One persistent galaxy of about 2,500 star systems, and everyone plays in the same one. Trade, fight, mine and build with a daily batch of turns. Hold territory with a guild — and lose it to someone else. Your standing defenses fight for you while you're offline, so nobody ever waits on anybody, and nobody has to be online at 3 a.m. to keep what they built.
Play in landscape. New galaxy for this wave — everyone starts from nothing, veterans included.
What it is
You get a batch of turns each night. Spend them warping, trading at ports with real spreads, mining deposits, fitting ships out of components you crafted or looted, and hunting the things that live in the dying lanes. When the turns run out you're done until tomorrow — and the galaxy keeps running without you. Your extractors keep filling. Your ships keep the orders you gave them. Your territory keeps being worth taking.
Above all that, there's a war. Two alien powers hold ground on the map, and a third thing wells up through the dead lanes and is nobody's ally. Every kill, every delivery, every liberated system feeds a front that all of us move together, or lose together.
From the build
Screens from the beta client. It's landscape, phone-first, and the art is still partial in places — this is a beta, and we say so.
The daily loop
There are no timers to babysit and no action ever waits on another player. A day in Deadlanes is a batch of turns and a nightly tick, and everything between them is yours.
What your pickets saw, what your extractors pulled, who came for your citadel at 3 a.m. and whether your doctrine held. Losing while offline is designed to be legible, not arbitrary.
Warp, trade, mine, scan, craft, fight. Take a contract or push a front. Ten minutes is a full session; an hour is an ambitious one.
The orders you give your ships — the gambit stack — are what fights for you while you're gone. It is the most under-used system in the game and the one that decides whether you wake up richer or poorer.
One server-wide pass resolves the war, the trades, the churn and every standing defense. Your turns refill. The consequences are waiting when you get back.
Design rules
Mobile strategy has a genre problem: timers you pay to skip, an economy tuned to make waiting unpleasant. Deadlanes is the opposite bet, and these are written into the design docs as invariants, not marketing.
You get a full batch of turns each day. When they're gone, you're done — and the game says so instead of selling you more.
Premium currency buys paint jobs, cosmetics and crafting time. Never power, never turns, never blueprints. There are tests in the codebase that fail the build if a premium item carries a stat.
Every fight resolves against standing defenses. Group play coordinates plans, never schedules. No queues, no raid times, no punishment for logging off.
Every twelve weeks the galaxy is rebuilt. Your commander level, blueprints and reputation carry; your fleet and your ground don't. Nobody compounds a lead into permanent dominance, and next season's new player starts on the same line as last season's winner.
The setting
"The lanes are dying. The lanes have always been dying. The difference this season is that something is using the corpses to get to us."— a home-zone dispatcher, name struck from the record
A dead civilization left behind a web of warp-lanes stitching thousands of systems together. The builders are gone; the web is failing. You're one of countless independent spacers scratching a living in the rotting middle of the map, racing to get rich before the ground vanishes under you.
"Stitchers" · the power that wants the ground
A territorial collective — one distributed growth-organism more than a society. They expand because they must, the way coral spreads, and they treat disorderly human territory as a defect to be corrected. Their advance closes over a contested zone like sutures over a wound.
"Ticks" · the power that wants the flow
A parasitic infestation-economy. They don't buy ports; they grow into them, until a market's prices answer to an appetite rather than a ledger. They spread through commerce the way the Blight spreads through lanes: slower, quieter, with a horrible patience.
The invader · nobody's ally
The disease in subspace; the thing the dead lanes let in. Not a rival, a reckoning. Its raid-scale horrors carry the demon-names humans gave them — Legion, Leviathan, Behemoth — and anyone can hunt them, because every one that falls pushes the corruption back.
Closed beta · now recruiting
It's free, it's a beta, and it's rough in places. Everyone in this wave starts on a brand-new galaxy at the same moment — new connectivity, new deposits, nobody holding anything.
Your first week
The beta lives on Discord — patch notes, questions, guild recruitment, and the developer answering things. If you install and never join, we lose most of what makes you a useful tester.
Founding TesterThe first hundred commanders keep a permanent badge across every wipe and every season. It costs nothing and it's the one thing in the game that never resets.
DEADLANESBETA