Spaceship building in sci-fi games has turned into something players can disappear into for hours without noticing. What separates these games from the usual “pick a ship and go” approach is the freedom they provide. A small starter vessel can grow into a strange, brilliant machine shaped by dozens of trial-and-error builds. A player might shift engines around to fix drifting, add new generators to manage hungry weapons, or rearrange the whole interior so power and oxygen actually reach every room.
The 10 Best Spaceship Building Games
There are no shortage of spaceship builders in the gaming sphere, and these 10 games offer a variety of casual and challenging gameplay for everyone.
Some of these games even expect players to think like an engineer, checking heat, mass, cargo flow, or crew needs before heading into space. It becomes almost like a part-time job, and many people end up loving the work far more than expected.
Avorion
Block-By-Block Starship Construction
- Players build ships from modular blocks.
- Ships can be scaled and upgraded as play progresses.
In Avorion, every single ship begins as a pile of modular blocks, and the fun comes from shaping those blocks into something that actually behaves well in space. A pilot might stretch the hull into a long, elegant spear, or stack thick armor plates around a chunky battle cruiser. Inside that hull, rooms, generators, cargo spaces, and system modules are all placed one piece at a time. Because everything is physically connected, each ship handles differently depending on how it’s built. Too much weight on one side makes it sluggish. Too little armor in the wrong place turns into a glaring weakness.
As players explore, they find better materials, stronger turrets, and more advanced systems, and that’s when the tinkering starts all over again. A tiny early-game craft might eventually evolve into a towering capital ship bristling with weapon hardpoints and shield modules. Players can even save sections they’re proud of, like a perfect wing, a reliable engine cluster, or a decorative bridge tower, and drop those designs into future ships without the hassle of assembling them from scratch again.
Space Engineers
Hands-On Voxel Engineering In Space
- Shipbuilding is voxel/block-based with distinct small and large grids.
- Functional customization (power networks, conveyors, gyros, landing gear, weapons) is as important as looks.
To build a spaceship in Space Engineers, players have to pick either a small grid or a large grid as the skeleton, then snap blocks together one at a time to create armor plates, cockpits, thrusters, reactors, and everything in between. The choice of grid size changes what the ship can do and how it’s built. For instance, small grids let players craft tight, detailed spacecraft while large grids support hulking interplanetary vessels and stations.
The coolest thing about customizing ships in Space Engineers is how physical everything feels. A ship that’s too heavy will crawl off the ground. A ship with poor thrust placement will wobble or spin during flight. A ship with bad conveyor routing will struggle to reload weapons or move resources. Players end up creating entire internal frameworks like ventilation shafts, fuel lines, and even maintenance hallways because the game treats ships like real machines, not simple models.
Cosmoteer: Starship Architect & Commander
Modular Ship Design With Full Internal Layouts
- Ship design is the core loop of the game.
- Players lay out rooms and place modules (weapons, engines, shields, crew spaces) on a grid, and internal layout directly affects combat flow.
Instead of just slapping pieces on the outside of a ship, Cosmoteer players have to shape the interior first. Rooms for crew, hallways for movement, power nodes, ammo storage, and shield generators all have to fit in smart places. A sloppy layout means the crew runs around like headless chickens during a fight, which turns even the strongest ship into scrap metal.
Weapons sit on the exterior, but their placement matters because firing arcs and power routes affect how efficiently each ship fights. Cosmoteer is a ship customizer designed for people who love tuning details until every tiny part clicks. Even a single door or corridor can make or break a design, which is why players spend hours perfecting their ships.
Kerbal Space Program (KSP)
Rocket And Spacecraft Building
- Craft construction happens in the VAB/SPH.
- Customization is engineering-first rather than purely cosmetic.
If there’s any sci-fi game that gives players the feeling of running a tiny aerospace firm, it's Kerbal Space Program. In the Vehicle Assembly Building, players stack functional parts like engines, fuel tanks, command pods, decouplers, fins, and science gear, and every choice changes how the craft will behave from launch to splashdown.
Because Kerbal models its physics system after believable orbital mechanics, customization demands real planning, math-ish thinking, and lots of hands-on tinkering. Players rarely stop at a single functional rocket; they refine engine mixes, tweak staging, rebalance fuel lines, and rework aerodynamics until the craft performs exactly as intended.
Starfield
Customizable Hulls, Bays, And Ship Roles
- Built around reshaping a ship until it feels personal, whether it becomes a traveler, a fighter, or a freighter.
- Each piece added or removed changes the ship’s role, style, and performance in noticeable ways.
Starfield pushes ship customization in a more cinematic direction, but the depth can still swallow a player’s entire evening. Everything is modular, from the cockpits to the engines, grav drives, fuel tanks, cargo bays, weapon types, structural hull pieces, and even decorative add-ons. Some players may spend more time rotating parts, adjusting symmetry, and rearranging sections than actually flying.
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Once the ship is “perfect,” the game makes that perfection temporary. As new parts unlock, the old design starts feeling outdated, and players may just decide to tear the whole thing apart to rebuild it from scratch. Starfield doesn’t force min-maxing, but anyone who wants a ship that flies well, fights well, and still looks cool ends up redesigning it constantly.
PULSAR: Lost Colony
Crew-Focused Systems And Upgradable Ship Modules
- The ship serves as a shared project where upgrades and system setups decide how well the crew can operate.
- Players adjust stations and ship parts to improve combat ability, travel speed, and day-to-day performance.
PULSAR takes a different customization approach from most spaceship games on this list. Instead of letting players build a ship piece by piece, it’s more about customizing the internal systems that drive the ship’s performance. Most ships come with component slots for reactors, shields, weapons, thrusters, and specialty modules, and each one can be swapped for variants with different stats and quirks.
Because the ship’s systems interact, a small swap can cascade into more work. Players may replace a reactor for more output, only to discover the new reactor generates extra heat that forces them to change coolers, adjust power routing, or alter shield settings. Crew roles amplify this, as engineers, weapons officers, and pilots all influence how a given fit performs in practice, which pushes teams to iterate fits after every run.
EVE Online
Builds Its Entire Combat And Exploration Around Careful Ship Fitting
- The heart of the game lies in fitting ships so they match a specific combat or support role.
- A ship’s entire identity comes from modules and rigs chosen by the player, shaping how it behaves in the wider universe.
There are over 100 ships in EVE Online, and they all have a set of slots, which can be high, mid, low, and rig slots, plus strict limits on CPU and powergrid. As such, building a single ship can take hours or even days of planning, tweaking, and experimenting before it even touches space.
EVE Online is a spacecraft game that lets players act as captains and make their own choices, but the thing is, every choice affects every other choice. A new weapon might use too much power, forcing the pilot to downgrade a shield module. A propulsion upgrade might squeeze out CPU resources, forcing a change in tracking enhancers. It's a constant push and pull of ship design that demands precision and compromise to get the best ship possible off the ground.
Elite: Dangerous
Allows Players To Tune Performance By Swapping And Engineering Every Major Module
- Encourages swapping ship modules to match different goals, such as exploration, trading, or combat.
- Small changes in parts can transform how the ship flies, fights, and survives long journeys.
Since just about every vessel in Elite: Dangerous can be outfitted with new internal modules, hardpoints, utilities, engines, and frameshift drives, it seems like a pretty straightforward game on the surface. Players might think they just have to pick the part, install it, and fly away, but modules come in different classes and grades, each affecting weight, power draw, performance, and heat output. A ship can easily break itself if the chosen parts exceed its power plant’s limits.
Elite’s physics and flight model are so sensitive that tiny changes can transform the ship’s handling. Someone might spend two hours making a long-range exploration build and another two hours shaving off unnecessary weight to squeeze out one more light-year.
Empyrion: Galactic Survival
Total Freedom To Construct Huge, Fully Walkable Starships
- Players build huge, walkable ships where exterior design and interior layout both matter.
- Every chamber, system, and device is placed by hand, giving each ship a unique personality and purpose.
Players start building in Empyrion: Galactic Survival with a starter block and then sculpt hulls out of individual blocks, fitting cockpits, generators, fuel tanks, thrusters, and weapons into a 3D grid until the ship looks and functions just right. Because the game uses block-based construction, interior layout matters as much as outer shape: reactors and fuel tanks need room, cargo and constructors have to be placed for access, and thrusters must be positioned so that the craft actually moves the way the builder intends.
Balancing performance becomes a full-time hobby when builders juggle weight, thrust, fuel, and firing arcs. Thruster placement and the ship’s center of mass decide whether a vessel flies straight or spins like a top, so adjustments to armor or cargo often force a cascade of tweaks to engines and control systems.
Star Citizen
Detailed Component Management Where Every System Affects How A Ship Behaves
- Build components that affect power, shields, weapons, and onboard tools.
- Players can tune and upgrade these parts to change how the ship performs in travel, combat, and exploration.
Star Citizen kind of sits at the opposite end of the spectrum from block builders. Ships come with detailed interiors, predefined shapes, and specific component slots, but customization still runs surprisingly deep. Basically, everything that makes a ship fly well in Star Citizen, from the shields to the power plants, coolers, quantum drives, thrusters, weapons, and even computers, can be swapped out for gear with different stats and behaviors.
A ship can be tuned for stealth, heat efficiency, burst damage, durability, or long-range travel, depending on the parts installed. Cosmetic customization is also a large part of the game, with paint schemes, liveries, and planned interior personalization tools adding some individual flavor to each spacecraft.
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