AURELIAN DRIFT

A voyage across a star that is going out.

The star is failing. Everything that lived in this system has already left or stopped. What is left is scattered across the dark: a station that kept its ovens lit for ships that stopped coming, a wreck field in a perfect circle, a buoy that has been singing the same eleven notes since before the star began to fail.

You are the last helm of the sunjammer Aurelian. Fly out to those lights, hold a scan on them, and take what they give — charge to keep flying, salvage to refit the ship, relics the Gate answers to, and a codex fragment that tells you what happened here.

Three relics open the Aurelian Gate at the system's edge. Cross it and you are out. Run the tanks dry, or let the hull come apart, and you drift, and keep drifting.

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The one decision the game is about

Burning charge is the only way to reach more charge. Cruising costs about 1.6 charge a second and caps at 130 u/s. Boost costs 7.0 a second for 215 u/s — 4.4x the price for 1.65x the speed. Drifting costs almost nothing, so thinking is free; getting anywhere is not.

The second decision is the line you take. Radiation shoals and wreck drifts sit across the direct routes between sites, and the star flares about once a minute. A shoal costs 3–11 hull a second at its core and almost nothing at its edge. Sitting within 260 units of a site puts you in its lee and costs you nothing. The straight line is nearly always the wrong line — I flew it on purpose while filming this, and it killed two runs out of three.

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How to play

The first screen is the brief. Press Enter to take the helm.

Key	Does
W / S	Throttle. It is a lever, not a button — it holds where you leave it, and S closes it and then burns retro.
Space	Retro burn. Kills the lever and scrubs speed off hard. This is your brake.
A / D	Roll. The hull banks into a turn on its own.
Mouse	Aim (hold right mouse to arm it).
Shift	Boost — much faster, far more expensive.
E	Hold to scan, once a site is inside 145 units.
C	Codex reader.
R	Refit bay (alongside Kiln Station).
Q / B	Cycle and confirm a refit at the station's own yard board.
Enter	Take the helm / sail again. Escape backs out of any screen.

Six destinations. Three of them carry relics. One is a waystation that will sell you a better ship — and Ablative Plate at Kiln Station (45 salvage) is the only way hull ever comes back, so a run that never docks is a run on a timer.

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What is worth staying for

• The contrast. Near-black void, one warm dying key light, cold blue fill. Big silhouettes that read only by their lit edge. Nebula veils in red and blue, a ringed gas giant lit from one side, and drives that are the only thing glowing for a thousand units in any direction.
• The codex. Five fragments, one per site, and they are the reason to visit rather than the reward for it. The Long Vigil's last watch entry is the word STILL, written eleven times down a page. Cold Wake is forty-one hulls on one ring, all facing out, all opened from the inside.
• The endings are honest. Losing does not say GAME OVER. It says ADRIFT — the voyage ends here, and tells you what you were carrying when the drive fell silent.

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What is still rough

Told straight, in the order it would bother you.

• Site geometry is loud at close range. The Chorus Buoy is a column of large translucent spheres that fills the frame while you are parked alongside scanning it. Kiln Station and Cold Wake read as pale untextured blockouts inside about 150 units — the dark sky flatters them at range and not up close.
• Three things land on the middle of the screen during a scan — the site's world nameplate, its scan percentage, and the HUD's scan ring — and they overlap.
• The radiation shoals tint whole sightlines green, against a look that is otherwise built on near-black.
• There is no audio at all. The buoy sings eleven notes in the fiction and in silence in the build.
• Two doors into one shop. The refit bay is reachable from the R screen and from the station's world-space yard board on Q/B. They share state and cannot double-spend, but you see two interfaces for one economy.
• Hull is a one-way resource outside that single upgrade, and the leg from the inner system out to the Gate is a gauntlet. Expect to lose a run to it.
• Multiplayer is untested with a second helm. The ship is the player avatar and the scene is built the multiplayer-correct way, but no run has yet had two people in the world at once.

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Credits

Built in one session inside a live ZeroMind world: a plan pass, five parallel build slices (helm, art, voyage, HUD, hazards), a playtest-and-fix pass, and this showcase pass. Screenshots and clips in design/shots/ and design/clips/ are all captured from live play, not from the editor camera.