Avorion is kinda OK.

[shortylickens]

You run around with a ship, blast out minerals from asteroids

Use the minerals to build up your ship,

And eventually work your way towards the center of the galaxy for the main story.


The galaxy is absolutely ginormous. 1000 by 1000 sectors. All of the sectors are huge but most of them are empty, unless you wait around for a long enough time in which case aliens and bandits will inevitably attack.
You cannot get between sectors with regular travel, you must enable the FTL drive, and it has a cool down after you jump.

Plenty of weapon turrets and ship modules are available. They can be purchased, salvaged after combat, salvaged from long dead wrecks in isolated systems, or created at factories (but they require a wide variety of parts and significant cash).

Armor and shields are build by you in the construction mode. You can access it any time while flying around but if you do it during combat you'll probably get blasted before you can finish.
You can also build new, randomly shaped vessels at a shipyard, and can even have multiple ships flying around doing their own thing if you give them a captain and crew.
Manning your ships requires a hiring fee as well as regular salaries, but they are not expensive compared to the money you can quickly make either mining or salvaging.

There are free wormholes and cheap space-lanes to get you across the massive galaxy quickly, if you dont feel like jumping and waiting and jumping again.

Thats just a small chunk of a galaxy, and they are generated with a Seed you can either pick randomly or type in yourself.
I used a seed of SAM and it was actually pretty good. My starting system had 3 space lanes and was close to several worm holes and many asteroid fields.

You can also buy & sell trade goods similar to Rebel Galaxy and Freelancer, except theres much less info provided on where you should go next and what the current prices are.

When you are in a particular sector, you can talk to any base long before you visit it and see what they sell, buy, and their current price, so you dont have to trek all the way across just get basic info. However, in order to actually conduct business you have to get really damn close to a docking port and if an enemy or massive rock pushes you away just slightly while docked, you wont be able to complete the transaction. The good news is after you clear out enemies they dont reinvade for a little while, and asteroids are destroyed permanently.
The bad news is theres infinite enemies to be found if you just wait around forever doing nothing, and there can be up to 3000 asteroids in a single area.

Some turrets can be set to attack automatically if you have enough gun crews, but it seems to not work so well.

Construction and repairs aren't nearly as complicated as Space Engineers but there is no planetary mining and no leaving your ship. All you can do is launch a smaller ship in an emergency and rebuild at a shipyard, assuming you have the needed resources or took out an insurance policy.

Its not too shabby but still in early access and doesn't look like its making super quick progress.

http://store.steampowered.com/app/445220/Avorion/

 

[HitAnyKey]

Ah yes Avorion. I picked this up during the sale and thought it was pretty fun for a while.

The ship building and sharing of designs is great. Running around in a Battlestar Galactica pawning the pirates was fun.
As I built my fleet I found myself using cheats to pay their salary instead of mining or trading because I found making credits to be a really dull and tedious experience. Or maybe I am just burned out on grinding in games?

And without any fleet commands it was getting annoying telling each ship, one click at a time, every time you want them to do something new. Seriously AI, jump the gate already as I ordered you to the first 50 times!!!

Looking forward to the updates. Fingers crossed he can make the game even better.

 

[shortylickens]

BUMP!

After 3 whole years they finally released the game. The released version is almost exactly the same as the early access version from years ago. I have no idea what took them so long to make so little progress. They are promising more content in future updates but somehow I doubt it. The game is mostly grinding for resources and slowly improving your ship.
Ship building is more painful than fun, and no matter how hard you try it seems like you can be easily destroyed by surprise attacks.
Crew management is a pain and I wish it didnt exist at all.
There really isnt much to do in the galaxy besides mine, blow up wrecks for salvage, and pointlessly fight enemies.

Not a good buy unless you really love aimless wandering and have had enough of Minecraft. The galaxy is still massive, 1 million sectors, randomly generated with a seed of your choice. But almost every sector feels the same and many are completely empty.

 

[Valorian Aurvae]

I choose to rebump, having stumbled across your mildly apathetic post, as I quite disagree, overall. ~

The released version is wildly different from the early access versions; I've been on board since a little before the original post here.
It's still got the odd mission bug, though nothing game breaking I've seen in the past few months.
There are long quest lines, complex trading and industry systems, vastly more ship upgrades and equipment, boarding actions, diplomacy to some limited extent, and fleet commands have improved considerably.
I love the ship building — the customization options are nearly limitless, and modding expands those limits considerably. From designing your own turrets and fighter craft and skinning them with your own textures if you so choose, to creating your own mining fleets, space stations and behemoth super carriers, I find it quite enjoyable.
The galaxy has a lovely, immersive atmosphere, and the graphics and performance have come along pretty nicely for a game with such modest requirements. It makes use of much procedural generation, but there's enough variety in goals you can set for yourself that it rarely feels forced. You're not entirely stuck doing pointless, endless fetch quests... you can go other routes without trouble, but the fetch quests are there if you want a change of pace and a quick pay off.
If the game feels too difficult, you can change the difficulty settings at any time, ranging from horrifically magnified enemy damage and AI and unpleasantly realistic consequences for brushing against asteroids down to a cakewalk for toddlers, wherein you get starting bonuses, enemy AI is basically shut off, and enemy damage is reduced by 97.5%. I usually play with collision damage off, but on Expert difficulty, for a decent balance of forgiveness and challenge.
There's a storyline, if you care to follow it, and you can make allies or build your own empire, send out massive patrol fleets to massacre pirate bases or to expand into bordering empires... or you can choose to aimlessly wander if you feel constricted by a game offering you other options.

It's not my favorite game ever, but I'm still playing it nearly 4 years later. It's pretty good now, with potential to improve.

 

[Stg-Flame]

Looks like a poor-man's Rebel Galaxy. Everything you talked about sounds like a barebones Rebel Galaxy, so... I think I'll save my money.

 

[quyxkh]

Looks like a poor-man's Rebel Galaxy. Everything you talked about sounds like a barebones Rebel Galaxy, so... I think I'll save my money.

Difference is the shipbuilding and the modding and workshop (well, also station building, fleet management, multiplayer, …). Designing your own ships isn't picking loadouts, it's full-on ship design about a jump to the left, then a step to the right more abstract than space engineers. The physics is its own thing, with no more than a nice side-hug relationship with our own; the constraints set up interesting design puzzles for meeting the challenges the vanilla galaxy throws at you. Crank the difficulty and ship design and personal skill at piloting and tactical awareness and weapons management and more start mattering *a lot*, plus: doing well is one thing, looking good's another, doing well *while* looking good, well, that's the dream.

The vanilla game turns into a sandbox once you figure it all out out, the galaxy's not trying to kill you personally so any half-clever boom strat works even for newbies if you've got no ambition, if you're willing to afk and all you want is to roflstomp, but there are full-overhaul mods, truly massive ones, still getting updates and expansions just like the base game lo these many years on.