COSMIC EMBER
The map is dark. Your light is the only thing that reveals it — and the only thing the dark can find.
One fire, and everything you own stands in its light
A factory-builder with a tower-defence heart, where light is the whole game. You are Vela, the one who kept the list when a great ship came down at the cold edge of the galaxy and fourteen people walked away from it. A year on, the ember is lit, the outpost stands, twelve are still alive — and the colony is going back out into the dark. Light is territory: you build only where the fire reaches, and the map beyond it is fog you burn away one beacon at a time. Light is also heat, and heat is what the dark can smell — the brighter you burn, the harder the things out there come for it.
Cosmic Ember is built on a single rule I refuse to break: if it's in the fiction, it's in the mechanics. The light isn't a lighting effect, it's the build radius and the fog you burn away. The heat isn't a number, it's what's coming for you. And the things crawling out of the dark aren't monsters — they're the crews of the ships that were eaten before yours.
Six pillars
Every system in the game is the same verb applied to one thing: light.
Light is territory
The Hand can only build where it can see. Every machine you raise stands inside a circle of firelight you paid for, and the dark map beyond it is fog — you do not explore it so much as burn it back, one beacon at a time.
Heat is the difficulty dial
Every machine burns. The hotter your colony runs, the further into the dark your warmth carries — and the husks out there are walking toward the brightest thing they can find. Growth is the threat.
Logistics is the defence
Turrets eat ingots, delivered by conduit. A gun your factory can't reach is a gun that doesn't fire — so the line you hold is a line you designed, and every bolt is a machine you chose not to build.
The husks are the eaten
They're the crews of the ships swallowed before yours — hollowed out, cold, still crawling toward the last warmth they remember. They don't hate you. They want what you have. One wave carries your own ship's insignia.
The seams run dry
Every deposit you mine thins out and dies. Standing still starves the factory, so the light can never sit still either — the game is always pushing you to carry the fire to the next seam, deeper into the dark.
The Survey
A game about thinking should let you think. Pause and the world waits, the plan comes up, your turrets' reach is drawn as rings — and every gun with an empty magazine floods red.
An island of light in a dark map
The ship on the ice, the ember burning at its heart, and the fog of the unexplored map closing in from the left — everything past your light is dark until you carry the fire to it. In-engine, from the current build.
The novella is the fuse. The game is the bang.
FOURTEEN is the first book: the fall and the founding, told by Vela — the fourteen who came down on this rock, lit the ember, and built the outpost. It ends the exact morning Cosmic Ember begins. Read it first and you play the game knowing every name on the wall.
It's being serialised a chapter at a time. When a wave comes out of the dark wearing your own ship's insignia, you'll know whose it was.
Where it's at
Playable internal build — the world, the light, the economy and the incursions run, and the nine-chapter map is laid out with the story written into the ground. Art and audio are in progress. No date; it's done when it's good.
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Cosmic Sloths is live, free and in its seventh season — and it's where this whole universe started.