Space Trash Scavenger News

Greeting Scavengers!

After almost 3 years’ work, Sarah and I are hyped that Space Trash Scavenger is finally launching into Early Access today!

Space Trash Scavenger is all about collecting space trash from a bygone era, in an abandoned corner of the galaxy called the Outer Reach. It’s up to you to build your own Space Rig, process that trash, and sell it on for profit.

At its heart, it’s an open-world survival crafting game. But we tried to bring something new to the genre, by setting it in a series of toybox-sized, partially procedurally generated asteroid fields - where local “Mario Galaxy” type gravity mechanics come into play.

I’ve already given an overview of what we wanted to do in Dev Blog 1 and talked about how we thought about spatial dynamics in Dev Blog 2.

But there’s more to talk about. Space Trash is a 3rd person action game. Combat plays a big part in this game. And then there is the automation too. And NPCs. So let’s dive into it!





We wanted combat included right from the start. I think it’s because we wanted a sense of danger and tension, and it suited the 3rd person perspective. Right now you get a selection of different weapons, automatic rifles, and slower but more powerful pistols. You can craft grenades and you can craft buffs, including crit hit modifiers, time dilation and damage resistance.

A lot of the buffs are crafted from food. We were keen to have farming and watering crops - just because it seemed fun - but using the food as ingredients for buffs, along with more exotic components sometimes - seemed like a nice way to encourage that side of the game and give it meaning. There is a hunger meter, but certain foods in and of itself will give you buffs to help you when going into the “dungeons”.

Based on feedback, I’m really looking forward to adding more tools to your arsenal, as well as more enemy types, going forward.




I mentioned the asteroid fields, but just as important are the derelict ships and abandoned mines and outposts you come across. Over time we’ll be adding more locations. These have procedurally generated layouts, enemies and loot. So they are kind of similar to a roguelike dungeon in that way. Personally, I like this because it means I don’t know what I’m getting when I venture into them while playtesting!

The interiors are dark and foreboding. Later they can get pretty tough, so you need the best weaponry and medpacks to survive. The corridor spaces mix up the combat from the outdoor stuff, with a more claustrophobic space horror feel. It’s for these places that the scavenger has a torch on the helmet! Some of these locations are locked, and you should keep hold of any keys you find around the place.




When you enter your world seed as you create a new game, it will affect everything from the types and positions of asteroids in every sector, as well as the layout of the locations. Most importantly, it keeps it different and adds a lot of replayability.

Because you jump forward on the galactic map to each of your salvage sectors, I see a lot of cross-over with roguelikes here. I even thought about taking that further and going fully rogue with permadeath, or perhaps rogue-lite. After some thinking, we decided it would just be too punishing to lose your whole base when you died. Instead, you are “recloned” by ScavCorp in the same sector, and you go back to your body to get your stuff. I think it’s a good balance.




From time to time, you’ll receive product orders from your employer ScavCorp. You’ll need to build up your Space Rig, a base of operations to process what trash you have found and refine it to products to sell at the local stock market.

There is a factory-style game here, if you are so inclined. You can automate this process, using conveyor pads (which transport items by floating them along pathways), and I made sure you can use splitters with ratio sliders to move the resources around in the amounts you need, to different factory machines.

There is scope to get pretty advanced here; however, you could choose to do it by hand if you prefer. You can also automate the input using tractor beams. I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts in Early Access about where to take this side of the game.


Once you have your products you can sell them at the Stock Market. Prices here are dynamic, so remember to sell high! And be careful of flooding the market, because the prices will react. I was keen to have this in from the start too. I was certainly inspired, at least initially, by my times playing Elite, but also Slime Rancher has a similar sort of system. It adds an extra dimension to your decision-making about when and what to sell.




It’s our goal to have the game feel good through the interplay of its main systems of scavenging, building, crafting, selling, combat and exploration. But we do want there to be some story elements, and we want there to be other people to meet and discover on your journey through the Outer Reach. We’ve added a few NPCs to the game already. Over time we’re looking forward to adding more, with more quest types and revealing more background story through these characters.


Early Access is a chance to hear your thoughts and make the game as best we can. So please do give us your feedback. Just hit F1 in the game to open a feedback form if you have any thoughts.

Or join the discord, where I’ll be happy to hear your thoughts and chat things over, or leave comments in the forum.

Hope you can join us on our journey towards 1.0.

Al and Sarah

Welcome, Scavengers, to the start of our Early Access release!

That’s right, Space Trash Scavenger is now released in Early Access, and for the first 7 days, you will be able to benefit from the launch discount of 20%!

Check back in later today as we will have another Dev Log, but for the time being, enjoy the game and let us know your feedback on Discord and in the Steam Discussion section. We hope you'll have a blast with Space Trash Scavenger.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1759350/Space_Trash_Scavenger/

Check out our release trailer here:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

Join our Discord here!

Follow our Social Media Accounts

• https://twitter.com/spacetrashscav
• https://www.instagram.com/spacetrashscavenger

third-person, open world survival craft-em-up about underpaid space workers will release this week in Space Trash Scavenger. It's an interesting looking one, with the conceit that it's a world where every little planetoid and asteroid has its own little sphere of gravity, including your own self-directed and constructed mobile scavenging platform. The same kind of gravity you may remember from Super Mario Galaxy—but you've got a jetpack to scoot around between it all...
Read more.

Greetings Scavengers!

Welcome to the second in our series of devlogs for Space Trash Scavengers in the run up to Early Access launch, in just one week's time! If you haven’t already, please do mash that wishlist button so you get notified on release day.

Today I’m going to talk a bit about Space. Okay, well obviously this game is set in Space. I mean, it’s in the name! But more than that, I wanted to talk about lower case space - the spaces you, the player, inhabit, and how you traverse through them. Because it underpins a lot of what’s unique about Space Trash Scavenger. Are you ready? Then strap into your jetpack and let’s go...





Space is big. Like really, really big. It’s so big that it’s almost empty. It takes ages to get anywhere. How do we reconcile that with a game which is, at its heart, a 3rd person action game (albeit one with some interesting additions like mario-galaxy gravity, and survival)?

We started by prototyping the idea of traversing just asteroid fields, jetting between small floating rocks with “mario gravity galaxy” (which I will hereon-in call microgravity before we get sued!). It was interesting to me because before, this mechanic always seemed to be associated with pristine spheres and planets.

This proved to be pretty fun, and surprisingly evocative with just a scavenger floating in space. We decided to take the prototype further, and turn it into a survival game. What could go wrong?



At first we built the game up around a fuel mechanic. It has a real world impact on how you play and what you can do. With the asteroids procedurally placed, the player would consider their fuel reserves before plotting their route.

In this way you have almost a little subgame of examining your 3D space and plotting your direction between asteroids where you could get more fuel resources. It felt like this brought something more interesting to the open world spaces typical of 3rd person action or survival games.




Then we had the idea - why not have the asteroids orbiting gas giants? It looked cool. And a little unusual. Of course, the distances involved in orbiting a gas giant, the size of say Jupiter, are rather large. It’s diameter is apparently 88,695 miles. Any locomotion for a man-sized object at subluminal velocity would mean the planet would appear pretty much static in the background for weeks or perhaps months at a time. Your motion in the world would feel divorced from your surroundings.

We quickly embraced the idea of shrinking them down to what are, in reality, ridiculously small sizes. Budding astronomers and physicists may riot, but we found you get all the atmospheric benefits of gas giants, while still having meaningful locomotive choices to make.





It felt good. But what about base building?

Every Salvage Sector is a finite space, necessary for you to plan and devise good decisions on where you go and why. Not just a stream of random places you will have to visit in fixed order. After you have explored it, you can jump to another, each one different.

Some sectors may have fewer asteroids, or have no gas giants. Some have more derelict spaceships, some have huge stars instead, or farms or mines. And the diameter of orbit and number of asteroids can change. Jumping means you can take your base with you. Incidentally, this was partly why we opted to have players build bases in Space, rather than on an asteroid.



During testing, we noticed quite a few people asking if you could fly your rig around. At first I wasn’t so sure. Why should it move, if the game is designed with jetpack travel? But we realized it adds a little more depth to the experience. Plus, it’s cool. Perhaps you would want to pilot it near a collection of asteroids, to make it quicker to explore them all. Or maybe you would position it near an enemy base to have your turrets help you out. It’s still quite early days with mobile rigs, but they add an interesting new dimension to things in the later game.



The last piece of the spatial puzzle was seamless “dungeons”. Orbiting asteroids is cool, but why not go inside them, and plunder abandoned mines or huge derelict spaceships? Scavenging these places was always a core part of what we wanted players to do. It switches up the experience of the game, allowing areas with standard gravity, and tense combat in more closed spaces, without load screens to interrupt things.





Well if you stuck with us this far, thanks for reading! Turned out talking about space took a while! It’s important to remember that aside from space, there is a whole survival crafting game with combat built around these ideas. Not to mention automation. I’ll talk about that side of things next time.

As I say, if you haven’t already, please wishlist and follow for all the updates - and stick with us for launch, next Thursday 9th November!

Greetings Scavengers!

We’re super excited to announce that Space Trash Scavenger is going into Early Access on 9 November 2023!

Release Date Announcement Trailer:
[previewyoutube][/previewyoutube]

As it’s only two weeks until launch, we thought it was about time we did a blog about the premise of the game and some of the mechanics and features that make Space Trash Scavenger a bit different from other games in the genre.

[h2]What is it?[/h2]
Space Trash Scavenger is a third-person, Open World Survival Craft base builder, set in a series of toybox-sized, partially procedural generated asteroid fields.

It’s a sandbox game, but with action and combat, and it is unique because of the way every asteroid (and your base) has its own “Mario Galaxy” style gravity field. You can circumnavigate these floating rocks in full 3D, as well as build your “Space Rig” in any direction, allowing interesting and gravity-defying designs not usually possible in building games.



[h2]Your Mission[/h2]
As a scavenger employed by ScavCorp, your job is to clear up space trash in the long abandoned Outer Reach, process it, and manufacture products to sell on the galactic stock market.

While you explore different Salvage Sectors, you will build up your base, creating a production line to atomise trash, then construct new products for sale—and this can all be automated with conveyor belts, bringing factory elements to the game. We call it light automation, where you can automate as little or as much of the process as you wish.



[h2]The Vision[/h2]
We wanted to bring a feeling of exploration and danger to this world. As well as rocky asteroids, you gain access to long derelict space wrecks and can find abandoned mining outposts and deserted farming sectors.

Along the way, you’ll frequently encounter a mysterious enemy called The Entity and engage in combat, so you need to ensure you have the right weapons and ammo to deal with them. An important aspect is that you’ll need to think about fuel management for your jetpack and jump drive. We are also experimenting with minor NPC characters that you will meet along your journey and carry out quests for but we will talk more about that in the future as we continue development in Early Access.



Space Trash Scavenger is a passion project made by 2 people. We started working on it in 2020 a little while after releasing our first game, Overcrowd: A Commute Em Up. That was a metro station management game, so this is quite a change from that! We really wanted to do something different for this, but I think we took a lot of lessons we learnt from making Overcrowd with us on this.

The emphasis is really on building the systems of the game and allowing them to come together to make a fun experience. We also learned how to work through an Early Access game, building on the initial game and expanding and perfecting it as best we could throughout that process.



The game takes inspiration from many sources, some very old, some newer. In the coming weeks we will be writing a few more of these blogs and talking to you about those very sources of inspiration and the systems that we're building that we think are really cool about our game and why we made those systems.

So do wishlist the game, and maybe even hit Follow, so you can get alerted for the next dev blog, where we’ll talk more about Space Trash Scavenger.

See you soon,
- Al and Sarah