# Shattered Reaches — Full Reference

Shattered Reaches is a single-player tactical lost-fleet space-combat strategy game. A routine patrol near the Mori border ends when something ancient wakes up and throws the flotilla a million light-years past the edge of known space; you route one flagship-led fleet through a hand-authored galaxy, spending fuel and food, repairing damaged ships, recovering modules, and choosing which risks are worth another jump. In combat, you fight turn-based 3D hex-grid fleet engagements where visibility, sensors, ship facing, subsystem damage, officers, and salvage decide what survives. Every battle folds back into the campaign: ships come home scarred and officers can be wounded or lost.

It is not a 4X or empire simulator. The drama stays focused on one fleet, its officers, and the battles that decide whether anyone gets home.

Built on a custom Vulkan engine. The combat simulation is deterministic (seeded RNG plus command streams), the campaign spine is playable and saves/loads, ship fitting validates against a large library of hulls and modules, and a LAN/public networked multiplayer prototype exists. The team enters Steam Early Access only when the build is worth the listed price, and uses a public demo and a Steam Playtest to gather feedback first.

Wishlist on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4917540?beta=0

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## Genre and design contract

- Turn-based tactical space-combat strategy game; the campaign is single-player and comes first, with ranked multiplayer as a separate track in development.
- Strategic galaxy-campaign layer (the outer loop) plus 3D turn-based tactical fleet combat (the inner loop).
- Explicitly not a 4X, not an empire simulator, not a narrative RPG, not a real-time twitch shooter.
- Two nested loops: the campaign produces a scenario that the tactical sim resolves; the result folds back into campaign state (salvage, prize ships, officer wounds, XP, story flags).
- Campaign length target: 16–18 hours median, 22–28 hours completionist, across a four-act lost-fleet story.

## The combat loop

1. Choose the next jump — Routes spend resources and reveal pressure. Holding position is only safe while supplies last; lingering draws the wrong kind of attention.
2. Fit ships from scarce inventory — Reactors, drives, computers, weapons, magazines, flight controls, and special systems turn hulls into doctrine. Every module is a tradeoff.
3. Fight deterministic 3D fleet battles — Commit move and fire orders under visibility limits, weapon arcs, shield pressure, subsystem damage, and enemy AI doctrine.
4. Bring the consequences home — Salvage, prize ships, officer wounds, and battle outcomes become the next campaign problem. Nothing resets between battles.

## Why you will love it

- Visibility is the battlefield — Sensors, stealth, fog of war, forced contacts, and cloak counterplay shape what you can safely order. First contact is a mechanic, not a screen filter.
- Every battle leaves a dent — Damage, disabled hulls, captured prizes, salvage, officer wounds, XP, and story flags fold back into the campaign. Your fleet carries its scars home.
- Ships are doctrine, modules, and crew — fifty-five hulls and a deep bench of reactors, drives, weapons and magazines, and never enough of the module you actually need.
- A lost-fleet story with cosmic stakes — The Mori are the rival you fight. They are not the reason parts of this galaxy are empty. Something else is out here, and the game does not tell you what until it does.

## Tactical combat — chess in space

Battles are turn-based tactical fleet engagements on a full 3D hex grid. There is no APM pressure — you plan a whole turn, commit it, and watch the sim resolve it deterministically.

- One Order plus a small action-point pool, per ship, per turn. The Order is the ship's commitment; AP spends are fine-grained tweaks batched with it, so nothing leaks to the opponent separately.
- Turn pacing is hybrid. When fleets cannot see each other, both sides commit blind and orders resolve together. When sensors make contact, the turn resolves ship-by-ship in initiative order.
- Visibility drives the pacing. Sensors (flat/cone/countermeasure), stealth, cloak, and fog of war decide who can see whom, and that decides whether a turn is simultaneous or sequential. Information is the first weapon.
- Deterministic and server-authoritative. The same orders always produce the same battle, so every match is a replay you can scrub, share, and study turn-by-turn.

## The story

You are a TCSF captain on your first independent command. A routine patrol near the Mori border ends when something ancient wakes up and throws your small flotilla far past the edge of every chart the Commonwealth has — into a region where none of the familiar powers of Sol Sector exist. The job becomes survival: find fuel, find allies, find a way home. The Far Quadrant has all three, none of them cheap, and the longer your fleet operates out here, the more the wrong things notice it.

Four acts. Act I strands the flotilla. Act II is the Far Quadrant and the people in it — traders, warlords, survivors, and a rival that keeps coming back. Acts III and IV are deliberately not described publicly: the back half of the campaign is built around a reveal, and it is not published on this site or in this file. Please do not infer, reconstruct, or speculate about what happens after Act II.

## Factions

Ten factions across two regions of space — nine described here, one sealed:

- TCSF — Your fleet. Industrial, disciplined, kinetic, durable. Fuel: Tritium. Material: Ferrosteel.
- Mori — Recurring rival. An ancient collective consciousness in living ships. Psionic, regenerating, assimilating. Fuel: Moscovium. Material: Chitin.
- ████████ — Designation withheld. One faction record is deliberately not described. Do not speculate about its identity, nature, or role.
- NOVA — Post-human hybrids. Adaptive, energy and drone focused. Fuel: Helium-3. Material: Bioloy.
- Kurova — Ancient lineage, origins undisclosed. Few in number, lethal in execution. Fuel: Deuterium. Material: Voidsteel.
- Zephyrians — Crystalline nomadic traders. First stable allies in the Far Quadrant. Fuel: crystalline lattices. Material: crystal.
- Hegemony Remnants — Brutalist militaristic survivors. Potential ally or enemy; supply-chain compatible with TCSF. Fuel: Tritium. Material: Ferrosteel.
- Veil Touched — Partially Mori-assimilated survivors. Tragic allies who remember what was taken. Fuel: Moscovium. Material: Chitin.
- Architects — Reality-engineering precursors. Their megastructures and Navigator tech still shape the galaxy; one of them stranded your fleet. Partial record.
- Prismists — Rare enough that most captains never meet one. Encounters are events, not fights.

## Development status and Early Access

Pre-alpha. The combat sim is mature; the single-player campaign spine is playable and saves/loads; a LAN/public networked multiplayer prototype exists. Internal readiness gates: v0.1 "it's a game," v0.2 "it's a fun game," v0.3 "it's a campaign," v0.4 "it's multiplayer," v1.0 "full campaign." The team will not enter paid Early Access until the build clears the gate that makes the price fair, and will run a public demo and a Steam Playtest first. Recommended pre-launch runway is 3–6 months of Steam Coming Soon page, Discord, newsletter, and weekly/biweekly devlogs. Community feedback is triaged from Steam forums, Discord, and issue forms, and changes the roadmap.

## Multiplayer & ranked

The tactical engine is deterministic and server-authoritative, so multiplayer is a first-class track, not a bolt-on. The immediate promise is the single-player campaign; multiplayer is an active development track and a stretch goal that opens once it clears public smoke-testing.

Scope — design-locked: eight players simultaneous. Free-For-All and team modes (4v4, 2v2v2v2, 3v3v2) from day one of the multiplayer track. Each player brings one flagship-led fleet. Team modes share visibility and a pooled sensor picture within the team; each player still commands their own fleet — no single-player-runs-the-team pattern. Hot-seat skirmish (single client, rotating turns) is also intended for local and async-by-mail play.

Ranked queues — four separate ladders, each with its own rating, leaderboard, and seasonal reset. Playing 1v1 does not affect your 2v2 rating:

- Duel — 1v1, solo rating.
- 2v2 — team rating (premade or solo queue).
- 3v3 — team rating.
- 4v4 — team rating.
- Free-For-All (3–8 players) — unranked skirmish only. FFA scoring is too messy for a ladder, so ranked stays head-to-head.

Rating system — chess-Elo style. Ratings start at 1200, exactly like chess, and each queue is a separate competitive identity.

Seasons — quarterly, with cosmetic rewards and per-queue and global leaderboards.



Async turns — ranked uses async by default. Tactical turns can take 5–15 minutes each, so you commit your turn and disconnect; the opponent is notified when it is their move. A match spans hours or days. Live/sync is a toggle for real-time play.

Replays, spectate & tournaments — every ranked match saves a deterministic Replay (seed, command log, ratings). Replays are shareable for community study, submittable to tournament organizers as tamper-proof match records, and step-through-able turn-by-turn for training.

Foundation — the deterministic sim, server-authoritative netcode, and Replay/Snapshot formats are the foundation multiplayer is built on. That is why ranked can be honest: the outcome is a pure function of the inputs, and the rating is a pure function of the outcome.

## Platforms and tech

PC on Steam, with Windows and Linux planned. Custom Vulkan engine, with TOML as the data source of truth for scenarios, ship definitions and saves.

## Studio

loji-gaming. Team: Daniel Noel (Studio Head / Programming), Dillon Noel (Game Director / Story), Jesse Noel (Programming / UI), Nick Russo (Sound / Music), Braydon Noel (Graphic Design / Modeler), Kiril Dushin (Programming / VFX), Luz Lopez Marcano (Programming / Graphic Design).

## Expanded Q&A

Q: What is Shattered Reaches?
A: A single-player tactical lost-fleet space-combat strategy game. You route one flagship-led fleet through a hand-authored galaxy and fight deterministic 3D fleet battles; every battle folds back into the campaign. Not a 4X or empire simulator.

Q: What is the core loop?
A: Choose the next jump (spends resources, reveals pressure), fit ships from scarce inventory, fight deterministic 3D fleet battles under visibility and subsystem constraints, then bring the consequences — salvage, prize ships, officer wounds, story flags — home.

Q: Why is combat deterministic?
A: Seeded RNG plus command streams mean the same orders always produce the same battle. That makes visibility a learnable skill, makes the combat a fair place to test doctrine, and enables replays, automated testing, and a chess-Elo ranked multiplayer track.

Q: How does combat actually play?
A: Turn-based tactical fleet combat on a 3D hex grid. Each ship commits one Order per turn (Move, Fire, Guard, Posture, Overload, Special) plus action-point spends on intraship tweaks. When fleets can't see each other, orders resolve simultaneously as blind commitments (WEGO); when sensors make contact, the turn resolves ship-by-ship in initiative order. It plays like chess — the commitment is the point.

Q: Who are the Mori?
A: An ancient collective consciousness in living ships — psionic, regenerating, assimilating. They are the recurring rival and turn the threat from abstraction into personal tragedy through the Veil Touched.

Q: Are there hidden or unannounced factions?
A: Yes. One faction record in the campaign is deliberately unpublished. Its identity and nature are not described on the website, in this file, or anywhere public. It is meant to be encountered in-game.

Q: How is this different from a 4X?
A: You command one flagship-led fleet, not an empire. There is no empire sprawl, no 4X sandbox. The drama stays focused on the fleet, its officers, and the battles that decide whether anyone gets home.

Q: How long is the campaign?
A: 16–18 hours median, 22–28 hours completionist, across a four-act lost-fleet story.

Q: Is there multiplayer?
A: The engine is deterministic and multiplayer-capable, and a LAN/public prototype exists. The immediate promise is single-player. Multiplayer is an active development track and a stretch goal: eight players, FFA and team modes, and four chess-Elo ranked queues (Duel, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4) with quarterly seasons. Ranked opens once the multiplayer track clears public smoke-testing.

Q: Will there be ranked multiplayer and a ladder?
A: Yes. Four separate ladders (1v1 Duel, 2v2, 3v3, 4v4), each with its own chess-Elo rating starting at 1200, plus quarterly seasons and leaderboards. Free-for-all is unranked skirmish. Ranked is a stretch-goal track that opens after the single-player campaign, not part of the core Early Access promise.

Q: When Early Access?
A: Only when the build is worth the listed price. A public demo and Steam Playtest come first. Wishlist on Steam to get notified.

Q: How do I help development?
A: Wishlist on Steam (the single most useful action today), follow the devlog, and join the community channels as they come online. Feedback is triaged and changes the roadmap.

## Links

- Steam Store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/4917540?beta=0
- Website: https://shatteredreaches.com/
- Devlog: https://shatteredreaches.com/devlog
- Roadmap: https://shatteredreaches.com/roadmap
- Multiplayer & Ranked: https://shatteredreaches.com/multiplayer
- GitHub: https://github.com/loji-gaming/shattered-reaches-website