress state and may change significantly before release.

A dying sun has scorched the world. The once-familiar star swelled into a red giant whose glare left the surface uninhabitable, and what remained of humanity fled into the cool deep. There, in the rock, they woke an ancient predator that stirs to the signs of life: the swarm.

Now humanity is caught between the sun above the world and the swarm beneath it. Its only way out is motion. It lives aboard colossal landcruisers that chase the planet's wandering cool zones and can never stay still for long.

Build your cruiser

Construct a rolling fortress from whatever the world gives up. Draw walls and floors however you see fit, place modules, lay out decks and roofs. Every build is a trade-off: roofs give vital shade and shield your crew from the killing sun, but every machine that keeps you alive, from the generator to the galley, throws off the heat and vibration that give you away to the swarm at night.

Command a living crew

By day you are the colony manager. Your crew are real individuals with skills, quirks and moods. Assign priorities and shifts, keep them fed and sane as they cook, repair, drill and harvest. A well-run post works; a hungry, exhausted one breaks down.

Survive the night

When the desert cools, the swarm rises. It is blind and hunts by signature alone: by day it follows your vibration unseen beneath the sand, by night it breaks through wherever your warm cruiser burns like a beacon in the dark. Post the watch, load the guns, aim the searchlights. Light here is not a comfort but firepower: what stands in the dark, you will rarely hit. Or run silent, cold and dark, and the night lets you be.

Read the land

The world is finite and gives up nothing freely. Sound out what lies beneath the sand with seismic charges, triangulate your finds and drill them out. Gather scrap from the surface, plunder weathered ruins and the wrecks of other cruisers. Deposits run dry and never return, so scarcity drives you ever onward.

Cruiser against cruiser against swarm

You share the desert with rival caravans. Most of the time you keep your distance, but in the most desperate hours two cruisers meet, and what follows is the most terrible battle this world knows. The combined heat and tremor of two cruisers at war is so vast that the swarm erupts from the ground even in daylight and falls on both at once. In the end there is no clean victor, only whoever is left.

A world that does not want you

The desert day burns, the night freezes, and the narrow band of survivable ground between them drifts across the planet with the seasons. You chase it forever, always a step from dying of thirst, of hunger, of heat. There is no destination, only the next day, bought.