Script

The game's content is procedurally generated, but the story is mostly fixed and so is the general progression of game milestones, difficulty and tactical options. However, since the story is reconstructed by the player from the randomized bits and pieces and from the reaction of the world to the player actions, the detailed shape of the story depends heavily on the player's imagination, his preferred speed of play (no much pressure there), his choices (there are multiple endings) and even on the random setup of any particular game.

The general game progression is structured via the ascent through the spaceship levels and so is described as part of the spaceship design. The plot is loosely interwoven within the progression and the tempo and ordering of story elements that reach the player is even less predetermined and leaves a lot of room for mystery, deduction and surprise. Here we will summarize the story in a condensed form bereft of wonder and drama, which constitutes the worst kind of spoilers, though we will omit the heavy spoilers that are revealed to the player only at the end of the game (and only in some of the endings).

Plot outline

Part 1

First, a pleasant surprise, deck 2 looks hastily abandoned and long unused, but contains many scattered and hidden supplies and valuable items. There are also habitable quarters with functioning life support, spacious common rooms and an impressive gym and medical bay. The stairs from the airlock at the surface of the ship, where the shuttle is docked, lead directly up to deck 2. From here, stairs leads further up to deck 3, towards the centre of the ship, but the airtight double doors of the staircase are destroyed by an explosion and crudely mended and welded permanently shut. Lifts are dead and sealed, too, but a few corridors away there is a dark, destroyed area with remains of a big staircase in the centre, housing intact stairs down to deck 1. The navigational console shows the ship running steady on autopilot towards Uranus --- a travel of many months, so there will be enough time for detailed exploration of the two longest decks of the disc-shaped vessel.

After a couple of days spent cleaning up, placing the scarce brought supplies out of the way and making themselves comfortable, the crew decides to explore deck 1. The double height, outermost deck acts as a buffer against meteor hits and cosmic rays and contains storage rooms with potentially valuable supplies and secondary life support subsystems. This where huge water recycling basins are usually located on passenger ships, where natural water purifying process is emulated, employing bacteria, algae and aquatic and swamp plants. The odour of decay coming from downstairs inspires the heroes to climb down in a file, with electric torches and long sticks for probing the ground, and watching for trouble. Still, near the stairs, on the bank of a deep, overgrown and stinking basin, they get utterly surprised.

TODO: research dangerous sweet-water animals and try to make the following paragraph less cliche. Hippos, for sure. Tigers like water, too. Some weaker ones would will be needed, too. Wild dogs can be common to both decks. Perhaps start with wild dogs? They are least unlikely.

A four feet alligator bites the leg and breaks the shin bone of a hero and pulls him away from the others. In the ensuing struggle another hero falls into the water and gets wounded, attracting a swarm of piranhas and a couple of lesser alligators. When the fight is over, nobody is sure how exactly they managed to wrest the crippled crew member and his badly wounded and unconscious companion from the jaws of the beasts. What is sure and unexpectedly lucky is that the robotic medical bay is fully operational and of an unbelievably advanced type. Not only is the fallen hero revived. His wounds are fully healed, skin repaired and scars, even his old scars, totally wiped out. The broken shin of the other victim is entirely mended and the bitten off muscle regrown, so that within days his mauled leg is stronger than the intact one.

Encouraged by the quality of their medical backup, over the next weeks the crew explores most of deck 1, gaining experience in combat with makeshift weapons and growing strong and ruthless. There are many dangerous animals in the water treatment area and around, but they rarely attack undisturbed and are easy to dispatch with good teamwork, unless they manage to ambush the heroes, which still happens from time to time. The training is the main fruit of the hunt, since the storage areas on deck 1 turn out mostly empty. Enough supplies is found, however, to rebuild the staircase walls and doors, so that no predator can sneak up the stairs to deck 2. The animals are far from eradicated, but at least they learn to fear the heroes, for whom killing has become a reflex. Many of them belong to protected species and some seem slightly mutated. It will be hard to explain to the authorities that inspect ships for registration, just as the filth and decay in the water basins and whatever contamination will be found in the upper decks. A prolonged quarantine of the ship would be disastrous, given the extent of the debt the heroes have gone into.

Adding to the mystery of the rich ecosystem of deck 1 are crazed autonomous household robots found in distant areas of deck 2. It looks like the whole ship has gone feral and went alive over the years. The robots correctly replenish their batteries from the ships' main electrical current, but the other parts of their programs seem utterly corrupted after 8 years without human maintenance and updates to anti-virus databases. The cleaning robots, shooting blinding foam, may seem harmless, but they are deadly coupled with aggressive greenery trimming robots, big autonomous transport vehicles or an occasional feral animal. Even the small rat-like robots for air-duct cleaning and power grid maintenance are nasty when dropping in numbers from above or dislodging hot water pipes and electric cables. Fortunately, the robots lack the animal predatory efficiency and don't reproduce, so all are quickly hunted down, turned off and stored for spare parts or to be repaired in the future.

Not long after the first two decks are conquered, the crew hears a distant explosion, the engines start working erratically, changing the course of the ship, and all contact with the outside world is lost. The wires from the communication and navigation panels are traced up towards the centre of the ship, where the reactor and the engines are located. The heroes pop the entrance to deck 3 open, kill the first thing that jumps at them, which is an oversize ostrich with bloody eyes, and deck 3 is never silent again. Even welding the staircase doors, lift shafts and air-ducts shut and building barriers and traps will never again hold the nasties above for long, given bears and other heavy animals from the zoo gone wrong area at level 6 and given reprogrammed construction robots, built to tear down walls and cut through steel plates.

The wires from the communication panel end up in the construction area on deck 9, among completely smashed computer and radio racks. Every piece of wiring around is completely torn apart, including the navigation cables. The huge antenna at the other side of the hull has been dislodged by the explosion and has drifted into space, though the hull itself is not breached. Replacing this equipment will be extremely expensive and is probably out of the question for the fist year. Fixing the navigation cables that go outside the hull at this place is much easier, but requires hunting down suitable equipment in the increasingly dangerous environment. As long as the crew can fend off demolition robots on all levels up to deck 9, they should be able to control where the ship is going. While searching for the repair equipment, they glimpse some of the past splendor of the cruise liner among the wreckage of luxurious passenger cabins on deck 4. They find precious stone jewelry after prying open a safe and they loot the corpse of a vanquished construction robot, apparently originally tasked with plating some walls in the construction area with gold. The can't yet discover the main storage of the gold plates though, but it's not a priority, anyway, and they focus on repairing the navigation circuit.

Just before the ship finally reaches Uranus orbit, the crew has a few encounters with robot-animal hybrids. The clumsy cyborgs look very disturbing and behave with rudimentary intelligence, but the hardened heroes can no longer be cowed and slaughter the interlopers with cold fury. After all, it's their ship, bought with years of deadly risk, loneliness and sweat. Their hope for independence, gained by breaking all contracts and burning all bridges. Their all-in bet they will defend working, fighting and bluffing if needs be. Neither mutated animals nor infected robots, nor prying humans, nor even if aliens themselves were to appear, will prevent them from building their future on this moving stretch of land that they took for their own.

Part 2

TODO