Welcome aboard captain!
Your mission as part of the Guardian program is simple: Survive and Discover
Battle through 8 procedurally generated planets per run, with a continuous difficulty curve. You will need to explore abandoned camps and buildings, solve micro-puzzles, and build up your own defenses in order to survive. Harvest resources to build your structures, and collect Data Shards to gain passive abilities. Waves of hostile alien creatures will try to disrupt progress, so stay alert! Find weaponry, and stack upgrades to augment your character abilities during the run, in order to keep up with the opposition and defeat the run's final boss. Win or lose, the Data Shards you collect can be used to research new unlocks to help you on future runs.
Planets
Each planet is procedurally generated, including terrain and points of interest.
Each will have its own hazards and weather conditions depending on things like temperature and precipitation levels.
Explore
There are various procedurally generated points of interest and micro-puzzles within them, that are good sources of different tools and weapons.
Old ruins, camps, and abandoned facilities can also house locked crates that require a certain level of key card to access, so finding these key cards can be valuable.
Harvest
Planets contain sources of Mineral, Crystal, and Pulp, used for tasks like building, upgrading, and healing.
Storage space can be increased by building some of the various storage structures.
Build
Different needs are satisfied by different structures. Use resources to create 40 different types to automate defenses, refill oxygen and other stats, upgrade weapons, and power your structures.
Power is needed for most structures and gets connected automatically.
Upgrade
Augments are acquired by doing various things, like harvesting or defeating enemies, when the data meter fills. They can also be found from searching crates and other furnishings in ruins and facilities.
These upgrades can be swapped or stacked, and provide passive abilities that will be crucial to your survival (similar to other "Hero Builder" type games).
You'll choose 1 from a set of 3 or 4 out of over one hundred options.
Defend
Waves of enemies will swarm you to try to stifle progress.
Over time, and by proceeding to later planets, the creatures get tougher, faster, and may use different attacks.
There are 6 main families, and several other independent types, to mix things up. The final boss of the run will correspond to one of the main creature families on the run's last planet.