Aurora Core
1,000 sleepers, 100 waking hands and 1,500 light years of emptiness. As commander of the Aurora Core you assign your crew, ration oxygen and make decisions no one should survive. Will you bring your colony to Thalassa?
"Cryo chambers at 94%. Fuel lasts 12 days. The destination is 26 days away. Input required..."
The Aurora Core is no warship and no research vessel — she is a wager. That 100 waking people can carry 1,000 sleeping colonists across 1,500 light years of emptiness, to an ocean world called Thalassa. You don't fly — you decide.
Features aboard:
Crew, not buttons: Assign your crew across Life Support, Engine Room, Salvage and Reactor. Every person in the engine room is missing from the air supply. Rooms can be overloaded for double yield — at the risk of burning out.
The cryo question: The sleepers are cargo and mission at once. Their cooling devours energy; when power runs short, they die. Emergency cooling saves power — and claims about one percent of the sleepers per day. Who arrives is your decision.
Over 100 events with an aftermath: From a crippled Precursor drone to mutiny in the fourth sector. Whoever recovers survivors or loots a wreck sees the consequences days later. Sixteen named officers unlock their own special options — as long as they live.
A story that doesn't explain: The Prometheus launched a generation before you — and fell silent. Something is counting on a frequency no human transmitted. And somewhere on deck 3, one person too many is breathing.
Three roads into the dark:
Single Mission: One journey, 1,500 light years, one destination. The classic run.
The Long Voyage: A campaign across three legs — ship, crew and supplies carry over, the danger rises.
Exodus: The nightmare scenario. Thalassa is dead, the Precursor catalog lists further candidate worlds — each deeper into never-charted space. How far can you carry hope?
Replayability:
4 ship classes with real strengths and weaknesses — from the balanced Aurora to the leak-resistant Vesta.
4 commanders with a passive bonus and an active ability.
22 relics and 24 anomalies that rewrite the rules each voyage.
Research archive: Earned data cores unlock permanent directives for all future missions.
10 ascension levels that make every journey a little more merciless.
At the end there is a number: how many souls reach the new world. And an epilogue that tells, twenty years later, what became of them.