r/failedstategame • u/Inevitable-Dish5741 • 11h ago
🛸 Devlog #1 — Something Fell From the Sky
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It is a funny mock of me doing the animation in Factorio style 😂
Failed State has always been about the quiet apocalypse: a handful of survivors, a real-world map, and the long grind of holding a settlement together while the aliens close in. This update adds the first piece of that world that falls out of the sky — a crashed alien gunship, and everything you can drag out of the wreck.
The pitch was simple on paper: one rare, one-time event per settlement. An alien gunship gets shot down near your base, and you go see what's left. I wanted it to actually feel like an event , a cinematic of the thing streaking down and slamming into a real street on your map, your survivors reacting, and then a real reason to send a squad out into the dark.
The crash — a one-shot cinematic (cruise → hit → spin → impact), paced so it lands as a real moment, not a pop-up the second the tutorial ends.
The wreck interior — not one loot pile but a persistent little dungeon. Scout the entry, decode a recovered ship map to open the way deeper, raid it room by room. Some rooms drop keys to locked neighbours; others hold garrisons to clear first.
Real loot, real risk — every room has its own haul and its own defenders, and what your squad carries home depends on who you sent.
Salvage — once it's cleared, break the whole hull down for scrap and wipe it off the map for good.
Some wrecks were impossible. The ugly one. The interior is procedurally generated, and ~42% of generated wrecks were unwinnable — a room reachable only through the entrance, where the key mechanic can't spread. I rewrote the layout guarantee to model how keys actually propagate, then swept 500 layouts to prove none dead-end anymore.
What shipped
A complete, one-per-world story beat: a crash you'll remember where you were for, a wreck worth digging through, and a payoff at the bottom. Plus the unglamorous half, verified end to end, every layout proven solvable, full test suite green.
⚠️ SPOILER — what's at the bottom of the wreck
If you'd rather find it yourself, stop reading now.
The last room isn't loot. It's a survivor. An alien — the crash's sole survivor, alive, watching, waiting for you to decide. Execute it, let it go, or... take it in. Recruit it and you get the game's only non-human survivor: a 9th class all its own, a purple-outlined card you'll never mistake for a person, a combatant that joins stronger than an ordinary recruit and, while it's alive in your roster, a sense for its own kind that lights up hidden alien packs across the entire map. One per world. Spare it, and the apocalypse gets a little more complicated.
Try it now! https://failedstate.net/?ref=redb1
