Stones to Starships

Pre-alpha demo · in development

Brought to you by Stubborn Machine Games

A first-person survival and base-building game about harvesting a world, building machines, and advancing from hand tools to the space age.

See the loop

Features

Harvest the island

Use your harvest beam to gather stone, wood, biomass, and other resources straight from the world. What you gather anywhere can be spent anywhere.

The helper drone hovering over a forest path, cutting into a mossy boulder with its laser as sparks fly.

Build your robots

Fabricate increasingly advanced machines, customize their modules and stats, and give them a name. Send them out to mine, build, explore, and fight alongside you.

The navy helper drone, smiling on its face screen, hovering over a flowering log in a summer forest.
Two yellow and charcoal walking robots crossing a sunlit forest path beside a wooden fence.

From hand tools to the space age

Start with hand tools and your own shield for power. Build your way through burners, power tools, solar, batteries, automation, and eventually a starship.

A camp shelter with two solar panels on its roof and a smiley-face banner, in an autumn clearing, seen past the charge pack in the player's hand.
A starship under construction on a lit pad at night, inside scaffolding beside the base, under a purple night sky.
A starship hovering over a night forest, firing a red beam down into the trees.

Fly your starship

Once your starship is built, travel to distant planets, or rain down destruction on your enemies.

Status

Steam page coming soon

Questions

Frequently asked

What kind of game is From Stones to Starships?

A first-person survival and base-building game with heavy automation. You harvest raw materials by hand, build the machines and robots that take that work over, and climb an incremental upgrade ladder — shield charge to burner to solar to stored power, hand tools to power tools, one robot to a shift of them — that runs from the first rock you break to the space age.

Is the world procedurally generated?

Yes, and you generate it yourself before you play. You choose a world archetype and tune continents, ocean level, coastline roughness, mountains, rainfall, desert belts and deposit density, read the result across seven map layers, then pick where to land. It is seed-driven, so the same settings and seed give you the same world again.

Is there a demo I can play?

Not yet. The game is in pre-alpha and there is no public build to download. A Steam page is on the way — that is where a playable demo will be announced first, and wishlisting there is the single most useful thing you can do for a game at this stage.

Is there multiplayer or co-op?

No. From Stones to Starships is single-player, and multiplayer is explicitly out of scope for the current work. That may be revisited after the single-player game stands up on its own, but it is not something to expect.

Is there a starship, or is that just the title?

It is the destination the title describes, and the reason the name was chosen. Right now it is concept work and design direction, not a system you can play.

What is it built in, and who is making it?

Unity 6 with the Universal Render Pipeline, by Stubborn Machine Games, a one-person independent studio.