Cosmoteer Starship Architect & Commander

Cosmoteer is a starship architect and command game that sits comfortably alongside FTL, Starsector and Space Engineers in influence. You design ships from a grid of individual modules — weapons, engines, hallways, crew quarters, reactors — and the choices you make about layout, redundancy and crew flow directly determine how that ship performs once it's under fire. Designs export cleanly to Steam Workshop, and the community catalogue is already deep.

Crew are individually simulated, not abstracted into stats. Anywhere from half a dozen to over a thousand people walk through your ship operating weapons, carrying munitions, and routing themselves between stations according to job priorities you can optionally micromanage. A long hallway is a real bottleneck; a damaged corridor genuinely slows things down. Combat is physics-driven and modular — individual modules can be targeted and destroyed, ships can break apart into floating pieces, and tactical targeting (knock out weapons, drop shields, kill the reactor) actually matters.

Around the architect-and-combat core sits a career mode set in a procedurally generated galaxy, with faction contracts, loot, ship upgrades and online co-op for friends who want to run the campaign together. Online PvP modes let you test your designs against other players, and a creative mode strips away resource constraints if you'd rather just build. A modding framework backed by Steam Workshop keeps new weapons, modules and total conversions flowing in, and the Discord community is large and active.