Later today Lightspeed Frontier will unlock for the general public on Steam’s Early Access platform. Crowdwork Studios and Riveted Games’ new sci-fi space sim sees players creating their own ship and captaining it through the known galaxy and beyond.

The concept of Lightspeed Frontier centers around exploring the universe, making trades, battling space pirates, influencing the economy and building your own modular ship from a variety of customizable parts.

There’s a pretty snazzy trailer they put together, showcasing the game’s travel, combat, customization and cargo hauling system. It’s an older trailer, but it conveys the spirit of the game’s mechanics and features quite nicely, summed up within the span of just a minute and a half.

The sandbox-style gameplay reminds me of Starmade. There’s even some collision physics involved so if you plan on making a ship designed to ram and smash opponents into pieces, you can do that.

I can imagine a lot of people during Early Access will probably be compelled to recreate some classic spaceships like the U.S.S. Enterprise or the Voyager.

You can create ships of varying sizes and types as well. I’m curious how well Lightspeed Frontier will do now that it’s competing against Boxelware’s Avorion? That game also recently launched into Early Access and managed to garner quite the following. I’m sure many of the people who helped fund Lightspeed Frontier will put in some effort to spread the word, but the similarities between the two games could hamper its Early Access momentum out of the gate.

Nevertheless, having a quest-based single-player game with a procedural universe, various corporations to work for or rob, scavengers to pick up, programmers to abuse and space stations to trade with, there seems to be plenty to do in Lightspeed Frontier.

The game will unlock at some point today over on the Steam Early Access page.