A Hard Science Fiction Colony Simulator
Arrive in an alien star system. Build a civilization of billions. Survive the age of cosmic birth.
Terminal Burn is a colony simulator where the physics are real and the stakes are cosmic. You arrive aboard an interstellar torchship decelerating into an alien solar system — a few thousand colonists, dwindling fuel, and a star system full of dead worlds waiting to be claimed.
Manage realistic Hohmann transfers and delta-V budgets. Engineer atmospheres on lifeless rocks. Build supply chains spanning billions of kilometers. Watch outposts grow into arcologies and orbital habitats holding hundreds of millions.
Inspired by Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress, and Stellaris — but driven by hard science and multi-generational scope.
"Ten thousand years ago humankind sent its first torchship into the void. What began as tentative steps has become a wave of expansion — a dust mote in the hundred-thousand-light-year breadth of the Milky Way."
This is the age of cosmic birth, where humanity's greatest constraint is not technology but energy and relativity. Torchships represent the pinnacle of engineering achievement, their antimatter drives capable of reaching a tenth of light speed by consuming fuel loads equivalent to tens of millions of times the old Earth's nuclear arsenals.
Like medieval cathedrals, billions work on projects that they may never live to see the final product. The race to new systems has spawned radically different philosophies: ultra-light embryonic ark ships betting on speed, generation ships bringing self-sufficiency to the frontier, and everything between.
The worlds that we find are not like home. Hot Jupiters evaporating under intense stellar radiation. Supercritical steam worlds. Even the most promising candidates — worlds with liquid water and stable orbits — are often anoxic wastelands harboring biochemistries fundamentally incompatible with human life.
It will take generations to make a barren system into a garden. Welcome to the frontier.
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