Play Need for Speed: Underground 2 (2004) in Chrome and Firefox with WebGPU graphics, Web Audio, up to 120 fps widescreen, controller support, free roam and Online races with friends. Fan project, not
Free, open-source, notarized. One-click Steam and Epic, per-game renderer verdicts from an open database, honest about anti-cheat. No account, no telemetry.
A co-op salvage horror game. You and your crew work the night shift for Mercy Salvage Co.: land at abandoned sites, go down into dark procedurally generated facilities, haul scrap back to the ship before midnight, and sell it to meet the profit quota. Miss the quota and you're fired.
Single player, or online co-op with up to 6 players (room codes, no port forwarding). Paint your robot any colour you like on the colour wheel before you start.
How to play it
Easiest: double-click share/GraveyardShift.html. That one file is the whole game. It opens in your browser (Chrome, Edge or Firefox) with no install and no server.
Also works: double-click Play.bat, which runs the development copy (index.html + js/) through a tiny local server.
You need an internet connection: the 3D engine, the fonts and the multiplayer matchmaking load from public CDNs.
Use headphones and play in a dark room. All the audio is positional, and a lot of the danger is something you hear before you see it.
There are no recordings and no synthesizer tones: every sound is worked out from how it's really made. Struck things ring the
way their shape and material do, hinges and trees creak by sticking and slipping, creatures have throats and mouths, drips are
bubbles, horns and klaxons are diaphragms being hammered, and the music is a section of bowed strings.
On a phone or tablet
Open the play link on your phone and turn it sideways. Touch controls come up by themselves:
Left thumb: a thumbstick appears wherever you put it down. Push gently to walk slowly, and past the rim to sprint.
Right side: drag anywhere to look around.
Buttons under your right thumb: JUMP (the big one), USE just above it (hold it to talk on a walkie-talkie), E to interact (it lights up when there's something to use), CROUCH (stays on until you tap it again; crouched, pushing the stick past its rim doesn't sprint), SCAN, LIGHT and DROP.
Hotbar: tap a slot to hold what's in it. II pauses and CHAT opens the chat.
To install it like an app: on Android, use INSTALL APP in the main menu (or Add to Home screen in Chrome's menu). On iPhone or iPad, tap Share, then Add to Home Screen. It then opens full screen and in landscape, and once it has loaded it also works offline in single player.
Phones start with a lighter picture (lower resolution, no flashlight shadows, no volumetric fog), which you can turn up in Settings. Volumetric fog (OFF / LOW / HIGH: high by default on a computer; phones start with it off, and LOW is a lighter version made for them) draws the air as a real volume: ground mist lying in drifting patches, thinning as it rises, cloud banks among the far hills, and the sun coming through the trees in shafts; turned off, the outdoors uses a lighter flat mist and drifting cloud cards instead. Settings → Touch controls can also force the touch controls on or off (on a touchscreen laptop, say).
Playing with friends
One person picks HOST ONLINE GAME → NEW RUN. They get a 5-letter lobby code, shown top-right and in the Esc menu, with copy buttons.
Friends pick JOIN ONLINE GAME and type or paste the code. They can join any time; if a round is already underway they spectate until the ship returns to orbit.
Crew bots (below) count toward the 6; a friend joining a full crew takes the place of the newest bot. No port forwarding or accounts are needed. Connections are peer-to-peer (WebRTC) through the free public PeerJS matchmaking server, with a relay server as a fallback for strict networks once one is set up (see below). The host's browser runs the world, so whoever has the best connection should host. Up to 6 crew.
The host can alt-tab (to Discord, say) without freezing the game for everyone: the world keeps running while the host's tab is in the background.
On phones and mobile data. Connections go straight between players when the networks allow it, which covers most home Wi-Fi. Two phones on mobile data (or behind strict Wi-Fi) usually can't reach each other directly and need a relay (TURN) server in between. The free public relays the game used have shut down and every relay now needs an account, so none is set up yet: add one in js/net.js (RELAYS, or RELAY_URL for a link that hands out credentials, such as Metered's). A phone pauses the game when it's in the background: the host should keep it on screen while friends join (if it was paused, the lobby comes back under the same code as soon as it's on screen again). If someone can't get in, both players tap TEST CONNECTION on the host or join screen: it checks the matchmaking server, a direct route and the relay from that phone's network, and says whether it can play online. If the game says you have different versions, both of you close it and open it again.
Sharing the game
Everyone needs a copy of the game, and everyone should have the same version. Pick one:
Send the file (simplest)
Send friends share/GraveyardShift.html (about 750 KB) over Discord, Google Drive, a USB stick, anything. They double-click it, choose JOIN ONLINE GAME and enter your code. Some email services block .html attachments; send share/GraveyardShift-web.zip instead (unzip, then open index.html).
Put it online (one link, invite links work)
Once the game has a web address, friends don't need any files: they open the link. From a hosted copy, Esc → COPY INVITE LINK gives a link like https://your-site/?join=ABCDE. Opening it lands straight on the join screen with the code filled in.
itch.io (made for browser games): create a free account → Upload new project → Kind of project: HTML → upload share/GraveyardShift-web.zip → tick This file will be played in the browser → set the viewport to 1280 × 720 and enable the Fullscreen button. Save it as Public, or as Restricted/Draft to keep it to people with the link.
Netlify Drop: open app.netlify.com/drop and drag the share/web folder onto the page. You get a URL right away; sign in (free) so the site stays up.
GitHub Pages: make a repository, upload share/web/index.html, then Settings → Pages → Deploy from a branch.
Updating
If you change the code (index.html, css/, js/), double-click Build.bat to regenerate everything in share/, then send friends the new file (or re-upload it). Everyone in a lobby should be on the same version.
Proximity voice chat: set it up in Settings → Voice & Mic. Turn voice chat on, pick your microphone (and, in Chrome and Edge, your speakers or headphones), and choose open mic or push-to-talk (hold V, or the TALK button on a phone). Set your mic volume and the open-mic threshold, so you only go out while you're actually talking (the gate also learns the steady noise round you, rain from your speakers or a fan, and only opens over it, so that never goes out to the others as static). Noise suppression can be turned off, and other players' voices have their own volume. TEST MIC shows your voice on a meter that lights up while the others would hear you, and HEAR MYSELF plays you back (use headphones). You hear crewmates from where they are, the way you would in real life:
Distance: a voice gets quieter with distance and more echoey in the room you're in.
Facing: it's duller and quieter from behind someone's back.
What's in the way: it's muffled by facility walls and shut doors, by the floors between levels, and by the ship's hull (unless the hatch is open).
Vacuum: out on an airless moon or rock there's no air to carry it, so outside you hear each other over the suit radios, which fade out past about a hundred metres.
How loud you are: the creatures hear your voice too, as far as it carries. A whisper only reaches whatever's right beside you, ordinary talk a room or two, and a shout most of the floor (and only just up the stairs). It goes along the corridors and round corners, and a shut door takes most of the edge off it (a barred window less). Your MIC tag shows how far you're carrying: ( MIC ) for a whisper, (( MIC )) for talking, ((( MIC ))) for a shout, and the mic test says WHISPER, TALK or SHOUT. Holding push-to-talk without saying anything makes no noise. On your own, without voice chat, none of this applies.
Walkie-talkies carry your voice to anyone else carrying one, anywhere on the map. Hold left click (USE on a phone) to transmit. It keys your mic whether you're on open mic or push-to-talk, so you don't need V as well. Calls sound like a real handset:
A click of the talk button and a burst of squelch as the channel opens.
A narrow, crushed voice over a hiss that crackles and now and then breaks up.
The squelch tail as they let go.
A typed message sent with a walkie-talkie in your hand (T, then Enter) comes out of every other set. Over a crewmate's set it bobs up above them; on the one in your own hand it rises out of the antenna, with newer calls stacking under older ones.
Dead players can still listen in, but the living can't hear them, by voice or in the text chat: the dead only talk among themselves. Sound you make, including your voice, attracts things, outside and in.
Text chat (T or Enter) works the same way. What you type is said out loud: it bobs over your head and only reaches crewmates within earshot (about 20 m). Holding a walkie-talkie, you send it over the radio instead: the words bounce up in green over every other walkie-talkie, whether it's in someone's hand or lying in the grass, so anyone near one sees it.
The job
Each quota period lasts 3 days. The first quota is $300, and each one after is bigger. Pull the lever to land at the routed site. It comes down out of orbit the way a real spacecraft does, and it takes its time: the world is enormous and the ship is a speck against it. Thrusters puff out on its nose and it swings slowly round to fly along its way round the world, belly down, the world laid out under the nose and its horizon held across the windshield, the orbit's own slow drift carrying on until it's lined up. The forward thrusters fire for a long, heavy braking burn, their jets streaming out ahead of the glass and the deck shuddering, and then begins the long fall: so slowly at first you hardly see it, the world filling more of the glass each time you look, a thruster puffing now and then to keep her lined up, the hum through the deck building. The lower it sinks the faster it goes round, the way a lower orbit does, so the ground that barely crept by up high is streaming past beneath by the time it's low, the horizon flattening out, mountain ranges, cloud banks and their shadows sharpening the whole way down, the first thin wisps of air starting to whistle on the hull. Onto a world it always comes down out of the dark into the morning, as the site is when you land, with the sun off to the side lighting the ground ahead, wherever the ship was when you pulled the lever (even straight out of a jump onto the night side): starting out over the night side it goes further round, and the sun comes up over the horizon as it goes. Onto a moon or rock the sun stays where it really is: the ship takes the way down that keeps it about as high as it was when you pulled the lever, and never brings it up over the edge or out from behind the world, so you come down in daylight only if the sun really is on that side, and in the dark over the night side or in the world's shadow. The whole way down it feels as fast as it is: the view stretches a little as it gathers pace, a shiver runs through the frame with the odd jolt, and flecks of dust and ice flick past in the dark. Then it skims into the top of the air at a tremendous lick, the ground below racing past faster and faster: burning plasma glows up round the belly and streams back past the glass, sparks of burning air streak past outside, the ship bucks and groans in the buffeting and the roar of the air on the hull builds, and the cabin glows with it all, in the colour of that world's sky (red over the Hollow, green over Kessler). At the worst of it armoured blast shutters slam down over every window and the power dips, the cabin lights dying to a glow for a moment. When they flicker back and the shutters grind open again you're in the cloud over the site, and the ship flies itself straight down to the landing spot: a powered descent, gear down, touchdown, ramp out, hatch open. Leaving, it fires up for about seven seconds, no countdown: the lift jets cough and sputter alight one by one, then build to a roar, the dust rolling out from under it and the frame trembling on its struts. That's your time to run for it: the ramp stays down until the last moment and comes up as the ship lifts, tipping in anyone still on it, and for a second after it lifts, someone right under the hatch can jump for the sill and haul themselves in. Then it lifts off heavy and slow on its belly jets in a rolling bank of smoke and dust, the downwash flattening the grass and bending the trees, tucks its gear and steadies in a hover, swaying a little; swings its nose round onto its heading, banking into the turn, and lifts the nose. Then the mains light with a flare and a roar. The blast lights up everything round it, rolls a gust out across the ground and a cloud of smoke after it, and burns a big black scorch into the ground where the flame hit, embers glowing in it and burning chunks flung all round it, smouldering for a while after. The ship surges away along its nose, gathering speed before your eyes and climbing steeper as it goes, into the cloud, leaving a smoke trail hanging in the sky; the shutters come down for the burn out of the air and open on space. Outside mist never follows you aboard; the cabin air clears within a few seconds.
Crew bots
Short-handed? Call robot crewmates aboard from the chat (T or Enter). Anyone in the crew can:
Command
What it does
/add bot
A bot joins the crew (/add bot 3 for three). Up to 6 crew in all, people and bots together
/remove bot
The newest bot leaves (/remove bot 2, /remove bot all)
/bots return
Every bot comes back aboard and waits
/bots work
Back out to it
/bots
The list of commands
Once the ship is down, a bot walks out through the airlock and down the ramp, follows the trail to the plant (round the ship if the trail runs under it) and goes in at the front door with its flashlight on (outside too, once it's getting dark), so you can see where it's headed. It searches floor by floor for scrap, heading deeper once it has covered a floor, opening doors and lockers as it goes. When its hands are full, it's badly hurt, or the night is getting on, it carries everything back up the ramp and sets it down in the bay, then goes out again. It sidesteps a charging crawler, slips away from things that haven't noticed it and runs from things that have, tears a leech off its head, and says the odd word to anyone close enough to hear. Everyone heads back by 10 PM, and the moment the ship starts to leave. Aboard with nothing to do (in orbit, waiting to lift off, or called back), a bot takes a seat (the bench or a jump seat, leaving the cockpit to the crew) and stays in it through the jump, the dive and the climb out, until there's work again.
A bot is a real crewmate: it's on the crew cams and the map, creatures hunt it, it can die or be left behind, and the scrap it brings in counts. A lost bot is on the casualty report, but the Company's insurance doesn't charge for one. If every person is dead, the autopilot waits for any bots still standing to get back aboard. Bots come back with a saved run, and a friend joining a full crew bumps the newest bot.
Controls
Key
Action
WASD
Move
Shift
Sprint
C (hold)
Crouch (quieter and slower; no sprinting while crouched)
Space
Jump
E
Interact / pick up / sit / mash to escape
Left click
Use held item
Right click
Scan
F
Toggle flashlight
G
Drop held item (or set the rover down)
1–5 / mouse wheel
Switch inventory slot
T / Enter
Chat
V
Push-to-talk (if enabled in settings)
Esc
Pause / settings
Field notes
The terminal's BESTIARY command has notes on each creature. Short version: listen, look up, don't stare, and keep the hatch shut after dark.
Files
share/GraveyardShift.html: the whole game in one file, for playing and sending to friends.
share/web/index.html and share/GraveyardShift-web.zip: the same file, packaged for web hosts.
index.html, css/, js/: the source. Everything (models, textures, sounds) is generated in code; there are no asset files. Every sound is worked out from how the real thing makes it, in several takes, and never plays quite the same way twice.
Build.bat + build.ps1: rebuild share/ from the source.
Play.bat + serve.ps1: run the source through a local server.
tools/build.mjs, tools/serve.mjs (npm run build, npm run serve): the same two for Mac, Linux or a cloud machine with Node.js.
manifest.webmanifest, sw.js, icons/: what lets the hosted game install as an app and run offline.
CLAUDE.md: notes for anyone (or any Claude session) working on the code.
Progress saves in your browser automatically whenever the ship is in orbit.
Plotting a course.ROUTE <site> at the terminal only plots the course (ROUTE CANCEL clears it); nothing moves until someone pulls the JUMP lever by the left seat in the cockpit. Its lamp glows green while a course is plotted, and the jump's cost is paid when the lever is pulled.
Jumping to another site makes a hyperjump: the drive winds up and, going that fast, space itself tears open ahead of the nose: a hairline crack that rips wide, white-hot along its edges. The ship punches through the rip, streaks of starlight rush past and everything, the cabin too, is drawn out from the middle, more and more the further in, until it bursts out the far side, a long way off, nose-on to the new world: the drive brakes hard, rumbling through the deck, and the world swells up out of the dark, slower and slower, until the ship eases round into orbit.
The ship, the MS-7 "Last Call", is a lean hauler about 29 m nose to tail: one hull wrapped tight round the bay and the flight deck, grey over a charcoal belly with a sharp chine down each flank and a bold orange stripe above it, a shark's nose (pointed seen from above, dark on top ahead of the glass) with its windshield split into panes, a tall swept fin up the tail's spine, and two big engine nacelles on stub pylons either side of the tail, orange-banded, an intake fan in each and the nav lights in their noses, with the main engine bell in the tail between them. On the ground it stands on four legs that fold up into its belly, with a ramp that runs out from under the hatch to the ground.
In the rain, drops bead on the ship's windows and trickle down them; flying, they're torn off and dragged back across the glass in streaks, and the rain outside slants past the faster you go (none comes inside, and none shows while the blast shutters are down). Don't stand out in a storm holding metal: the shovel, a toolbox, a gearwheel, a gold bar, anything heavy and iron. Now and then the air round it starts to crackle and spark; you have about two seconds to drop it before lightning comes down where you're standing (it takes most of your health, all of it if you're already hurt). Let go in time and it hits what you dropped instead. Plain rain draws it too, but far less often. Under the ship you're safe, and a flashlight or other small tin thing doesn't count. The fog lies right up against the hull, with nothing cut out of it round the ship, and no street lamp or other clutter ever stands where the ship sets down.
Things throw off what they would: your boots kick up dust off dry ground, snow on the ice world, ash on the burnt ones and a spatter of mud in the marsh, and spray off water (wade in and it splashes); rain splashes up off the ground and the water all round you; a failing tube in the facility spits a shower of sparks onto the floor with a crackle; the Executioner's blade sprays sparks back off the concrete as it drags; a blow throws dark spatter off flesh or sparks off metal; a blast flings sparks, burning bits and grit and rolls dust out across the floor; a dropped thing lands in a puff of dust. The ship's lift jets fling grit out from under it, its engines whine up before it lifts, the mains light with a deep whump and a burst of sparks off every bell and trail embers as it goes, and its roar comes from wherever it is.
The ship has an airlock. The outer hatch is the real door; the inner door seals the lock off from the cabin. Each is worked by pressing its buttons (green open, red shut): the hatch from the panel in the chamber or the one on the hull beside the doorway outside, the inner door from the panel beside it in the bay or inside the chamber. Everything you use, an item, a door, the terminal, a lever, has to be within arm's reach. The hatch can be opened in the air while the ship is low, to look out. It shuts itself when the ship climbs past about 40 m, and nobody can step out in flight. A ladder in the airlock climbs up through a hatch in its ceiling and a trunk through the hull (you can see down it into the lit chamber from the roof) to the roof deck, a long railed platform along the top of the ship: take hold of the ladder (use, looking at the rungs) and climb it with forward and back, coming up under a shut hatch pushes it open (when it may be), stepping off the top puts you on the deck and off the bottom back in the lock; up in the trunk under the hatch, use opens or shuts it over your head (shut it after you on the way down), anywhere lower use lets go, and jump always does; from the deck, use at the open hatch to take hold and climb down. watch the site from up there, or ride the takeoff or the landing out in the wind and smoke. The hatch has a hinged lid with a yellow handwheel, lit from below by a lamp in the trunk. It's shut when you land: look up at the hatch and press use to swing it open (or just climb up into it), and again to shut it, from below or from the deck. Open, you can see the sky up the trunk from the airlock and look down into it from the roof. It seals itself before the shutters come down on takeoff, and stays sealed in space. The hatch is open while the ship is on the ground or low with its shutters up; climbing away, a klaxon calls everyone down before it seals for space.
Sit in the cockpit seats, the jump seats in the bay, or on the bench at the crew's table (E). You stay in your seat through landing, takeoff and the climb back to orbit. Seated, your body stays facing the way the seat does; crewmates see you turn your head to look round (and your shoulders, for a look behind).
The bay is home: padded insulation on the walls, a perforated ceiling, worn deck plates, the Company's posters, a coffee machine, a pegboard missing half its tools, and a wall clock that keeps the site's time while you're down there (and the real time in orbit).
Charging: the charger on the bay wall tops up anything that runs on a battery. Hold it up to the charger (E) and its lamps fill one by one over a couple of seconds as the cell takes the charge; walk off or put it away first and it keeps only what it got.
The main screen in the bay shows crew cams: one slice per crewmate (halves, thirds and so on), everyone's but your own (each of you sees the others' feeds; alone, it shows the ship's hull cameras), with where they are, their facility level, and "NO LIFE SIGNS" if they're dead. Each feed is lit the way it is where that crewmate is: down in the facility you see its dark, the lamps near them and their own flashlight beam, not the daylight up by the ship. The ◀ ▶ buttons under it page on to a map that follows each crewmate in turn: the walls, doors, stairwells and blast doors of the level they're on, seen from above, with everyone on it. RADAR sweeps around whoever the map follows and marks any creature it crosses. The last page is the ship cams: its own cameras over the hatch looking down the ramp, on a tripod that's set up out ahead of the nose looking back at the hatch (pick it up and set it down anywhere outside, and it watches the way you face; carried, it sees what you see; it works down in the facility too, but its signal has the rock to get through: the further down, the snowier and choppier the picture and the more often it drops out), on the tail, and one up in a corner of the bay, so whoever stays aboard can watch the crew come and go. They're live wherever the ship is: in space the outside ones show space and the world below, and until the ship is down on the surface (and the tripod set up) the camera on the spine over the cockpit, looking out past the nose, takes the tripod's place. The screen belongs to the ship: everyone sees what anyone last put on it, and it stays on that view (saved with the run).
Find the facility entrance (press right click to scan; the scan marks the ship and entrances outside, and scrap and its value inside). Scanning also outlines creatures in red and names them.
Facilities go down, at least four floors (the ground floor, G, and basements B1 to B3); high-risk sites go five floors down and extreme ones six, to B5. Every floor is a full floor of rooms and corridors, so a deeper plant is a bigger one, and the way down is a floor at a time: two or three stairwells join each floor to the next, tall shafts with switchback steel flights, dim failing lamps on the landings and, where the damp got in, vines hanging the height of the well, each with a lobby on the floor above and a hall at its foot on the floor below (the level painted big on every landing, and a plate by each doorway saying where it goes). Getting to the bottom of a deep site and back is a long walk. Each level down is darker, more of its lights are dead or failing, and it's further gone: water down the walls, standing water, moss, trailing vines, fallen ceiling panels, rubble; past the second basement the emergency circuit is most of what's left. The deeper floors were never stripped, so the scrap down there is worth more, and more of it is the good stuff; on the bottom floor of a deep one there's usually a piece or two of real value besides.
Some corridors are cut by blast doors, each stencilled with a code (also shown on the map). Nothing inside can move them: type the code at the ship's terminal to raise the door, or drop it again (monsters can't get through one either). There's always another way round, but it may be a long one. The lower levels were never stripped, so scrap there is worth more, a little more every floor down. A deep plant holds no more of it than a shallow one would: it's shared out over the floors, about as much on each, so the deeper the site, the further apart the finds. The facility's core is always on the deepest level, as far from its stairwells as it can be. The deepest sites have room for a few more creatures.
The scanner sends a pulse rolling out over everything around you. Each find is marked the moment the wave reaches it. It reads what's in the open and line of sight; through a wall only at very close range.
Everything you find and buy looks its age: colours faded, grime worked in, paint chipped back to the metal along the edges, metal scuffed. The shovel is a proper navvy's spade (ash shaft, D-grip, a dished, pointed blade with its green paint worn off the edge), carried ready in your right hand with the blade up at the edge of view. A swing draws it back, brings it down hard across your view with a jolt as it lands, and carries it back up.
Scrap is where it would really be. Lab rooms hold flasks, specimen jars, test meters and circuit boards; machine rooms hold gears, engine parts, toolboxes and car batteries; offices hold phones, registers, typewriters, valve radios, desk globes and silver trophies; morgues hold personal effects (and the odd ram's skull or teddy bear). Lamps you find give light: a storm lantern, the candelabra (its candles light with a match), the fancy lamp. Right-click one in your hand to light it (on a phone, press use with nothing in front of you; facing a door, use opens the door). It lights the place for everyone, keeps going when the power's cut, and stays lit where you set it down. Something running you down brings in the chase: high wailing strings and a heart racing past two hundred a minute. Dropped things sound like what they're made of. With volumetric fog on, flashlight beams show in the facility's dusty air. Some of it does something if you use it: the radio hunts through the static, the old box camera's flash whines and pops, an extinguisher blasts, a teddy groans, and anything that makes a noise can be heard. What the site was (a mill, a biolab, a pumping station) tilts it further. It's tucked away: against walls, behind crates, under desks, on shelves. Rooms nearest the entrance were picked over long ago.
Gift boxes turn up in every facility, lying about or shut in lockers. One is worth a little as it is; open it (left click) and you might find a wad of cash, something valuable, a tool, a snack, or a doll's head. Once in a while there's a charge inside with its fuse already burning: throw it (left click) or drop it (G) and run.
Kill a creature and you'll know it: it collapses, twitches a few times and goes still, its colour drains away, and a dark pool spreads underneath. The scanner marks bodies DEAD in grey.
A crewmate who dies goes limp right where they stood and falls the way the blow threw them: toppling away from whatever got them, knocked flying by a blast or a meteor, tumbling down the stairs, flopping over railings, and coming to rest in a heap. When it's you, the view rides your own body down before the static takes it.
Search lockers and cabinets (E). Whatever is inside is invisible to the scanner apart from a faint "SIGNAL" when you're right next to it. Opening them is noisy. Open, look at what's inside to take it, and at the door (or into an empty one) to shut it again. Some have cobwebs in them.
Put things down (G) where you're facing: on a desk, a table, a bench, a crate, a drum or a shelf if you're over one (on racking, the shelf you're looking at), otherwise on the floor. It goes down square and clear of whatever's already standing there, turned if that fits better, and never through a wall or into a console; if there's no room for it, it goes on the floor in front.
Doors swing away from whoever pushes them, and an open door is solid. A door takes a moment: hold use on it (a ring fills round the crosshair) and the latch clicks, then the door swings; let go too soon, or look away, and it doesn't (lockers and cabinets just take the latch's moment). Every door has a vision panel at eye height, wired glass or a grille of bars: you can see through a shut door to the other side (and anything over there can see you), and a lamp beyond it throws a faint shaft of light through the window into the dark (in stripes, through bars).
Somewhere off the trail on most sites lies an old Company ship that didn't make it: the front of it dug in nose-first at the end of the long furrow it ploughed, rolled half onto its side, its back end torn open on bare frames and hanging cable. The tail snapped off and lies spun round behind it. An engine pod and a landing leg were thrown clear, and hull plates and scrap are strewn the length of the furrow, the ground going black with old soot toward the wreck.
Round every facility lies what's left of its old concrete yard: whole slabs at the entrance, cracked and stained, weeds in the joints, breaking up into islands of paving and bare dirt farther out, and the trail turning into a broken road as it nears the plant. Snow, dust and growth have covered more of it on some worlds than others. Your footsteps sound like concrete on it.
Each site is its own world, ten of them, from safe and free to deadly and dear. Ashgrove is rolling dead-autumn hills around a brick textile mill. Verdigris is a hothouse world of ferns and moss-hung trees around an overgrown hydroponic farm, glasshouses on its roof and vines up its walls. Kessler is a drowned marsh of reeds, standing water and moss-hung trees around a white-clad quarantined biolab, with fireflies after dark. Rimefall is an ice world, snow always coming down, around a pale-clad cold-storage depot hung with icicles. St. Agnes is a violet moor of heather and mist around an old brick sanatorium with a slate-spired clock tower, a chapel and a graveyard. Nadir is a red-rock canyon of stepped mesas and spires, with pipelines running off from a rusted pumping station. Brinewell is a drowned coast of mudflats and tidal pools around a sea-green shipyard, a gantry crane over its containers and a hulk run aground. Saltreach is a dead salt sea, flat and white to the horizon, around a refinery with gas spheres and a flare stack still burning. The Hollow is a cratered ash waste under a red sky, with a blackened ruin and something very large lying dead in the field. Vesper is a volcanic world of black basalt and drifting embers around a foundry whose stacks and furnace still glow, slag running off hot. Round every site the country goes on past where you can walk: nearer hills standing in the ground mist and the high ground behind, in that world's own shape (rolling ridges, terraced mesas, volcanoes over the ash, lone mesas on the flats, snowy peaks). The mist lies thickest on the ground and thins as it goes up, so on a fine day the peaks clear it and far-off things are grey shapes rather than gone; cloud hangs among the far hills to show how big they are; rain closes it in and greys a sunset, and a foggy day is a wall. Dead leaves, twigs, grit or ash lie in the grass by world; litter lies along the trail; puddles stand in the ruts after rain; crows wheel high overhead by day. Abandoned cars are a little different every time: a door hanging open, smashed headlights, a flat, and a wheel that's gone shows plainly (the corner up on a block with the brake drum bare and the tyre lying in the grass, or the car down on its drum).
Inside, each plant was fitted out its own way, and all of it matches, down to the door frames, the stairwells and the blast doors: red brick, oak boards and cast iron under warm tungsten at the mill, green-tiled grow rooms under magenta grow lights at the farm, white panels gone grey and sheet vinyl at the biolab, freezer panels and steel grating in cold blue light at the depot, institutional green tile and wooden doors at the sanatorium, pump-house green paint on wet concrete at the pumping station, rusted plate and deck plating at the docks, cream-painted steel, yellow rails and sodium light at the refinery, oxblood concrete at the Hollow, sooty firebrick in furnace-orange light at the foundry. The doors are the place's own too: panelled timber at the mill and the sanatorium, insulated freezer doors at the depot, riveted bulkhead plate at the docks, the foundry and the Hollow, pressed steel elsewhere, all of them kicked grimy at the foot and rubbed dark round the handle. Moons and rocks are fitted out like their world (or, round the gas giants, like what they were for: the ice mines like the cold store, the prison its own way). How far the moss and vines got in depends on the place: the farm is overgrown, the cold store and the foundry have none. What the rooms are (and the scrap in them) follows what the place was for.
From orbit the world hangs nearly still: the ship is parked well out and takes half an hour or so to go round, and the world turns the other way beneath it, so you can watch the ground and the weather move by and day and night slide over it. Now and then a fleck of dust or ice catches the sun and flicks past the glass from ahead, the ship going round at a tremendous lick even parked (more of them while it brakes in out of a jump). Another of the Company's ships is usually parked lower down, a speck of sunlit hull crawling across the face of the world, a small strobe winking on it and a red light. Lightning flickers inside the storm clouds on the night side, lighting a storm up from within so you see its billows, several storms at once and now and then a whole storm going off together (by day it's lost in the glare off the cloud tops); on the day side the sun glints off the sea. Moons and rocks have craters inside craters at every size, so the closer you come the more of them there are. Round a giant's moon the ship parks well off, the moon a small ball against the wall of the giant behind it.
Rings. Nadir, the Hollow, Rimefall and Saltreach wear rings; the rest don't. They're real, flat sheets round the world's middle, the same from orbit as from its moon or rock: the world's shadow falls across them and theirs across it in bands, sharp-edged; the sunlit face shines and the far face glows only where they're thin; and each one's rock goes round inside them, in a lane it keeps clear, so standing on that rock the rings run right across the sky in front of the world, and the rock's own shadow falls across them when the sun is low.
Moons and rocks. Every world has a moon and a captured rock circling it: you see them hanging beside it from orbit, slowly going round it (nearer some days, farther others), waxing and waning with the sun, throwing their shadows across it, passing into its shadow, and now and then crossing the sun's face (dimming it down on the ground too), and in the sky over its sites, pale by day and bright at night (when the weather lets you). Some days Mercy Survey radios in a facility beacon on one of them: a bonus site for that day only, listed under SITES and better paid for the risk. ROUTE to it from its world and pull the jump lever for a short hop across (the shutters come down for the burn and open on the new orbit). Out there there is no air: a black sky with the stars out by day and the sun a small white disc as blinding as it is from space, glaring whenever you look its way, grey cratered dust or dark broken rock, nothing hunting outside, and the world it belongs to filling half the sky: by night it lights the ground, and once in a while it swallows the sun and the place goes dark for a few hours of the day. Come down while the moon is in its shadow and you land in that eclipse, the world black over the sun and the ground lit only by its glowing rim, until the sun comes out past its edge an hour or so into the morning. The gravity is light on the surface (you jump far higher and fall slowly) and full again inside the ship and the facility. By the next day the beacon is gone and the ship has hopped back. Where they are and how close is the same that day from everywhere: from orbit, from the world's sites (a moon in close looks bigger), and from the moon or rock itself, where the world looms larger on the days its orbit has brought it in close and the other one hangs where it really is.
Gas giants. Three of them, massive, with no ground at all, only cloud all the way down: you can jump to one to look (orbiting low, it fills the windshield and runs on past it, its moons specks beside it), but the lever won't take you down. Halcyon is pale gold and softly banded in broad bright rings; Tarrow is boldly banded, a great red storm turning in it, in a faint rusty sheet of dust; Hush is a still, pale blue, nearly featureless, in thin dark ringlets. What you work are their moons, every one with a facility and open every day. Halcyon has five: Sump, a moonlet mined hollow in the rings; Lantern, an ice moon just outside them; Chandler, sulphur-yellow with a refinery; Gloam, black as soot, with an observatory; and Ferrule, rust-red, a breakers' yard. Tarrow has three: Kiln, smoking down in its dust ring; Tithe, grey, with a chapel and a counting house; and Warden, a prison moon. Hush has three: Murmur, an ice moon so close in that Hush fills half its sky; Lull, a rock with a cryo vault in it; and Pall, its dark outer moon. ROUTE straight to any of them from another world (one jump), and hop between a giant's moons for nothing. They go round close: from the nearest moon the giant fills most of the sky, its rings slicing across it and the other moons pinpricks beside it, and even from the farthest it's a wall of cloud a third of the way across the glass. Close up its cloud never goes soft: finer and finer streaks drawn out along its bands.
The first sight of a creature hits you with a sting of strings; not again while it's still with you (looking back at something on your heels is no surprise), only once you've lost it a while.
Each site has its own creatures. Nobody tells you which: you find out when you get down there (the terminal's BESTIARY has field notes on each). The mannequins are only on the harder worlds, and only down in the lower half of a facility. Ceiling leeches and roaches turn up in every plant, wherever they don't already belong (the leeches mostly down in the lower floors, where the infestation's got hold), so there's always something about besides the clock. You never face a pack of the same thing: at most one of each big creature and two of the small ones (and one swarm of roaches, which counts as one thing), with a cap on how many are inside at once. They find their way round furniture and through doorways and up and down the stairs, and nothing reaches you through a wall, round a corner or from the flight above: a creature has to get to you. Anything that brushes past an open door knocks it shut behind it. What they know of you comes from their senses. To see you, the ones with eyes need light: a lamp near you, your own flashlight, or being close (in the dark, crouching or keeping still lets you get nearer; running doesn't). Sound carries the way sound does: along the corridors, round corners, dulled through a shut door, up and down a stairwell. They remember where you were and which way you were going, less sure of it the longer it's been, and they wander where the crew have been walking. The animal ones each have their own way of hunting:
Crawlers are eyeless. One feels movement in the air in front of it and hears footsteps, so someone keeping still a few steps off isn't there to it. Once it has you it screeches, and another crawler that hears comes round by another way. It charges at where you're going to be, and if it loses you it runs on the way you went, then noses through the nearest rooms. It can't work a door: a shut one stops it (it goes round, or waits at it), and one slammed in its face mid-charge it hits full tilt and is left reeling.
Ceiling leeches wait where people have to pass under them: over the middle of a doorway, or a corridor the crew have been using. One that hears footsteps further off creeps over to meet them, and one that sees someone down below goes after them across the ceiling, scuttling, and drops the moment it's over them: keep moving and you'll stay ahead of it. It moves like a bug: a quick scuttle, its legs rippling and its body snaking, then dead still, rearing its head to taste the air, then another. It goes the way a thing that clings does: over the ceiling, down the wall to a doorway's lintel (its body curling over the edge after its head) and up the wall on the far side, never through the open air (knocked down, it scrabbles off, makes for the nearest wall and climbs straight back up it, up the face of whatever's standing against it if it has to). On someone's head it wraps round it, mouth working. It can't open doors.
Leech nests: more days than not, they've bred. One room, on any floor, has a nest grown up out of a corner like a termite hill: wet flesh from floor to ceiling, fluted and swollen, its crown spread out over the ceiling, pocked with burrows that glow a dull red down inside (you can see them in the dark before your light finds the rest of it), with clutches of egg sacs stuck to it and strands hanging off it. It breathes, slowly, and you can hear it. Veins creep away from it over the ceiling and walls, out through the doorways and along the corridors outside, thinning as they go: follow them back and you'll find it. Two or three of its brood keep watch on the ceiling by it and over the ways into its room; the rest (six or more, ten in a room it's taken over) are still inside it, and the moment anyone comes into its room, or near it and in sight of it, they pour out of the burrows in its crown one after another and come straight across the ceiling for whoever set them off. Left alone, it breeds them back up. Sometimes it has taken the whole room over: more of it grown up out of the other corners, and the walls and ceiling skinned with flesh in great lumpy patches. Hit it with a shovel and it shudders and bleeds, lets its brood loose and they come for whoever's doing it; five blows (eight, for one that's taken a room) and it bursts, goes dark, and breeds no more.
Roaches the size of a boot come two or three at a time out of a vent. They scuttle about in fits and starts, a dash and a dead stop with their feelers going, and the patter of their claws carries. They hear footsteps and feel anyone moving near them, and come at you in a rush along the floor, quicker than you walk but not as quick as you run (a hiss as they come); one bites at your ankles and is off again, then round and back for another. They can't stand light: put a beam on them and they scatter for the dark, and so do the others near them. They can't work a door, and one blow kills one, which ends up on its back with its legs folding up.
Hounds come out of the dark at the edge of the site between 7 and 8 PM, the whole pack out by 8 (one on the easy worlds, up to three on the worst, and one more after 10). Now and then one howls from wherever it is, so you can tell where they are. They have no eyes, but the skin grown over where they were shines back milky green in a flashlight beam, a long way past where the beam lights anything, when one is looking your way. They're blind and go by sound. Close up, though, one can smell you: keep still beside it and it noses round to you and bites. Move off quietly. A hound that lunges howls, and that brings the rest of the pack. They go round the ship rather than into its hull, and through the hatch only after someone they heard inside.
The cleverer ones (the Pale, the Mannequins, the Executioner) don't just kill whoever they reach. A landing goes in swells: quiet for a while, then building (they shadow you, show themselves and back off), then one of them is let loose on one of you, then it eases off again.
They pick whoever is furthest from help: alone, on another floor, or heading home with their hands full. Stay together and they hang back, waiting for someone to wander off.
There's always warning before one comes for you: a sound somewhere out of sight, your flashlight stuttering, a door slamming shut down the corridor. The first comes a good six seconds before. They never take two of you within a minute, and now and then they only toy with you.
Until one is let loose on you, getting caught hurts, but it lets you go. Once it's let loose, it knows where you are.
Unwatched, they cover the ground fast. While you watch, they walk. If you're heading out, the one that's after you gets ahead of you on your way out and waits there.
They remember where you hid last time, and look there first.
The marsh water (Kessler, Brinewell) is black and thick: wading through it slows you down, and if it's over your head it drowns you in seconds. Under it you can't see a thing: thick black-green murk an arm's length all round, silt hanging in it, the daylight gone and every sound dull and close.
The Clown walks the lower floors of the harder worlds, later in the day. It's too big for the building: bent double under the ceiling, a shoulder on each wall.
There's no getting past it in a corridor. In a room you can go round it.
It folds itself slowly through every doorway.
It's slower than you even when you're not looking, and slower still while you watch it. It doesn't need to be quick: it hears you through the floors, knows the short way round, and gets to the corridor you need before you do, then stands in it.
It never pens you in for long. With no other way out, it gives you a while, then backs off.
Listen for the squeak and slap of its shoes, the wheezing giggle, and its music box winding through a bent "Pop Goes the Weasel".
The Seep turns up in some facilities.
It's a wall of jelly as wide as the corridor and as high as the ceiling.
It's slow, but it never stops, and nothing hurts it.
It feels your footsteps through the floor (on its own floor, through walls and doors; running from further off, a voice hardly at all) and comes after you, to wherever it last felt you. Left alone, it settles across a corridor the crew use, often between you and the way out, and waits there, blocking it. It never settles anywhere that would leave somebody with no way out at all.
There's no squeezing past it in a corridor: it fills it wall to wall. In a room you can go round it.
It can't open doors, so shut one on it. It will start to seep through under the door (or quicker, through the bars of a barred window) and gather itself again on your side.
Touching it burns and shoves you along ahead of it. Backed into a corner, you're swallowed whole, and your body hangs inside it as it goes, until it has to squeeze under a door and leaves you there.
It's a different colour every landing.
It catches whatever light falls on it and throws it round the corridor in its own colour.
It leaves a glossy trail wherever it's been.
The Sisters keep to the wards (St. Agnes most of all). They come in twos and threes: faceless, twitching nurses with swollen, bandaged heads and rusted scalpels.
They're blind, and go for light. Turn your flashlight on one, or carry a lit lamp past it, and the whole ward comes for you, jerking along, stopping, jerking on.
Moving about under a lamp close to one is light enough for it.
Put the light out and keep still, and they lose you. They stand where they stopped, twitching. A noise only turns their heads, with a twitch or two that way. Right up close, they find you anyway.
The Bound look like bodies lying in the corridor, until you're close enough to touch one (or make a noise right beside it). Then it gets up: no arms, no face, just a ragged mouth at the top.
Lying there, it listens. When it hears footsteps a way off and nobody comes near, it gets up and goes to lie down where they'll pass: round a corner, just inside a doorway, somewhere you don't see it until you're on it. When it loses you, it lies down across the way you'll come back.
It lurches after you on wrong-bent legs and retches a caustic mist from a few metres off, at where you're heading. Keep out of the cloud; it eats through a suit.
Walk wide round anything lying down.
Pulling the core kills the power, all of it. For a few seconds there's nothing but your flashlight.
Then the emergency circuit's main breaker slams home somewhere below, and the red emergency lamps come on one fitting at a time, spreading out from the core room, each with its own clunk. Most of the ones that light are failing and flicker; a few burn steady; many never come on at all.
Then the old alarm on the circuit starts up, a worn-out motor siren that sags, stalls and cuts out, and it doesn't stop until you're gone.
It wakes the worst thing on the site. And sometimes the alarm brings up the Executioner up from the bottom floor: a huge figure in a rusted iron hood, dragging a blade longer than you are. You hear the blade scraping along the floor long before you see it, sparks flying off it in the dark. It walks, never runs, toward whichever of you is the shortest walk away, wherever you are, and once it has picked one of you it doesn't easily change its mind. Nothing hurts it. When it lifts the blade, get out of reach.
A walkie-talkie in your pocket hisses with static near any of these three, in bursts that come quicker the closer it is.
Meteors. On the airless moons and rocks, some landings a meteoroid shower comes through: the survey office radios a warning half a minute ahead. Some showers are light (pebbles), some heavy, with a big strike in them. There's no air to burn them up: just a glint, a white flash, ejecta flung out on long slow arcs, the ground jumping under your feet, and a fresh crater ringed with bright rays. Out in the open near one, you're thrown off your feet, or killed.
Now and then the shower is only the leading edge of something bigger on its way in. It shows as a new star in the black sky, then a rock, swelling hour by hour as the showers come thicker and heavier, and the radio gives you the impact time and counts it down.
Be off the surface by then. If the ship is still down when it hits, everyone goes with the moon, and the contract ends there.
Get away in time and you watch it hit from orbit: the rock falling in, a flash that lights the limb, a plume of molten rock and dust, and a great scar left on the moon. The fresh craters stay on it until you jump to another world.
Carry scrap back and drop it inside the ship. Most of it is junk worth a few dollars; a real find is rare. The day runs from 8 AM, a minute on the clock every two seconds, and the ship leaves at midnight, and anyone not aboard is left behind. Pulling the lever with crew still outside warns you once; pull it again to leave them. Anyone it leaves behind, alive or dead, gets one last look. Out in the open, the view stays right where they are (their eyes, or over their body) and turns to follow the ship as it lifts away and climbs into the sky without them. Down in the facility the picture breaks up into static and cuts to the ground outside, the ship on its pad in view, to watch it go. Where you lose sight of it, up in the murk or the cloud, it goes with one sharp twinkle and a ting.
Sell from orbit at the terminal (SELL). The Company pays more as the deadline gets closer (50% → 70% → 85% → 100%).
On the deadline, pull the lever to submit. Make the quota and a bigger one follows; miss it and you're terminated. The klaxon sounds, the lights stutter, the inner door slides open, and then the outer hatch blows: the cabin's air goes out through the lock in a roar and takes everything with it. The whole crew, limp, and every loose thing aboard (the scrap, what was in your hands, the junk in the corners) tumble across the bay and out into space in a jet of freezing vapour. The view rides your own body out, the ship falling away behind you with its hatch still venting, the world wheeling past, until the static takes it.
Spend credits at the terminal (STORE, BUY <item>) on flashlights, shovels, stun grenades, walkie-talkies, a motion tracker, a survey pad, snacks, and ship upgrades.
The survey pad is a rugged tablet you hold in front of you (click to switch it on; it runs on a battery): its screen shows the floor you're on from above, live, with you in the middle, north up: walls, doors, stairwells, blast doors and their codes, the exits, and the rest of the crew on your floor. Outside it shows the ground round the ship. The Salvage Locator (a ship upgrade) is a metal detector wired into the ship's radar: a RADAR sweep then picks up metal scrap as well as anything moving (amber, with a higher ping), and every survey pad pins the metal scrap within 30 m. It only finds metal: glass, china, wood, cloth and bone it can't, so it shows you some of what's there, never all of it. Riskier sites (SITES, ROUTE <site>) pay much better.
Deliveries: bought in orbit, a delivery drone flies out to the ship: Mercy Supply calls it in over the radio, and you can watch its strobe blink in from far off through the starboard portholes. The lock seals, the hatch opens, the drone flies in, sets your order down in the airlock and leaves, then the lock repressurises and the inner door opens. Bought on a site, it's called in over the radio with an ETA (about half a minute, time to walk out and watch): a glint shows high in the sky and grows, then a supply pod falls out of it and slams in near the ship, leaving a crater. Open it (E) to get your order. Anything else ordered in the next ten seconds or so goes on the same pod (the radio says so); after that, it waits for the next one.
The scout rover (a ship upgrade, BUY ROVER) is a little yellow remote-control truck with a camera on a mast, a headlight and a wire basket on its back. It parks in the bay by the airlock, next to its console. Once the ship is down, one crewmate at a time can take the console (E): your view becomes the rover's camera, grainier the further it gets from the ship and worse underground. Drive with WASD (or the stick), look round with the mouse, F for its headlight, Space for its horn (creatures hear it), E to let go. It goes out through the airlock, down the ramp and in through the facility doors, and the console's little screen shows the crew what it sees. Put whatever you're holding in its basket (three things) and take them out again; whatever's in the basket is aboard once the rover is. It can be carried too (E on it): both arms, heavy, so you walk slowly and can't use or switch items until you set it down (G). If the ship leaves it on the ground it's gone, basket and all.
Snacks and drinks are sold in the store and found in lockers and cabinets. Eat or drink one (left click) for stamina back and a perk: longer sprints, faster recovery, sharper eyes, steadier hands, or some health back. Mystery cans can go either way.
