What Riftborne is
Riftborne is a real time grand strategy game played through a terminal interface. You start with a single base and grow it into an interstellar power: colonize worlds, build fleets, set up supply lines, and manage production, storage and logistics across your colonies. The galaxy runs in real time and keeps developing whether you are actively acting or not, so campaigns stretch over days, weeks or even months. Small choices pile up — a supply problem can turn into a military crisis, and a minor rival can become a major power while you plan something else. The interface is deliberately dense and text driven, built to show a lot of strategic information at once rather than flashy visuals.
How a group plays it together
You can play a solo campaign at your own pace, host a private server locally, online or through SSH, or join the regularly scheduled official multiplayer galaxies. In those official galaxies, factions and up to 120 commanders compete inside the same persistent universe. Between the co-op and PvP sides of things, you can coordinate with allies on production, trade routes and defensive networks, or work against rivals through raids, espionage and sabotage. Diplomacy and economic pressure matter as much as fleets: negotiate with other powers, use markets and contracts, and hire galactic operatives against targets where open war would cost too much. Alliances, rivalries and economic dependencies develop over time inside the campaign, and the galaxy keeps records through campaign histories, rankings, medals and long term progression.
Before you start
This is a slow-burn game made for players who enjoy learning interconnected systems and watching early decisions produce consequences much later. Expect to spend time on logistics, storage and economy, not just combat — a successful empire depends on more than military strength. Enemy powers adapt to your behavior, including patterns you established in previous saves, and each campaign generates a procedural galaxy with different strategic geography, so past experience helps but the map will not repeat exactly. Because campaigns run in real time over long stretches, plan for check-ins rather than single long sessions, and be ready to read a lot of text: the terminal interface is information heavy by design.