Shortest Trip To Earth (v1.2.11 & DLC)

A battered starship becomes your only shelter in a hostile, unknowable galaxy where every jump can turn into a disaster. Shortest Trip to Earth is a hard-edged roguelike space simulator that mixes the tense resource management of FTL with a more chaotic, gruesome approach to shipboard survival. Its universe is full of strange civilizations, lethal anomalies, scavenging opportunities, and decisions that rarely offer a clean outcome. The mood stays bleak and unpredictable, with failure often arriving through a chain of small mistakes rather than one obvious bad fight.

Piloting a ship means charting routes across procedurally arranged sectors while balancing fuel, hull integrity, power, crew health, weapons, and supplies. Encounters present choices that can win valuable equipment, create new enemies, injure specialists, or permanently alter the run, so reading risks matters as much as firing guns. Battles unfold in real time, requiring players to target enemy systems, manage shields and weapon cooldowns, and react when boarding parties breach the hull. Intruders can tear through rooms, kill crew members, and force desperate defensive actions, while damaged systems need attention before the entire vessel becomes helpless. Different ships encourage distinct strategies, whether that means relying on durable defenses, heavy firepower, drones, or a more flexible crew setup.

What separates it from many space roguelikes is its willingness to make combat feel physically messy: rooms become battlegrounds, crew losses hurt, and even a victorious encounter may leave the ship barely functional. The art leans into detailed, grimy science fiction, giving aliens, weapons, and ship interiors a harsh industrial character rather than a clean futuristic sheen. Randomized maps and event chains give each attempt a different rhythm, although the unforgiving systems reward patience and repeated runs more than casual experimentation. Fans of FTL, Teleglitch, or punishing management-driven roguelikes find a deeper, rougher alternative here, while newcomers should expect a steep learning curve and accept that early catastrophes are part of learning to survive.