Star Freighter Drift

Star Freighter Drift is a gritty, deterministic space-trading LLM RPG built around one perfectly tense loop: run cargo, dodge customs, keep the reactor from melting. You play an independent freighter captain surviving in the ungoverned Drift — six star systems of factions, contraband, and creditors — with a real freight economy, a five-state Heat track for your legal standing, and a ship whose reactor will kill you if you push it too hard at the wrong moment.

Three systems are deliberately in conflict. Legal cargo barely covers costs; contraband pays well but raises your Heat. Outrunning a customs cutter saves you from the law but strains the reactor. The GM never rolls dice — outcomes are deterministic, decided by your preparation, your plan, and the state of your ship. A proactivity engine keeps your crew alive in the background, pursuing their own goals and initiating scenes whether or not you pay attention to them.

Run Cargo

The freight economy is real. Cargo has a buy price, a sell price that varies by port, a legality status, and a bulk cost in hold space. You profit by reading the Star Chart — the knowledge file that defines supply and demand across all six systems — buying cheap at one port and selling dear at another. Fuel, docking fees, crew wages, and debt interest drain credits constantly. Standing still costs money. Contracts from NPCs, job boards, and factions add pay, cargo, risk, and deadlines on top of the base economy.

Legal runs keep you clean but rarely cover everything. The math only works if you take on something with risk attached.

Dodge Customs

Cargo is Legal, Restricted, or Contraband, as defined in the Star Chart. Contraband pays far more. The trade-off is Heat — a five-state track running None, Noticed, Flagged, Wanted, Hunted — that rises whenever customs finds something, catches something, or simply notices you in the wrong place.

Inspections resolve deterministically: hidden compartments, forged manifests, pre-paid bribes, and the quality of the story you give the inspector all factor in. There is no roll. Good preparation clears inspections. Carelessness raises Heat. High Heat closes ports to you, attracts bounty hunters, and forces you into backwater routes where the margins are worse and the help is further away. Cooling down requires running legitimate cargo long enough that the heat dissipates — or finding someone who can change your transponder ID, for a price defined in the Star Chart.

Keep the Reactor from Melting

The ship is a fragile body with four tracked systems: Hull (Pristine → Worn → Damaged → Breached), Reactor (Stable → Strained → Overheating → CRITICAL), Fuel in remaining jumps, and Life Support (Nominal → Degraded → Failing). Every hard decision degrades something.

Pushing the reactor to outrun a customs cutter raises reactor strain. A CRITICAL reactor means the next strain event causes a meltdown — ship loss, crew loss, or both — unless you vent heat by dumping cargo or shut down and drift powerless while the problem you were running from closes the distance. This is the game’s central dilemma made mechanical: the move that saves you from customs may be the move that kills you anyway.

Repairs cost credits and time and require parts listed in the Star Chart. Neglect compounds — a Damaged hull leaks, Degraded life support shortens how long the crew can work before things get worse.

Your Crew

Crew are people with their own goals, not tools. Every in-world day, each crew member evaluates their objective, emotional state, and current tensions, then takes one micro-action toward what they want — tinkering with the reactor baffles unasked, getting into a shouting match with the gunner, quietly checking the bounty boards for their own name. Crew initiate scenes on their own when relationships shift, jealousy spikes, Heat rises, or the ship takes damage.

Trust, Loyalty, and Affection move silently based on your actions: paying wages on time, defending a crew member from a hostile faction, keeping promises. Risking their lives for a cargo run you knew was suicidal moves them the other way. Romance can emerge from either side when enough has been built. Jealousy and conflict between crew members play out like adult relationships in a Firefly or Expanse register — no melodrama forced, no outcomes predetermined.

Starting Position

Before the first scene, you choose three things: your captain’s name and backstory, your ship’s character (a rust-bucket workhorse, a sleek ex-smuggler, a salvaged hauler, a decommissioned patrol craft), and your starting edge — a fat debt and a fast ship, an honest hold and clean papers, or a hold already full of someone else’s contraband. You also tell the GM what you are actually chasing out here: money, freedom, a clean slate, or a person you lost. The answer shapes what the GM threads through the world as you play.

Player Tools

Character Insight: [Crew Name] returns one sentence on where that crew member stands emotionally right now — no numbers, no logs, just what it feels like from their side. Review Ship or Open the manifest pauses the narrative and presents a clean itemized report of cargo, finances, ship condition, and crew without advancing time. Agency Check rewinds any narration that spoke for you. /fix_state re-reads the hidden logs and presents a corrected HUD with an in-world explanation — the fuel gauge was sticking, the credit count was off. The engine stays honest.

Who This Game Is For

Star Freighter Drift is for players who want the pressure of survival economics in space — where every run is a negotiation between profit, risk, and the systems that will kill you if you push too hard. If you want a frontier that does not care about you, a ship that degrades under the demands you put on it, and crew who have their own reasons for being here, this is the game that delivers it.

Read the full review and install guide for step-by-step setup on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.