What Can I do in TextSpaced?

The question of what you can do in TextSpaced is a common one, being a sandbox style MMORPG the answer is a lot, with more activities becoming available as you realise skills, get new ships and discover new research and technology. New content, items and other features are also added all the time.

Below is an exhaustive list of everything you can do in TextSpaced, but it does not detail every single skill and what new abilities they grant you (that would be a long list).

Character

• Be born at a player colony or choose to be starborn creating your own faction.
• Review detailed metrics and statistics about your character so you know what to focus on.
• Observe your 16 personality factors, helping you decide what to continue or stop doing.
• Define your characters biography and history with the help of AI generation.
• Listen to what your character tells you through narrative text to keep them happy, with trackable equanimity and morale.
• Witness your character chat with other faction members respecting rank.
• Discover your characters traits - what they like and dislike.
• Manage the gear your character uses down to your suit, personal weapons and consumables (such as mines or medicines).
• Change the appearance of your character with different attire, banners, titles and, as a patron, randomise your portrait.
• Take advantage of continually changing boosts which provide temporary boosts to game aspects to all players for a few hours.

Colonies

• Construct colonies for new players to be born at, that will be part of your faction.
• Foster and grow your colony by completing colony requests.
• As your colony grows through your support, construct body specific colonial structures or have heroes born.
• Convert heroes to maximum level crew members.
• Get your colony to a population of one million to create your own self-sufficient NPC faction - leaving your mark on the game.

Combat

• Define a custom card deck for your ship, with cards provided by your ship, your skills or faction research.
• Engage in PvP combat at any time against players (it is one shared universe after all) including both ships and structures.
• Engage in PvE combat against coordinated NPC factions like the Descendants or fringe factions like the Outlanders.
• Hunt wildlife on planets you have charted to obtain wildlife parts using your own defined gear or capture them.
• Take part in raids or special events (a new one every month) that may involve combat in both defensive and offensive roles.
• Take combat focused missions or refine your skills in simulated combat and combat challenges (with rewards for the best performers).
• Steal cargo (or people) during combat or recover it from destroyed vessels, collect capsules from players and other rare loot.

Computer

• A computer window allows you to browse and review various reference information such as ship specifications, codex items, story chapters, galactic news and profit logs.
• Listen to audio logs recovered by all players in the game, voiced by professional actors (example below).
• Undertake tutorials from the computer, take part in surveys or read FAQs.
• Monitor your personal and faction standings with leaderboards across dozens of different metrics.

Command

• Manage your faction with roles and dedicated communication channels, with options to demote, promote or kick.
• Review faction karma as relations with other factions, as well as declare wars or alliances.
• Keep track of faction profits from structures and tolls.
• As a Founder, define the destiny of your faction through research and technology.
• Set rules players should abide by in systems or face karma penalties.

Communication

• Review and add to your own captains log.
• Use communication channels to chat with others in-game or just with your faction.
• Send direct messages to other players with the messages rewritten by an LLM to keep in safe an in character.
• Meet characters and chat with them using dialog options.
• As a patron, send emotes that trigger full screen effects.
• As a patron and a faction founder, add and manage custom content other members can view in-game.
• Mention people, factions, coordinates or systems with auto-linking.
• In the faction communication channel, mention players by role to send them a notification.
• Use special commands to enclose your current position, send a news report, review system rules or log a bug.

Construction

• Build structures to claim systems and provide defence, services or special abilities (such as a Null Space Gateway for faster travel).
• Build the macrostructure "Alderson Disc" creating your own disc world where colonies generate no requests.
• Build the macrostructure "Dyson Swarm" to generate huge amounts of energy.
• Build the macrostructure "Caplan-Anders Stellar Engine" to move entire systems.
• Build the macrostructure "Planetary Cloak" to conceal entire planets from others.
• Build buoys to convey messages to other players when they enter your systems.
• Claim regions to receive the region effect by owning the highest percentage of systems in the region.
• Construct specialist structures that can take advantage of exotic bodies.
• Terraform planets to better types.

Crafting

• Craft thousands of consumables from things like fuels cells and mines to quantum recall devices and nerve toxins.
• Manage factories for refining commodities or fabricating parts.
• Craft equipment for your ship from equipment parts.
• Craft new ships from ships parts.
• Craft weapons from weapon parts.
• Create and release macro-organisms with positive and negative effects to planets.
• Create never before seen weapons by dismantling exotic weapons.
• Create never before seen food and drink items from wildlife parts.
• Forge new suits from the items you collect with different factions having different themed suits.
• Dismantle equipment and weapons to obtain their parts.
• Use matter synthesis to create exotic commodities.
• Salvage ship wrecks to discover the parts that make the ship (and try to craft it yourself), or take the scrap to a junkyard
• Craft new combat cards by merging surplus cards together.

Crew & Companions

• Hire crew of different roles and races to help you command bigger and more complicated ships.
• Name, train and foster relationships with your crew.
• Each crew role provides a unique benefit, such as security crew that will accompany you on wildlife hunting expeditions.
• Build the Reserve structure to share crew with your faction and to home and train wildlife.
• Capture wildlife and train them to be your companions, continue to train them so that they gain new skills and abilities.
• Utilise companions in charting, gathering and personal combat.
• Hire elite crew for specific tasks.
• Capture wildlife to fulfill black market deals.

Guilds

You can choose from 13 guilds to personalise and propel your gameplay in a direction you enjoy. Different guilds have access to different ships, perks and abilities with a few highlighted below.

• In Evax Company gain the access to replication bay technology to replicate ships.
• In the Hunters Pact, gain the ability to fit equipment and weapons to companions (wildlife) ranging from artillery to mobile triage.
• As part of the Intelligence Order gain the ability to plant viruses to sabotage structures or ruin karma relations.
• In the Merchant Guild gain access to spot exotic items for sale from afar.
• AS part the Miners Guilds gain the ability to mine Dark Matter, Flux Matter and Quantum Matter has new exotic commodities.
• In the Pioneers guild gain the ability to use different mechs in ground combat, charting and gathering.
• While in the Starfarers guild gain access to generational ships which attract families to live onboard which can be settled in your colonies.
• In the Warmongers guild gain the ability to use ammo in ship ports which can change their characteristics or replace their perk.

Idle Activities

• Chart planets to reveal the abundant consumables and wildlife present.
• Start interactive charting, allowing you to directly instruct your character what to do with natural language.
• Gather on charted planets to collect the abundant consumables.
• As an android perform Data Mining, to mine for credits.
• Hack faction treasuries to steal credits and research points.
• Use sublight travel to explore and navigate the universe.
• Meditate to move your personality factors in a direction of your choosing.
• Mine spatial bodies to collect commodities and recover consumables.
• Repair your ship if damaged rather than paying for a repair service.
• Terraform planets in an attempt to convert them to a more useful body type.
• Train wildlife converting them to companions that can support you in hunting, gathering and charting.

Lore and Story

• Optionally follow a story set out in chapters that help you learn about the universe and its inhabitants.
• Discover the lore through narrative text, codex entries and other supplemental information.
• The entire universe is described with narrative text, from what wildlife looks like to the appearance of a black hole devouring a ship.
• Take part in role playing events both in and out of game.
• Music that adapts based on activity and such metrics as the size of player systems (example below).
• Listen to a Twinkle radio, complete with adverts for in-game events and items.
• Adaptive videos for different activities such as sublight travel, mining and ship repair.
• Original art to enjoy, as well as sound effects and audio logs with professional voice actors.

Missions

• Choose from a total of 106 mission types ranging from mining and combat, to charting, sampling food and playing slots.
• Send your crew on away missions.
• Find and chat with characters that may give you jobs to complete.
• Complete faction specific missions to aid your faction.
• Complete missions at a level of your choosing for greater rewards.
• Complete missions on-behalf of player and NPC factions alike to aid in their development and build better relations.
• Objectives that track the activities you enjoy and reward you for it automatically.
• Finish daily objectives for additional rewards.

Out-of-game

• Join a friendly and helpful community on Discord, share experiences and request new features to help shape the game.
• Patrons can use the official API to create their own interfaces, bots and websites.
• Download log streams about your character and faction.
• Invite people directly to your faction with a custom invite code.
• Support the game via Patreon to download the soundtrack, artwork and access sneak peaks of upcoming content and features.
• Support the game by purchasing Merch ranging from t-shirts and mugs to prints and die cut stickers.
• Support the game by purchasing 3D printed models of the ships and structures in the game.

Services

• Access system services to trade all cargo as well as ships and fuel.
• Purchase food and drink items to temporarily augment your character's statistics (including illegal items).
• Play casino games at different stakes.
• Improve your skills at training facilities.
• Hire crew or dismiss them returning them to the pool.
• Use faction services for crafting, fabrication, meditation, customisation, storage, training and treasury services.
• Dock in faction or personal structures for safety.
• Pay for transport services such as wormholes or catapults to get to other places quicker.

Ships

• Buy ships to command of different roles, stats and with different perks.
• Fit equipment and weapons to your ships to customise them.
• Fit rooms to your ships and structures so you and your crew can train or which provide a unique benefit, such as passenger accommodation for ferrying passengers or advanced haulage.
• Repair your ship and install ship patches to change its characteristics.
• Fit fuel scoops to collect fuel from different types of bodies.
• By using a ship for its intended purpose gain Flight Time Units (FTUs) to unlock improved versions of the ship class.

Skills

• Realise new skills from a list of 110 using a unique personality system.
• Learn skills specific to your race and your personality factors.
• Unlock new skills that give you new abilities, such as alchemy, travelling merchant, rebirth as a clone or which augment existing activities.
• Collect books to improve your skill further.

Trade

• Trade hundreds of thousands items of cargo across 10 different cargo types.
• Use the computer to locate good prices and use skills to improve your trading modifier.
• Invest in new ships to be manufactured at your shipwrights using B-Chips.
• Create trade requests where you trade items for items.
• Combine, dismantle and fabricate cargo for extended trading options.
• Monitor a dynamic and real-time exchange system powered by players, capitalising on market shifts (live updates in Discord and a dedicated comms channel).
• Use searching mechanics to locate exact pieces of cargo, recover adrift cargo, hunt wildlife for their parts or gather on planets.
• Capture and train wildlife to sell them.

Travel

• Travel to different systems and orbit different planets.
• Explore the universe for new systems with exotic bodies or undiscovered relics, lifeforms and other mysteries.
• See undiscovered systems with skills, ship perks or simply because of a stars brightness.
• Use FTL travel, wormholes, catapults, slipstream, blink drives and quantum recall to travel to new worlds quickly.
• Travel to any arbitrary coordinates you like for sneaky exchanges or to find people in distress.
• Create waypoints for yourself and your faction with the ability to attack notes.
• By following the story, travel to different universes and dimensions as well as forward and back in time creating butterfly effects.

Appearance

Like all modern websites, TextSpaced can be played in the browser of any device from phone, tablet or desktop. It has a carefully crafted and dynamic user interface that is exciting for sighted and non-sighted people alike, with original art for all aspects such as system bodies, emblems, ships, structures as well videos for different activities. The game fully utilises aria standards to aid screen reader users without sacrificing the look and feel and is always being refined and updated based on feedback. The layout is consistent and simple, with tables used for browsable data that allow sorting and filtering. An example of a typical screen is demonstrated below.

An example window of the game (the helm window) is demonstrated below.