HULLBREAKER

The freighter KESTREL WAKE died in low orbit and nobody came for her. You did.

You are a scrapper in a hardsuit with a plasma torch and a magclamp, working a wreck that is slowly coming apart around you. Five minutes of air. Six tonnes of quota. Nine plates still bolted to the hull, and the good ones are deep.

The loop

1. Fly out from your skiff, down the open truss shaft.
2. Pick a plate. Deeper into the wreck is heavier and worth more.
3. Cut it free. Three welds hold each plate on. Hold the torch on a weld and it burns through — but the torch heats while it cuts and locks you out if you push it, so cutting is a rhythm, not a held trigger.
4. Clamp it. The freed plate drifts. Magclamp it and its mass becomes your mass: you start slower, you stop far slower, and the shaft you flew in through is narrower than you remember.
5. Bank it in the skiff's cargo maw.
6. Go again, into a wreck that is angrier than it was.

Every plate you take off raises the hull's instability, and instability is what turns the wreck on: pressure vents that shove you off your line, structural members that let go and sweep through the shaft, debris drifting across your route. The first cut is quiet. The sixth is not.

There are no brakes

Nothing out here slows you down but your own thrusters, and firing them costs propellant. Every burn you make you will have to pay for again to stop — and you will pay more for it with a tonne and a half of steel on the clamp. That is the whole game, and it is why the trip back is the frightening half.

Controls

Mouse	Look. Your helmet is your throttle direction.
W A S D	Thrust — forward, back, and sideways.
Space / C	Thrust up / down.
Shift	Burn — the high-thrust boost.
Q	RCS brake. Costs propellant.
Left mouse	Plasma torch.
F	Magclamp — grab a freed plate, and release it in the maw.

Gamepad and touch are bound too: left stick moves, right stick looks, right trigger cuts, left trigger brakes, west button clamps, shoulders thrust up and down.

Reading the helmet

• Top left — air remaining (this is the run timer), suit integrity, propellant.
• Top right — tonnage banked against the quota, what is on the clamp, and the hull's instability with the hazards it has armed.
• Bottom centre — the plasma torch: its heat, the weld you are burning, and whether it has locked you out.
• The green marker — home. It points at the skiff and tells you how far it is, which matters more than you think once you are deep and heavy.

Worth seeing

• Hold the torch too long on one weld and watch the plate glow red while the torch vents. It is the most honest thing in the game: the wait is the cost.
• Cut a plate free with the third weld and watch it simply leave — no physics drama, just a slab of steel that is no longer attached to anything.
• Take one heavy plate off the deepest bay and try to bring it home. The run out takes twenty seconds. The run back takes as long as you are willing to spend propellant on.
• Let the instability get to three and fly the shaft anyway.

You win by banking the quota and getting back to your skiff. You lose if your air runs out, or if the wreck opens your suit. The quota is set high enough that most runs end with the second one.