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Humanity has all but collapsed. It is up to the player to drag us back from the brink and rebuild.

  • Space combat - manual control fighter to fighter dogfighting, scales up to big ship broadside duels - in space!
  • Farming and mining on planet surfaces - players can build their own planetary bases for resource harvesting. City simulation style play.
  • Personal starbase construction - players can construct their own starbase to their own design. This becomes your home in space, and your centre for heavy zero-g manufacturing and research
  • Trading - dynamic local NPC markets, player to player global market
  • Dynamic NPC mission system - combat, trade (supply/demand), passenger transport, courier and salvage missions
  • Asteroid mining - manual control of ship and axial mining beam. Player and character skill based.
  • Research - blueprint fragments attainable from salvage missions allow the player to research forgotten and new ships and components, as well as enhancements to their buildings
  • Manufacturing - every ship, weapon and utility module in the game can be manufactured by players and sold or used to customise their ships (which can also be given a custom paint scheme)
  • Gas giant harvesting. (because sometimes you need things like hydrogen and oxygen!)
  • More than 200 billion solar systems (not a typo!). This is now live for exploration - we are now in the process of adding planetary settlement and starbase construction features to these new systems
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Beta Cast interview James Hicks in their sixth episode, covering a range of nerdy topics and getting down into the nitty gritty detail of how stars and planets are formed in Ascent.

The whole episode is highly entertaining and the Ascent section starts 28 minutes in.

Workinbeta.com

Players can now actually Colonize the outer planets!

Players can now actually Colonize the outer planets!

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This feature at last brings true Sandbox play to Ascent's insane 270,000,000,000 star system galaxy, allowing players to construct and populate cities...

Space Game Junkie interviews James Hicks

Space Game Junkie interviews James Hicks

News

Space Game Junkie interviews James Hicks in their latest podcast, and talk in depth about Ascent - The Space Game now that it has over 200 billion star...

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mason531
mason531 - - 39 comments

Hello mod developers i wanna ay thank you for all the work. I was wondering would it be cool if you make ships form movies and games like star wars, halo, Ender Games, and so on if you can that would be pretty cool thanks bro reply if you can

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mehtal
mehtal - - 2 comments

Tend to find this community is really defensive of itself.

They perceive themselves as the best community in their own opinion. They percieve the help system as adequate and routinely answer questions with "Read the wiki" which while better than the game docs, is still only intuitive to the experienced player.

As a player that played over 6 months, set up a colony, I concur that you can find new systems to name your own, but it is very discouraging to see how far players have to go, and how quick people are to want to stamp everything with a name. I never liked this aspect myself, I thought systems should only be named if they established an actual colony thus making the game of exploring something and setting up first the imperative, not simply warping to as many as you can.

That said, given this is how people did it, I too just warped around a lot to get my name on many systems for no good reason.

The mining of asteroids is alright, its interactive, but yeah I suppose it is a grind. the star bases are a mess, too many rings, you need spreadsheets to figure things out for sure ( almost worse than eve lol).

The gameplay is worth a few hours distraction but I too got bored and left, now waiting on star citizen myself, maybe elite dangerous.

Cheers

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Guest
Guest - - 689,312 comments

Well, when I was a new player, I also found things like "read the wiki" super annoying, but ive noticed that people rarely say that anymore, most of the ones who did stopped or became inactive.

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Slashin8r
Slashin8r - - 1 comments

We really only say to read the wiki if it is easier explained there than in chat. The wiki also has a lot of other good information as well so becoming familiar with it is very useful.

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IdeoPraxist
IdeoPraxist - - 1 comments

Your point-of-view of a defensive community comes from your review of the game. It seems you haven't really played Ascent.

Those systems that become stamped with the explorers name can have the name changed once a colony is established. There are also billions of unnamed stars. I sense you wanted your own name where others have explored in a convenient location of your own choosing. There are players like myself that love exploring space. Currently, I scout of potential asteroid belts so the mining guild have opportune locations to discover the rare resource Promethium in order for them to construct materials for the jump gates. The mechanic to 'stamp' names on stars is wonderful, but those that want to build up a star system, the name can be changed to the star system builder. You can make it your own.

Spreadsheets worse than Eve-Online? This convinced me to write this response to your biased, inexperienced review of Ascent. Eve-Online is the master spreadsheet sim and nothing comes close. There is enough complexity in Ascent for the need of spreadsheet analysis, which is great! Some science has been implemented into the game, so knowledge of soil samples and mineral yields become important.

Remember, this is a tiny Indie game. I can see why Elite and Star Citizen is more appealing: more money, more players, more devs. Hopefully we will see you back in Ascent.

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mehtal
mehtal - - 2 comments

no. I really have played ascent. but...as I said. very defensive community.

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Guest
Guest - - 689,312 comments

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bhoadley2012
bhoadley2012 - - 3 comments

To anyone who's put any effort beyond the tutorial and the core 9 worlds you can be certain there are 200 billion + systems out there. What you see in the initial screen is the first sector. Sure people have explored those and many surrounding sectors to death, but there are thousands more out there within a short hyperjump for you to explore and people don't own what they discover they just get their name on it as the discoverer. It's up to you to put down your mark and claim your deed.

People can ask for help and their questions get answered fairly quickly and the wiki was completely written by the player base and extremely helpful to new players. The player base is one of the best if not the best communities i've been in and i've been playing mmo's since I robbed people out side the bank in UO.

There's only one developer, so that's the drawback, but it's an indie mmo. Development is slow, 1 person can only do so much, but there are regular well thought out updates including major updates like player colonies, star bases, combat enhancement, new player enhancement (tutorials). I've seen a lot of change just since June when I started.

I look forward to outer star bases coming soon and npc's you can talk to and cultivate in your domes. Eventually we'll get some smuggling and pvp and all the fun stuff....I can't wait...
The kickstarter did well, fully funded, soon we'll have some more/bigger ships, terraforming and alot of other fun stuff. It's well worth the price 3 bucks a month for premium and 10 bucks for the client than in eve and I don't fall asleep mining.

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Guest
Guest - - 689,312 comments

As someone that paid for a bit of premium. I tried the game, but found it lacking. It is a constant grind for minerals or credits to buy the next thing for minerals. exploration is really not possible when you start, nor for some time after. the small player base has some clearly defined cliques that you are either a part of...or not. You will certainly know when your not, I found myself joining one simply to not fall in the bad graces as those who didn't. In the end I left out of boredom from the grind, and a community that can't seem to resolve drama, instead they sweep it under the rug and promote players making 'good impressions' to get more players. I don't enjoy drama but be real and open not trying to put up false pretences. I also enjoy the concept of the game, but 200 billion stars is not what you get...you get a very small number, already explored by the vet players, and travelling further at their indulgence.

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bhoadley2012
bhoadley2012 - - 3 comments

Can i have some of what ur smokin'?

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