Sandbox Game

Sandbox games are one category of New Game. These custom maps have no preset goals — players set their own.

• You build your own spaceships, rovers, walkers, and stations.
• You are free to customise the World Settings, add mods, add planets, etc.

You can pick from the following presets:

Red Ship v2

This Quickstart map is recommended for beginners to explore. Try out various ships (fighters and utility ships), do some mining, use production facilities, weld up damaged ships, trigger sensors and push buttons! Then use what you have learned in a custom sandbox game, such as "Star System".

Star System / Home System

Star System is the most popular and most commonly used preset for starting adventures in Survival Mode.

• On PC, the Star System world contains all default planets: Earthlike, Moon, Mars, Alien, Triton, Europa, Titan, Pertam.
• On consoles, your three options are:
  • Home System: contains Earthlike, Moon, Mars
  • Distant Worlds/Alien System: contains Alien planet, Pertam
  • Distant Moons: contains Europa, Titan, Triton

You choose your start location (planet) in the beginning. Starting locations in the star system represent varying difficulty levels, depending on how hard it is to find resources and maintain life support.

• Survival is easier on planets with an atmosphere.
• Lifting off is easier from planets with low gravity.
• Ice planets lack basic resources but are great for oxygen and hydrogen production.
• The hardest start is "space suit only" (can be enabled in the World Settings) where you start with just a jetpack, handtools, and a weapon, drifting in space.

Sparks of the Future

Party with friends and explore a futuristic asteroid station in the Sparks of the Future Scenario! Try not to get arrested (or hit by a train) while snooping around behind the scenes of shiny casinos, shooting galeries, luxury hotels, and night clubs. This sandbox game contains multiple asteroids and stations, multiple shuttles, and a ship load of entertainment. There are no planets.

This exploration showcase has no objectives and there is no building required, just exploration. You can play it in singleplayer or multiplayer.

Pertam Orbiter

Explore an industrial asteroid base above Pertam and remotely connect to a rover to analyse the desert base below. The asteroid base Pertam Orbiter makes a perfect start point for a Pertam playthrough. No other planets nor objectives are included.

Asteroid Armory

Play as the red or blue faction, PvP against friends, or go solo and engage in a bit of PvE piracy in this prebuilt conflict zone. This showcase features the upgraded iconic ships Big Red and Big Blue that you can take for a spin. Hunt NPC cargo ships and use the Asteroid Armory as a weapons test platform.

Asteroid belt only, asteroid station, battle ships, NPC ships, no planets.

Empty World

This map is intended for Creative Mode, serving as a clean canvas to build in zero gravity. The player spawns in an empty world without ships, planets, or stations. Asteroids are generated.

Experienced players use this template in Creative Mode to manually add planets, workshop blueprints, and mods. After adding content, you can choose to switch to Survival Mode to play or create a custom scenario.