A Hard Sci-Fi Colony Simulator
Arrive in an alien star system. Build a civilization of billions. Transform worlds.
Terminal Burn is a colony simulator at a planetary scale. Begin 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.
Inspired by Kerbal Space Program, Dwarf Fortress, and Stellaris, physics defines the core mechanics of Terminal Burn. Manage Hohmann transfers, hard burn trajectories 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.
The fate of this new system lies in your hands. The possibilites are boundless. Will you transform barren worlds into gardens? Or will you consolidate every resource into planet-scale compute clusters? Will you seek coexistance or annihilation?
"Ten thousand years ago humankind sent its first torchship into the void. What began as tentative steps has become a wave of expansion — but still 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.
Every torchship is a loaded gun - the remaining safety margin of antimatter necessary to travel between the stars contains enough energy to sterilize entire continents. But every new system contains unimaginable resources, more than enough to support billions. There is room enough for coexistence, if at times tenuous. Brinksmanship can let an audacious faction carve out a home for itself in these new worlds, but war, should it arrive, has the potential to be cataclysmic.
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.
Like medieval cathedrals, billions work on projects that they will never live to see the final product. It will take generations to make a barren system into a garden. Welcome to Terminal Burn.
Be first to know when Terminal Burn reaches Early Access.
No spam. Launch notifications only.