About
Captain of the Astral Sea places you in the Captain’s chair of a freelance starship travelling a region of space known as the Astral Sea. A procedurally generated galaxy that is over one hundred parsecs in size, made up of inhabited systems, each at differing tech levels and made up of differing political systems.
Put together a crew, keep them healthy and happy, and raise your ship up. Will you be a trader, a passenger liner, a pirate or a bounty hunter? What destiny will you forge?
Missing Features and Bugs
- There are a number of incomplete features, including the Jobs and Shore Leave tabs, but also anything to do with injuries, doctors and medbays. Do not worry about the Doctor role or medbays as they are non functional in this version of the game.
- You cannot surrender or plunder. I had hoped to have these done but implementing the save/load feature overran and then I ran out of time. This will be my first focus for the next release.
- As stated before, I do intend to add more depth to crew management, and this is also the focus of the Shore Leave and Jobs tabs as well.
Note that there is a known issue when downsizing the app. You should be fine making it bigger, but if you want to make it smaller again you might need to restart the game.
If you find any other issues when playing, be sure to let me know and, if possible, provide your save game file. This includes button presses that do nothing, any black screens of death, and any odd behaviour.
How to Play
The first thing you should remember is to hover over everything; if you see a hand icon, you can click on it!
Once you are past character creation, you will see a screen that has tabs along the bottom and a status bar along the top, a central display and two side panels.
- The tab bars control the central display, and will give you access to all the main areas of the games functionality, as well as to the main menu and settings panel.
- The Status Bar provides quick access to important information; be sure to click on things here to get more detailed info at a glance!
- The left panel shows you info on your current system and any target or destination system.
- The right panel shows info on your crew in the ships roles, and will be expanded over time with more detailed crew info.
Take a moment to look over these, then go to the Captain > Crew, and select the Roles tab, to assign your crew to their roles. You will at least need a pilot assigned, unless neither your Captain or First Officer is competent in those areas, in which case you will have been given a free auto pilot.
Then you can use the Merchants tabs (along with the arrows at the top) to find the best trade and passenger routes, and use the Dock tabs to navigate the Galaxy, warp to destinations, and keep your ship repaired.
The Tavern tabs on the left currently only holds the Jukebox, but will in future be Job and Crew related, and the Shipyard tabs on the right offer new crew, ship upgrades and new starships.
And that’s it!
In Depth Guides
The purple dot surrounded by a circle on the left of the map is where I have started. Worlds go purple when you visit them so you can see where you have been, and the circle around the planet shows the current range of my starship. Each ship has a different range, so finding the right ship for your playstyle is always important.
In this example, I started on a world called Lowry. You can see there are a number of stats which tell me about the world, and each stat makes the world unique, from the trade goods they want, to the passengers that will travel to/from the world, to the ships you might encounter when you visit.
In addition, each world can have a status. In this case there is nothing eventful happening, but other worlds might suffer from a pandemic and need medicine, or a drought and need water, or be at war and need firearms. This gives a boost to that particular trade good.
There are two main ways of traveling around the Galaxy. The first, and cheapest, is your own ships propulsion. You can travel to any system within range, and must then buy fuel to travel onwards from there.
When you warp to a system like this, you may meet other ships along route. Police, pirates, traders and passenger liners all frequent various systems depending on the type of system it is. Most ships will ignore you, but pirates will attack you and police may sometimes inspect your cargo hold for illegal goods.
How you interact with each encounter is up to you, and is part of the way you define your place in the Astral Sea.
The second way to travel is through Portalling. This is a service provided by the Hi Tech worlds that enable you, for a price, to jump across the Galaxy. This price is dependent on both the size of your ship and the distance you have to travel, but is a great way to jump around if you ever get stuck or you desire to be elsewhere.
When you arrive at your destination, you are presented with the services that the Dock offers. Here you can refuel, repair your hull strength, and restock on food for your crew to eat. Crew who aren’t your Captain or First Mate will require payment upon docking and will slowly grow unhappy if you choose to not pay them.
The Docks also offer banking services for loans and a hospital (that may differ in quality and cost depending on the planet you land at) in case you require medical help your doctor can’t provide.
One of the core ways of making money is through Trade. Trade goods come in two flavours, the legal kind, and the black market goods.
The legal goods make up the bulk of galactic trade. They range from food and water, to robotics and cybernetics, and everything in between. As stated earlier, different worlds will have different requirements. As such, finding trade routes between the differing worlds is relatively easy, though you will find stock will reduce the more you return to the same world, so travelling about is also important.
The tech level, special resources and active status of a world each have a huge impact on what a world produces and doesn’t, as well as what it buys and doesn’t, and at what price. Each of these provide for a vibrant setup, but also lead in well to the black market goods, as these are also heavily influenced by the type of government.
There are three types of black market good; firearms, narcotics and slaves. Each type of world will accept or abhor these, but the transport of these goods can be extremely profitable if you are able to find routes in them. Just make sure you aren’t caught out by the ever present galactic police…
In future, the Black Market Merchant will also offer shady products for you to buy, and is another route of engagement into getting random goods and possible improvements (or not) for your captain and crew.
Passengers are fun in that they are often antithesis to trading. You might see the most profitable trade route goes to Planet A, but all the passengers want to travel to Planet B. Passengers are also directly influenced by the world they live in; they will travel from planets where they don’t want to be to planets where they would prefer to be, depending on who they are and why they are traveling.
Each passenger group is made up of a number of people with a required number of cabins. Some passengers are happy to share a cabin to save cost, while others would want to spend the extra money on additional cabins for enhanced privacy, or to get their kids out their own cabin.
The fare that you can charge a passenger depends on the number of passengers present, the number of cabins they are after, and the distance they want to go. As can be expected, the more of each of these there are, the more you can charge them. However, more passengers on your ship also incur increased cost, as like your crew, passengers require rations during the trip. This is usually two rations each, which is also affected by the Great Cook perk that reduces this to one.
Passengers also like things to be stable, and they get scared every time your ships hull takes damage during the cruise. Overly scared passengers will in future jump ship without paying, so be careful to look out for them!
There are two ways to keep things more stable. First, you can buy shields, which will protect damage from reaching your hull. Passengers don’t fear incoming fire when they can see it bouncing harmlessly off the ships shields. The second thing you can do is get a good diplomat to entertain passengers.
This is vital for those venturing into the passenger transport industry as entertained passengers tip, and so you get a nice small bonus at the end of your trip.
Being a Captain of a Starship is a hard job. That’s why it’s important to have a well oiled crew working for you so that you can help offset some of that load!
Alongside your First Mate, you can hire additional crew to fill out the five core roles of the ship: Pilot, Engineer, Fighter, Diplomat and Doctor. You hire these crew off planets you visit, with each different government type encouraging different types of crew, so you’ll have to look around if you’re looking to fill out a specific role.
Crew can be hired for a set cost, and then require daily payment as well as feeding through rations. This needs to be taken into consideration when taking on crew since you will need to ensure your own income is sufficient enough to offset the cost of these additional crew. Crew expect payment when you dock, and will grow unhappy if you don’t pay them.
Happy crew gain mood bonuses to skills, while unhappy crew will find themselves not able to perform their tasks as well as before, so keeping your crew happy is very important.
When you assign crew to their roles, you can assign a primary and secondary crew member. The primary crew member takes on the full responsibility, while the secondary crew member acts as an assistant, boosting the primary member with extra stats. Together, very happy crew can help your crew reach Legendary skill sets that make them undefeatable, and is a worthy late game achievement.
Currently happiness is a little simplistic, but will become more nuanced in future updates. In future, crew will be expanded with injuries and illnesses, desire for only moral/immoral actions, jobs and trade goods, a likeness/dislike for planet types, trade types, and passengers, and more, making each member feel unique and giving purpose to having larger crews who help to cover each other when others are down.
Crew will also be indispensable in handling jobs you take in the upcoming job system, can take part in shore leave adventures, and will be able to teach and learn skills from each other to improve.
Just like your crew, a starship captain is nothing without the starship they captain. Upgrading your starship and even buying new and better ships are all things you can do.
The main starship upgrades are split into four main categories. Three of these (the first three) fill out upgrade slots, and so you are limited in choosing the ones that best benefit and suit your playstyle. The combat tab fills out weapon and shield slots, with increasingly powerful weapons and shields.
Upgrades provide for your standard upgrades, such as more cargo bays and reinforced hull. Skills provide boosts to your crew in their roles, while gadgets provide the really unique stuff, such as cloaking devices and a smuggler’s hold.
Buying these upgrades is simple, and you can sell them back at 1/4 price, but just be aware that some upgrades you can only buy once, and others have to be bought again if you change starship.
Starships can be purchased from the Starship Hangar, and are also divided into four sections; scouts, traders, liners, and fighters. These sections further divide into ship size, starting at tiny and going all the way up to huge.
Upgrading to larger starships is important to help you expand, gain more crew, earn more cash and eventuality reach the pinnacle of commanding a huge starship, which can help you with the tougher jobs and earn the biggest cash. When you upgrade your starship, your starship sells back at a quarter of the price, and you have a choice of reducing the cost further by selling unwanted upgrades with it, hence why it says “Cost From” in the screenshot above.