Space Station 14 is a free and open source multiplayer game about paranoia and chaos aboard a space station — a modern remake of the cult-classic Space Station 13. It is built by the Space Wizards Federation on their own C# engine, Robust Toolbox, and it has nothing to do with unlockable cars or a story campaign: every round a fresh crew spawns on a Nanotrasen station, is handed a job, and then has to survive itself.

Sessions are round-based and role-driven. You pick a role — captain, engineer, medical doctor, security officer, scientist, chef, botanist, janitor, bartender, clown, mime and dozens more — each with its own access, tools and responsibilities. The station around you is simulated rather than scripted: atmospherics, power, chemistry, medicine and engineering all behave, so a vented room, an overloaded grid or a badly mixed chemical can cascade into a station-wide emergency long before anyone shouts about it. The result is the game’s own tagline: disasters, enemies and incompetence conspiring to make each shift unique.

Because SS14 is a content pack loaded by a shared engine, the game is genuinely forkable and hostable. Anyone can run a dedicated server, ship a total conversion or build their own content pack, which is why the official servers sit alongside a long list of community ones with their own rules and maps. Development has been open and continuous since 2017 — code, content and assets live in public repositories, releases are cut regularly, and the whole project is written in the open on GitHub.

Key Features

• Round-based multiplayer roleplay — dozens of players share one station per round, each with a job and a personality; the story is whatever the crew does to each other.
• A simulated station, not a scripted level — atmospherics, power, chemistry, medicine, engineering and security are all modelled, so small mistakes compound into station-wide disasters.
• Dozens of distinct roles — from captain and head of security to chef, botanist, chaplain, clown and mime, each with unique equipment, access and duties.
• Antagonists and randomised events — some of the crew are not what they claim to be, and the game deliberately cultivates distrust and paranoia.
• A homegrown open source engine — Robust Toolbox, written in C# for the game, with a content-pack architecture that makes forks, mods and total conversions first-class.
• Host it yourself — the dedicated server runs wherever the client does, so community servers and private rounds with friends are fully supported.
• Free to play, no store needed — available free on Steam and as a standalone download from the official site; no purchase, account or launcher is required.
• Cross-platform multiplayer — Windows, Linux and macOS clients play together on the same servers.
• Actively developed in the open — public since 2017, with commits landing daily and releases tagged continuously (the current build is v2026.07.27.1).

Why Use Space Station 14?

SS14 is one of the very few free games where the interesting content is other people rather than levels: two rounds of the same map can be a quiet shift of cooking and chemistry and then a full-station evacuation, because the systems interact and the crew decides what happens. Nothing is gated behind a store, the code and content are public, and the same download works on Linux, Windows and macOS. If you have ever wanted a multiplayer simulation with real depth — or wanted to host and mod one — it is an unusually complete package to get for free.

Use Cases

• Play long, round-based multiplayer sessions with a persistent crew of friends on an official or community server.
• Run your own dedicated server with custom rules, maps or a total conversion, using the same engine the official game ships on.
• Learn from a mature open source game codebase — a complete C# engine plus gameplay content, all public on GitHub.
• Contribute art, maps, roles or code to an actively developed project that accepts community pull requests.
• Enjoy a deep multiplayer sim on low-spec Linux, Windows or macOS hardware without buying or installing anything closed.

Platforms

Linux · Windows · macOS. Clients for all three platforms play together on the same servers, and the dedicated server runs on the same operating systems. The game is distributed free on Steam and as a standalone download from the official site.

Licence

Free and open source: the source code is released under the MIT licence (LICENSE.TXT in the repository). Artwork, sound and other assets follow the project’s own Robust Generic Attribution scheme, which is documented alongside the source.

Website

spacestation14.com · source code (GitHub) · documentation

Similar in the directory

• Hypersomnia — another free and open source top-down multiplayer game in the same pixel-art perspective, with a built-in server you can host yourself.
• Veloren — open source multiplayer world with community-run servers, for players who want the shared-server multiplayer experience without a store.