I will be straight with you. Salvage Rat launched in August 2025 and it did NOT land the way I hoped. I took that harder than I want to admit. Then I went quiet... for a long, long time... THEN I got to WORK, on my own terms and against my own standards for what the game should be.
So here is the thing you should know before you read any further. I am not a salesman. I have a day job. This is a game I am building because I want to play it, and I am putting it out at a low price so that other people who want the same kind of game can come along for the ride. If it sells, good. If it does not, I am still going to build it, because I would be building it anyway.
What I am really trying to make is the single-player space game I have always wanted and never quite found. I love EVE Online for its living economy, but it demands other people (and brings out some of the worst in them... and some of the best...) and a second job to enjoy. I love X4 for its flight and its simulation, but the economy tends to settle down and stall out once the map stabilizes. I love Mount and Blade II for its factional intrigue and the way you can climb from nobody to a mighty king, but once you have conquered everything, the fun quietly ends. I have finished that game more than once and felt the same emptiness each time.
Salvage Rat is my attempt to take the best parts of all three and fix the parts that let me down. A real economy that keeps moving because it is driven by simulated actors with their own motives. Flight and combat you actually pilot. Factional politics deep enough that you can rise through the ranks, get a vote, and eventually steer wars and policy yourself, in a universe big enough that you never run out of rivals. One person cannot promise you EVE at the scale of a full corporation war. What I can promise is an honest and fairly stubborn attempt at that feeling.
Here is what has changed and what is coming.
1. Flight, Rebuilt From Scratch
A flight model you actually fly
The old flight model is gone. The new one is built in the spirit of X4, six degrees of freedom, weighty and deliberate, and it is designed from the ground up for mouse and keyboard and for the controller equally. If you want to fly with a gamepad, full 6DOF support is there and it feels good, not bolted on.
2. Combat You Steer, Not Combat You Watch
Real, flyable combat
Combat used to work like EVE. You locked a target, you activated your turrets or bays, and then you mostly watched it happen. It was dull to play and it was no fun to build either, so it is gone. It is now built like X4 or Elite Dangerous. You either line your ship up on the lead indicator and fire, or you use the HUD tracking reticle to mark where your turrets should draw their bead. You are the one making the shot now, not a lock timer.
3. A Living Economy That Does Not Go Stale
Economy, faction warfare, and world building
This is the heart of the game and the part I care about most. The economy is driven heavily by NPCs that are built to simulate real players, each with their own motivations and their own reasons for doing what they do. The goal is an economy that keeps moving on its own instead of settling into a quiet equilibrium the way X4 tends to. I have been building out the economic models specifically to avoid that stall. The world reacts, factions push and pull, and the map is meant to stay alive whether you touch it or not.
4. Rise Through the Ranks and Take the Helm
Factional intrigue and player influence
You start inside an alliance. You earn influence over time. There are votes and politics, and if you play it well you can eventually be elected into a position where you set policy yourself. That means calling the wars, steering where the economy goes, and deciding where the borders push next. This is the Mount and Blade feeling I always wanted more of. The difference is that Mount and Blade runs out of map. Here there is enormous room to keep expanding, so you should never run out of enemies or intrigue to get tangled in.
5. Permadeath Is Now Your Choice
Optional permadeath
Permadeath is still the way I think the game is meant to be played, and the legacy records are built around it. But it is now optional. If final death is not for you, you can turn it off and play the game your way. The stakes are yours to set.
6. Land on Worlds and Work Them
Planet exploration and planet-based missions
You can now go down to planets. Each explorable surface is a sizable ten by ten kilometer area. When you make planetfall, a short cinematic plays as you are dropped from your ship into a ground rover, and from there you drive the surface. There are missions to run down there, resources to pull, and old points of interest scattered around to dig into if you go looking. It opens up a whole second layer of play beneath the one in orbit.
7. A Universe Big Enough to Get Lost In
Thousands of procedurally generated systems
The universe now supports a huge number of unique, procedurally generated star systems. For this build the ceiling sits around 4,500, and because generation is procedural it will land somewhere in the region of 4,200 to 4,700 from seed to seed. The vast majority of that space starts out unclaimed. The race to carve it up is the point.
8. Performance Work Everywhere
Many performance improvements
There has been a great deal of performance work across the board. A big part of that came from refactoring core systems out of Blueprints and into C++, partly for speed and partly because Blueprint debugging was making the deeper systems painful to maintain and get right. The result is a more stable foundation to keep building on.
9. Play It Your Way
Customizable inputs and full gamepad support
Inputs are now fully customizable, and there is proper gamepad support throughout, not just in menus. Whether you live on mouse and keyboard or you want to lean back with a controller, the game is built to be played comfortably either way.
10. New Ships in the Hangar
New ship models
There are new ship models in the game. To be clear and up front, these are still marketplace assets from Fab, and I am glad to use them. More on that below.
Also Coming
Beyond the headline work above, a lot of smaller things are being touched. Nothing is off the table in this pass. A sample of what else is in progress:
Continued world building and lore woven through the factions and systems
Ongoing refactors of core systems from Blueprints into C++ for stability
Updated screenshots and fresh gameplay footage once it is ready to show
Broader tuning of the economic models as they are tested in the wild
Expansion room built into the faction and territory systems for the long haul
On multiplayer
Multiplayer is on the roadmap. I want to be careful with the word, so here it is plainly. It is something I intend to work toward when the single-player game is where I want it, and there is no date attached to that yet. The game is single-player at its core and will stay that way. Think of multiplayer as a direction I am heading, nothing more concrete than that for now.
On updates and how you get them
The next release is coming soon. I am keeping the timing loose on purpose, because I would rather ship it right than ship it to a date. What I can tell you is that updates will come more regularly from here. If you own the game, you will get access to incremental beta builds as things get ironed out, so you can play along as it comes together. To be clear, this is not Early Access. I am not playing that game. It is a finished product that I am going to keep making better, and owners get to ride along while I do.
On price
It stays at 9.99. One time pay. There will not ever be no DLC and there are no subscriptions of any kind. You buy it once and it is yours forever, including everything I add from here on out.
On AI and marketplace assets
I want to be direct about this because some people care and I would rather they know where I stand. I use AI tools to create some of the loading screens and icons, character portraits, and the like, and to help me work through storylines, and YES CODING ASSISTANCE! The first release of the game was PURELY BY HAND and took over 4.5 years! Vector calculus, UMG, procedural generation algorithms, flight model, NPC bot AI, name generators, materials and shaders, model customizations, and way more than can just be listed! If you think that is a problem and slop, please keep it movin'. Try building a project of this scope with AI, and go ahead let me know how easy it was for you... I won't wait...
I also build on marketplace assets, including ship models from Fab.
I am proud to support the creators who make those assets, and I am not going to apologize for either choice. This is how a single person ships a game of this size at this price. If that is not for you, that is completely fine, and I wish you well. It is simply how this game gets made.
Closing
I am trying to create an addictive 30 dollar experience for 10 dollars, made by one person who wanted this game to exist. It did not go well the first time, and I sat with that for a while. Then I decided that if I was going to build it anyway, I might as well build it right and share it with the people who want the same thing I do. If that is you, I am glad you are here.
There is a lot more coming.
Thanks for reading.