How about a fresh look at Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions, that not-an-Astroneer-sequel from System Era? The developer revealed an extended look at gameplay yesterday, detailing what it is you’ll be doing exactly. As has already been established, it’s an online co-op game, one of those “friendslop” kind of games you’ll see people be mean about on Ditter and TikTok comments. To be specific, you can play it solo, or with three of your friends, but there are elements that draw on other players (more on that in a bit).
Like a lot of These Kinds Of Games (we really should agree on a name for them at this point), to start off you’ll have to prepare for the challenge ahead. You do this on the titular S.S. Starseeker, a big ole ship filled with a bunch of other cutely designed also titularly titled Astroneers. Here, you’ll buy and craft different tools and items to bring with you, and decide what it is you want to take with you on expeditions. That might be something useful, or, if you’re that kind of person who just likes to goof around while everyone else actually has fun playing the game, you could bring a beach ball instead.
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Expeditions! Structurally these sound pretty par for the course. You land on a planet, you go do a mission or a task or somesuch, and you get back before your oxygen runs out. Along the way there might be alien creatures to do battle with, bits of loot to plunder, that sort of thing.
The Astroneery element of it all is that you have a terrain tool that you can modify in different ways. At its base you just remove terrain, but different nozzles can make it shoot out water, build up the land, launch aliens or yourself into the sky, etc.
There’s no procedural generation to be found on the planets you visit either, the main one the game is launching with, Tefra, was made by hand, so you’ll be able to revisit particular locations from expedition to expedition. As you progress, you’ll also unlock more landing zones to other parts of the planet, which subsequently have tougher challenges to face.
These challenges might include something simple like repairing some equipment, or bringing up a receiver to a high point on the map. Some of them might even encourage you to work with other groups of players to complete them, a point I quite like – there’s not enough online games about collaboration out there!
No exact release date just yet, but Starseeker: Astroneer Expeditions is due out some time in 2026.
