What is Space Station 14?

Space Station 14 is inspired by the cult classic SS13 and tells the story of an ordinary shift on a space station gone wrong. Immerse yourself into your role, tinker with detailed systems, and survive the chaos in this round-based multiplayer role playing game.

Your custom character can spawn as one of dozens of crew and enemy jobs, ranging from engineer to captain, or even a traitor, each with its own unique gear. Your duties guide you through rich interactions with complex mechanics, whether you’re managing your inventory, setting up the reactor, or flushing yourself down the disposal tubes.

As disaster, incompetence, and sabotage strike the station, the tension rises - opening up emergent situations that force you to make hard choices. Will you patch up the medical bay after an asteroid punches a hole in it, or fight for control when the captain gets murdered by revolutionaries? Do you break out an unjustly imprisoned clown, or sit back at the bar and serve drinks without a care in the world?

The story of the station’s collapse is in the hands of its players, and each round is an intense, immersive experience that will leave you wanting more.

Beyond Space Station 14

Space Station 14 is open-source and extremely extensible. Community servers are the backbone of the game, and can change every aspect of it to provide wildly different experiences. Altered mechanics, different roleplay atmospheres, and completely unique settings are all one click away from the server browser.

Status

Currently, the project is in a “pre-alpha” state. We have many tasks ahead of us. On this website you will be able to find progress reports as long as we’re still kicking.

Getting involved

Rome was not built in a day, and neither was SS14. We can always use extra hands! The entire project is open source and available on GitHub here:

We primarily communicate through Discord:

We also have some other project services set up:

History

The original Space Station 13 dates back all the way to February 2003, and is built on the BYOND game engine. Over years of constant community development, SS13 slowly outgrew BYOND, and the engine’s limitations became more and more obvious. Dozens of attempts have been made by people from all over the community to “remake” SS13 onto a new engine. While almost all of these projects have since succumbed to “The Curse”, Space Station 14 has actually succeeded.

SS14 itself starts around 2011. A couple developers hailing from the Goonstation branch of SS13 started a remake project that showed a lot of promise. It was hosted at https://spacestation13.com and was also just called “Space Station 13”. They posted occasional development updates on their blog, but otherwise development was closed. Eventually, the people involved got busy with their lives and development slowly crawled to a stop. In January 2015 they made the decision to release the project’s code open source, so that the rest of SS13’s community could continue what they started.

Space Station 14 was started from this open source release. Dozens of people gathered into an IRC channel. The name was picked, organization was made, project infrastructure was set up, and so on. There was a ton of enthusiasm at first, but none of it lasted very long. The game in 2015 was still years away from being playable. Worse, many core systems such as the rendering engine had to be replaced, and this effectively halted other development at the time. Within about half a year momentum had ground to a halt once again. A few dedicated developers kept chipping away, but the rest of the SS13 community put SS14 in the “failed remakes” category and moved on.

In May 2017, things slowly started turning around. A couple more SS13 developers started working on SS14, deciding it was best to work on the existing one than start Yet Another Remake. The Discord was made. A new website was set up, and we started posting some updates blogs. Large chunks of the engine were rewritten, making sure community servers can thrive better than they ever could in SS13. And then the engine was rewritten some more. And some more. People in the SS13 community made jokes that we rewrote the engine too much, but we persevered.

Even though the game was still far from playable, more and more people started contributing just for the sake of it. Things slowly accelerated. We created the Steam page. Under Steam’s playtest system, we started hosting regular playtest events.

In late 2021 we finally managed to have consistent, round-the-clock player count on official game servers. This roughly coincided with a large burst of popularity in the Russian community, thanks you YouTubers and other content creators in that sphere covering the game. The game has only grown from there.