Space Trucker

Overview

Space Trucker is an interstellar trading game in the tradition of open-galaxy merchant classics. You start at Kessa Prime with a small freighter, 1,500 credits and a 20-unit hold, and your licence runs for 360 days. Eight star systems sit on the map, each with one of six economies: Agricultural, Mining, Industrial, High-Tech, Resort and Frontier. Each economy produces some of the six goods cheaply (Grain, Ore, Alloys, Medicine, Circuits, Luxuries) and pays a premium for others. Prices also drift between visits, news events spike or crash a single good in one system for a week or two, and your own trades push the local price against you as you buy or sell in bulk. Jumps burn fuel by distance and cost travel days, and safe core worlds alternate with lawless frontier systems where raiders wait. The goal is one million credits in cash before the deadline.

How to Play

Press Start Trading. The market table shows buy and sell prices for the system you are docked at; green numbers are cheap compared with the galactic average and orange ones are expensive. Use Arrow Up and Down to highlight a good, Arrow Right to buy one unit and Arrow Left to sell one; hold Shift for maximum quantities, or tap the Max and All buttons. Pick a destination by clicking a star or pressing Q and E, then press Space or the Jump button. The dashed circle on the map is your current fuel range. At the shipyard, F refuels, H repairs the hull, and C, T, G and L buy a bigger hold, a larger fuel tank, a faster engine and stronger lasers. When pirates appear, choose 1 to fight, 2 to flee or 3 to pay a toll.

Tips & Strategy

Early on, cash is the limit, not the hold: Medicine from Iridia to a frontier world earns well over a hundred credits per unit and fits a small budget. Once you can fill twenty units of Luxuries at Corvel, the money starts to snowball, and the first upgrades should be hold space, because profit per trip grows with every bay you add. Watch your price impact. A hundred units of one good moves the market noticeably, so split a large hold across two goods with good margins instead of maxing a single one. Plan loops, not single trips: Corvel to Tamsin Reach pays well outbound, but you need a decent return cargo, so check what the frontier sells cheaply, usually Ore. Buy lasers before you start running frontier routes with a full hold, because losing thirty percent of a hundred-unit luxury cargo hurts more than any upgrade costs. Engine upgrades shorten every jump, which is effectively buying extra days. Keep an eye on the news line: a soaring price on a good you can source nearby is often worth a detour.

What Makes It Distinct

The market reacts to you. Prices are not a fixed table to memorise; each system remembers how much you dumped there and recovers slowly, which turns route planning into a real juggling act between margin, travel time, fuel range and pirate risk under a firm calendar.