ASTRALCRAFT is a salvage cooperative. We don't design games; we recover them. We tow derelict ships into the L5 yard, strip their flight computers, cold-weld the surviving logic into something flyable, and launch it again before orbital decay takes the lot. Every title is a jury-rigged vessel with someone else's scars.
Recovered from a prospector tug that missed its burn and froze in a 200-year orbit. We kept the original attitude controller — it fights you. Steering is a conversation with a dead pilot's muscle memory. Win by not tumbling into the debris field. The HUD is the tug's actual corroded glass, scanned and re-lit.
A station horticulture sim pulled from a crashed centrifuge ring. No main bus — you route power by throwing salvaged breaker switches daisy-chained through soy-yields. Plants die in real decay-time. The original crew's logs are intact; they starved on Sol 88. You can read them while your radishes wilt.
Built entirely from wreckage AI shards — we cold-welded 40 dead autopilots into one hostile pathfinder. Each run spawns you inside a fresh debris cloud with a different dead pilot's instincts hunting you. Survive to the yard beacon. The soundtrack is the static of 40 comms deaths, desampled.
Our flagship refit: a colonial lander with a belly full of someone's saved civilization. We're patching its ablative shell from 9 other wrecks. The game is one continuous descent — no checkpoints, no respawn, just heat shield integrity and the yard's radio counting you down. Estimated launch: 2028, if decay holds off.
ASTRALCRAFT operates Dock 9 of the L5 Debris Cooperative — a tumbling lattice of salvage gantries, cold-weld rigs, and a mess hall that hasn't seen gravity since 2043. Eleven crew rotate on 90-day shifts. We don't draw concept art. We cut into a hull, see what logic is still alive, and weld it to something that flies.
A title starts as a tow. We haul a derelict in, scan the flight computer for uncorrupted sectors, lift the state machine out in chunks, and re-house it in a patched frame. The original devs are usually dead, bankrupt, or both — we keep their crash logs as flavor text. If the reaction wheel still spins, we keep it. If not, we bolt on a jury-rig and call it character.
The coop charter of 2041 says: *nothing launches that isn't assembled from at least three wrecks*. Pure original code is contraband here — we'd have to melt it for alloy. The yard loses 0.3% altitude a year; we race decay with every patch. The beacon stays lit because someone always tows one more husk home.
Can read a hull's death from micrometeorite scarring. Cut Widow's Thrust free from a 200-year orbit without waking its dead pilot. Keeps the original tug glass as her personal HUD. Sleeps in the drydock airlock. Says every wreck talks if you listen to the static long enough.
Patches logic boards with a handheld electron beam and no schematic. Assembled Slag Navigator's 40-core aggro from pure corrosion maps. Refuses to solder original silicon — "that's not salvage, that's authorship." Keeps a jar of slag from every hull he's cut.
Calculates every re-entry window against yard decay. Designed the single-descent shell of The Long Re-Entry from 9 ablative wrecks. Logs altitude loss to the second. Claims the L5 beacon is a dead pilot's distress call looping since 2031. The crew doesn't argue.