Are you serious?!! This is the first you've heard about Empyrion Galactic? It's been on Steam as Early Release Alpha game since 2015 or so. Similar to SE, it's a 3D, open world, space sandbox survival simulator. With a significantly greater emphasis on the survival element. Most of which features are customizable and can be toggled off. And both flight model (space and atmospheric) and space leg game play being solidly implemented as a cross between NMS and SE. With the complete ability to visit/travel between planets and earth like atmospheric worlds in the universe. The obvious drawback are the graphics which are a tad dated given their 2015 time frame. But this isn't a deal breaker as the game play mechanic more than makes up for this.
Second to Steam Workshop mods, the next best feature about Empyrion is the dedication the dev team put into the exploration and survival aspects of the game. They make it very rewarding to explore with the RNG POIs (e.g. artifact sites, orbital/planetary trading stations, hideout black markets/slave markets for piracy activities, alien/robot occupied bases, abandoned bases that can be investigated/exploited for resources, crashed ship sites, mining facilities, alloy synthesis factories, Rados bases on snow planets etc etc) with a light survival/needs system built in.
- So your PC will need to eat/drink and yes sleep.
- Your PC will need to build a base HQ for temporary or permanent use. Depending on your resources, your base can be as small and efficient as you want in regards to power usage. Or a sprawling metropolis that radiates wasted energy off the planetary surface. You can build base HQ the scope and scale of
- simple camps
- outposts (further customized as combat outposts, spy/listening outposts and trading outposts)
- fortresses (heavily fortified structures which look and behaves defensively as it sounds). Can be controlled by single player or player group/faction and can support capital ships and other smaller air/space/land vehicles.
- If you suck at building, download one from Steam Workshop. Or make use of the blueprints system (works for vehicles and other stuff as well). And your building progresses along a tech tree, requiring you to unlock the blueprints of one tech before you can get to the specific tech you want.
- Regardless of the size, your base HQ will be necessary for shelter, defense, provides for more complex crafting options (for other buildings, ship transport vehicles like hover craft, farming etc). You can build your base just about anywhere (i.e. on the surface, underground, mountainous/hilly areas, concealed areas like in depth of rain forests, etc.)
- Farming is a fundamental base feature you'll need to support because you'll need to grow your own food or trade/buy it from NPCs or other players (if multiplayer).
- Ideally you need to build your base HQ near a source of water, which you'll need to generate O2 and purified water to grow crops. And exploit food/medicinal resources of water based plant life/animals. However,
- need to consider strategic and tactical advantages of base placement here as water sources are typically in low lying/relatively flat areas. Which may compromise your base security from hostile NPCs and/or PvP player threats (if doing multiplayer)
- Mountainous/hilly or underground base locations have their strategic defense values with varying benefits/disadvantages to water access and/or the ease at which you can grow sustaining food/crops.
- Environment exposure to temperature is also a factor and affects both PC and the vegetation they grow.
- planning for cold/arctic like climates on planets your PC visits and/or makes their home base/HQ is vital as it will affect how much food resources you can produce.
- next to building a hover vehicle (i.e. an HV) to get around quicker, crafting a survival tent once you establish your home base (like you do in SE) is a must if you're going to weather the elements and do any exploration to checkout the POIs on a planet.
- Little immersive details like certain foods being able to raise/lower your PC body temperature. So drinking hot beverages or water will help adjust your PC body temp stats in artic/desert like environments.
- Other environment effects on your PC health like radioactive damage. Your PC can be harmed by this from being in close and/or extended proximity to radioactive sources. Like a base generator or certain ship components like the ship's warp drive. Or from exposure to certain radioactive ores they mine. And you can customize this feature by high, low difficulty or just turning it off.
- Your PC can also enter the water (not as detailed or enhanced as Subnautica but they can and will drown once they run out of O2) to harvest food/resources as part of their daily needs.
- Exploration of both land and water areas of the planet are necessary base building, ship and weapon building/repair, base defense against potentially hostile alien life (humanoid and/or fauna).
- You can hunt, fight and be killed by alien flora/fauna wildlife you encounter on these planets for food and other survival resources. Same for robotic NPCs the likes of drones (typically encountered at bases), or special hostile alien NPC entities (some which are designed to protect said wildlife). So make sure the next time you want to do a dairy run to get some milk (to go with your food processed space burger and fries) you're packing a lot of firepower.
You also have the same options to do solo v. online/CoOp game play. The devs are also still actively updating this (not as frequently as SE). But they did do a recent update release a couple days ago, which addressed a lot of bug issues and made some excellent QoL feature improvements. Stuff like HV (hover vehicle) to SV (space vehicle) docking (i.e. you can now fly your hover craft bike onto your space vehcile and dock it directly). And docking either HV or SV on your Capital ship vessel. And dock ALL of these to your base HQ. Also the new flight model which has improved the lift/drag aerodynamics on your SV. This now allows for direct lift off from atmospheric planets using only back facing thrusters. Before this update, you had to put additional side/up/down thrusters (similar to SE) on your ship to escape the planetary atmosphere.
The game is stable (I've only played solo mode for the small amount of time I've done this on Steam) with no lag, CTD or other game breaking performance issues.
And now in closing this unabashed shilling for this game, I must link the obligatory YT video which extols the glorious legacy that has been EG:
A 2017 review (Game is currently at 10.2 version with lots of updates to date. e.g. the game world is now full 3D v. when this video was made. But basic gameplay is same):
First part of a more recent playthrough earlier this year with no commentary. This is before the latest Oct 2019 update btw:
This one is a useful comparison to SE (but a bit dated back in 2018):