The headline is a bit on the elongated side but it’s an accurate description of Boxelware’s Avorion. The game truly is a sandbox space simulator that allows you to create your very own space ships, space stations, and space fleets.

The independent developers hailing from out of Erlangen, Germany, announced that Avorion has entered into Early Access on Steam. Gamers can currently pick up a digital copy of the procedural space sim from over on the Steam store for $17.99.

They don’t have plans on keeping the game in Early Access for very long. According to the Steam page they’re gunning for anywhere between six months up to a year; so either by middle to late 2017 or the early start of 2018 you should expect to see Avorion launching in full.

The game features the ability to craft your own ships as you attempt to build something powerful enough to investigate an anomaly at the center of the universe. There’s a trailer to showcase some of the combat, custom ships and the space stations that players will encounter as they attempt to complete the game.

I’m getting a few Starmade vibes from out of that.

Players will attempt to complete quests, take on bounty missions and even fight or work cooperatively with other players thanks to the online multiplayer mode.

Lead developer and founder of the game Konstantin Kronfeldner commented about Avorion in the press release, saying…

“We’re proud to have come such a long way” […] “I have been working on Avorion alone for over four years. After the Greenlight campaign a collegue from uni joined me and we managed to successfully fund a Kickstarter in May 2016. Since then we have been working hard to make Avorion a unique experience, with still a lot more to come. We and Avorion are still only at the beginning of our journey.”

The game is pretty tiny, only 4GB of RAM is required and a dual-core CPU. 600MB is necessary as far as hard drive space is concerned.

You can check the game out over on the Steam store page or wait a year or so for it to exit Early Access.