Become a literal galaxy brain in this ambitious space strategy sim about an AI seeking a new home for humanity

Sine Fine is a “hard sci-fi” space exploration game from the avid stargazers at Vindemiatrix Collective, a developer based across western Europe. It is certainly hard to get your head around, but also, very promising. The premise is that you’re a lonely, functionally immortal AI, seeking a new home for some meagre frozen embryos in the wake of humanity’s extinction. Labouring across eons, you’ll send out probes to nearby systems and build outposts and communication networks.

The game is played at relativistic speeds – that’s to say, at speeds great enough for relativistic effects such as time dilation to become significant. It’s also not a traditional strategy game – as currently conceptualised on the developer’s blog, at least – in that you won’t have direct and instantaneous control over outposts in different solar systems. Instead, orders will travel outward from the AI core to a target solar system along a “star path”, while smaller AIs handle day-to-day operations in outposts. This creates a delay between order and execution, with messages to distant outposts requiring more thought to ensure they’re relevant on arrival.

The smaller AIs are, in fact, envisaged as fragments of the original terran AI. They’re all particles of a decentralised and desynchronised cosmic “psyche”. Which is pretty fascinating. Also fascinating: the devs are planning to let players further influence and perhaps, enhance the target outpost by routing the star path through a bunch of intervening celestial objects.

One developer gives the hypothetical example of transmitting the signal through ‘exotic’ phenomena such as black holes, pulsars and the remains of supernovae to “focus” the target outpost on research. Or angling it around a “dangerous” area such as a nebula, where the signal might degrade. It’s like the galaxy is a brain, and you’re fiddling with the wiring.

That would have been quite enough to whet my interest, but Sine Fine also has a bunch of other ideas and prototype systems taken more directly from real-life astrophysics. For example, the devs hope to procedurally simulate the formation of planets around stars, moving through accretion phrases over millions of years. It’s not clear how palpable all that will be to the player, but the research makes for nourishingly nerdy reading.

If all of this tickles your pulsars, the devs have a free early prototype available for Linux and Windows. Beware that it’s just a technical test, not a game – you can poke around the galaxy map and system screen, but it’ll be a while before you’re ferrying any embryos to Alpha Centauri. In general, all of the above may change significantly as Sine Fine evolves over what I hope will be years, rather than aeons. You might want to check out the Discord and subreddit for project updates.