Recently System Era had a Starseeker Beta from May 1st to May 5th, 2026. I received an email invitation which I happily accepted. In case you don’t know, System Era are the developers of Astroneer, a sandbox cooperative adventure game, when you as an Astroneer, land on Sylva, then follow a linear guided project list accessed through a mission interface. There are assigned objectives, and you receive items and/or blueprint unlocks for completion of these missions.
Starseeker also involves an Astroneer like player, and you are required to complete a short tutorial (during the beta) before you reach the multiplayer platform, where all the other players are also there. Once you have learned the basics of scanning, opening caches, jumping, sliding and using your terrain tool to dig up ground, spray water or throw items (or creatures), you are now ready to go on your first expedition.
Each expedition can be done solo or with up to four other players. In the main area, there are printers, fabricators, and item sashes, where you can store the items you collect while on your expedition(s). Each expedition has (at time of the beta) a 30 minute limit, after which you run out of oxygen. You also have limited power, so doing too much can run down your battery and leave you stranded.
You arrive and leave the expedition the same way, via a globe shaped shuttle, that lands and drops a ladder, and which you use to get into and out of the shuttle. There is a map and the ability to scan for materials and resources, as well as scrap piles and points of interest. Before you go on an expedition, you’ll want to activate from one to three objectives, which are fetch quests that require you to do a variety of tasks. Thankfully, your tasks are shown in the upper right and you can see as you complete each subtask, the list updates in realtime as you complete each one. Once you complete each task, you are told to return to your shuttle and to go collect your reward.
When you get back, you are told to visit one of three entities - Captain Jupiter, Science Officer Jessandra, and a Bot named Jam-RX. When you interact with them, each has three tabs, Task Board, Reputation, and Trade. You visit them to receive your rewards for your completed tasks, and you also receive reputation points which, when enough are collected, your reputation rank increases and unlocks new tasks to be completed by each of these entities. Each of them have different purposes, for example Captain Jupiter asks you to complete some basic resource collection, then rewards you with the ability to create Medi-Mash, which heals you. These can also be crafted at a fabricator once you have unlocked the recipe - of which there are two, one with resin, and another with compound. The recipe also requires you to spend bytes, which are also earned along with your rewards when completing the tasks and subtasks.
Trade is how you can obtain resources without collecting them, and some are not achievable in any other way. You get resources in this way by turning in scrap for other resources, or convert different parts of plants for organic resources, or parts of animals and/or ship components (space parts, baubles, etc) for resources.
Around the main area, there are also blue crew members (Ensigns), which usually just show text or say something when interacted with, to either give you a funny comment, a hint, or a clue about what to do next, or in one case, Ensign Muriel, gives you quests just like the other three entities. Ensign Muriel is found as soon as you enter the main area (space portal).
It was really fun to see all the players running around checking out the main area, or interacting with each other by using emotes, or party poppers, or showing off their customized appearance. You have vending machine looking customization machines, where you can interact with it and change your appearance with different suits, helmets, attachments and emotes. For the beta, initially color was the only option to customize, but as the beta went on, more customization was unlocked, like adding wings to your suit, or using new suit palettes with cooler effects that just an accent color change.
Each day, System Era emailed a survey to each beta tester, where we could provide our feedback and ratings about the features and game play that we experienced during the beta. There were a few times where the game would randomly disconnect me, but then would usually reload me into the starting screen, and usually I would not have lost any items that were in my backpack at the time of disconnection. So while it wasn’t without issues, the system did recover well, in my opinion.
–GAM3RGAWD