Seedship

In Seedship, the player controls an artificial intelligence in charge of piloting a colony ship from the unsalvageable Earth deep into the black, unknowable void, seeking out suitable planets to settle. With a cargo hold packed with a thousand meat popsicles, the AI is awakened upon reaching an unknown quadrant suitable for colonial evaluation. Planet after planet is scanned and the player's straightforward job is to give the yea or nay regarding the planet's suitability for the ship's one possible attempt at establishing a new home for mankind among the stars. But if the conditions are not copacetic -- requiring a royal flush of gravity, temperature, water and resource conditions -- then the colony may well fail. Lending urgency to the mission, the colony ship's scanning instruments, its limited supply of surface probes, and its databases of the collected cultural and scientific wealth of humanity deteriorate over time, vulnerable to radiation damage, micrometeorite impact and other such coincidental but inevitable wear and tear across the centuries, and the longer players wait to build their colony hoping for more ideal conditions, the less likely success becomes.

Gameplay contains many bespoke SF vignettes to play through and player input is often used to lend more fine-grained detail into ship damage (eg. take 1 point of damage to this system, or 5 points to some other random system?), giving the AI agency into shaping its invariable decline. In the end, a detailed report is issued regarding the ultimate fate of an established colony, influenced not only by the factors listed above but also native flora and fauna, the presence of precursor ruins and indeed other sapient species to cooperate or compete with.