Humanity spread across the stars a long time ago.
Colonies became cities. Shipping lanes became routine. Corporations built ports, moved cargo, stripped worlds, lost ships, filed reports, and kept civilization running.
Then an inhabited world disappeared.
Not destroyed.
ErasedIts routes vanished from navigation systems. Records of it disappeared from databases. Official histories stopped mentioning it.
As if millions of people had never lived there.
But not everything was deleted.
The Contract
You weren’t looking for a conspiracy.
You were looking for a paycheck.
In JUNKSPACE, you work the forgotten edges of civilization as an independent salvage contractor aboard The Wayward.
The jobs aren’t glamorous.
- Recover a navigation core from a dead freighter.
- Restore power to an abandoned ship.
- Inspect a damaged station.
- Retrieve equipment.
- Find out why something stopped working — and what’s still worth bringing home.
Then one routine recovery produces something that shouldn’t exist: a valid navigation route to a place that isn’t in the records anymore.
The deeper you dig, the less it looks like an accident.
Evidence
The records say one thing.
The ship says another.
Officially, ships suffer failures. Crews evacuate. Cargo gets abandoned. Contracts get closed. Life moves on.
But machinery keeps its own history.
- A terminal that was accessed after the supposed evacuation.
- A system deliberately isolated instead of damaged.
- A crew log that doesn’t match the official report.
- A navigation computer carrying coordinates to a destination every modern database insists doesn’t exist.
And the people paying you to recover the evidence may have reasons for wanting it back.
In-engine capture — work in progress
The World
This is a working future.
JUNKSPACE isn’t a universe of spotless starships and gleaming corridors. It’s a future built by people who had budgets.
Freighters are patched together. Industrial stations have service corridors behind the nice parts. Machines have breakers, access panels, maintenance routes and warning labels. Ports are crowded with workers, cargo, equipment and decades of accumulated infrastructure.
Things wear out.
Things get repaired.
Things get bypassed.
And sometimes things are deliberately made to stop working.
Understanding these places is part of playing the game.
In-engine capture — work in progress
Systems
Solve problems, not puzzles.
A locked door isn’t waiting for the blue key. It’s part of a system.
- Maybe the credential reader still works.
- Maybe the security bus has lost power.
- Maybe you have enough authority to override it.
- Maybe there’s another route.
- Maybe you cut through the damn thing.
JUNKSPACE gives you problems with causes, not puzzles with prescribed answers. What you carry matters. What you’ve repaired matters. What you’ve learned matters.
And sometimes knowing how something works is more useful than anything in your inventory.
Consequence
The world remembers what you did.
JUNKSPACE doesn’t reduce decisions to GOOD and BAD dialogue choices. You make choices by what you actually do.
- Repair somethingorbypass it
- Preserve the shipordamage it
- Search deeperorfinish the contract
- Turn over what you foundorkeep digging
- Take the clean routeortake the expensive one
The game remembers the state you leave behind — the systems you changed, the equipment you recovered, the information you uncovered, and the damage you caused.
There isn’t always a correct solution. There are consequences.
Environmental Storytelling
Every wreck has two stories.
There is the story in the report. And there is the story left behind.
And sometimes what the wreck tells you is nothing like the story you were given.
Home Base
The Wayward
Between contracts, you return to The Wayward.
Your ship.
Your workshop.
Your transport.
Your home.
What begins as a series of salvage jobs gradually becomes a journey across ports, derelicts, industrial installations and forgotten corners of inhabited space.
Every contract can pay the bills. Some can improve your ship. Some uncover pieces of the past.
And some lead back toward the same impossible question.
How do you erase a civilization?
And perhaps more importantly:
Why?
Junkspace™
Salvage the wrecks. Follow the evidence. Find what was erased.
Exploration, environmental storytelling, systemic problem solving, and a conspiracy buried in the infrastructure of the human frontier.
In development at Rock River Interactive
Rock River Interactive is the game-development division of Rock River Research—the same team behind RockSolid Trader™, RockWiFi™, RockTerm™, and RockSolid Money™.
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