Starwake — Coming Soon

Starwake is a large-scale sci-fi idle/active strategy game built entirely inside World of Warcraft.

Explore a procedural galaxy, build stations and moon bases, command specialized fleets, trade across changing markets, pilot your Fighter in active sorties, develop your flagship, interact with factions, and grow a small operation into a sprawling interstellar network — whether you're actively at the controls or letting your infrastructure work in the background.

Starwake is currently in active development. Public beta files are coming later in development.

✨ Features

• 🌌 Procedural Galaxy — Explore star systems filled with planets, moons, belts, stations, anomalies, resources, and discoveries.
• 🪐 Gamified Orbital Physics — Navigate local space using gravity, orbital capture, transfers, burns, and gravitational influence rather than simply clicking destinations.
• 🚀 Active Navigation — Personally maneuver your flagship through local systems and plot interstellar travel across the galaxy.
• 🛸 Fighter Gameplay — Multiple Fighter frames with specialized roles, progression, armaments, and hands-on sorties.
• ⛏️ Extraction & Industry — Actively mine asteroid belts and orbital deposits, then build infrastructure that continues producing over time.
• 🏗️ Stations & Moon Bases — Construct permanent installations, develop specialized facilities, and expand your economic footprint.
• 🚚 Fleet Management — Build and develop autonomous mining, trade, botanical, survey, salvage, and support vessels.
• 💰 Dynamic Economy — Buy, sell, stockpile, automate trade, respond to market opportunities, and build long-term economic power.
• 📋 Operations — Take on combat, exploration, extraction, trade, infrastructure, and faction-driven objectives.
• 🤝 Factions & Communications — Build relationships, receive offers and distress calls, and watch the galaxy react to your choices.
• 📖 Full In-Game Guide & Wiki — Learn Starwake's mechanics, systems, terminology, progression, and gameplay without leaving World of Warcraft.
• 🏆 Persistent Progression — Relics, milestones, upgrades, discoveries, fleet experience, infrastructure, and long-term statistics persist between sessions.
• ⚡ Play Your Way — Jump into active gameplay when you want something hands-on, or develop systems that continue generating progress while you focus on World of Warcraft.

🌌 A Procedural Galaxy

Starwake is built around a persistent procedural galaxy rather than a fixed collection of handcrafted destinations.

Systems can vary in tier, layout, resources, celestial bodies, stations, belts, anomalies, and economic opportunities. Exploration gradually reveals more of the galaxy, and what you discover becomes part of your persistent game state.

The galaxy is designed to feel like a place that exists beyond the current screen. Fleets travel between systems, civilian traffic moves through space, markets differ from one location to another, infrastructure remains where you built it, and new discoveries create reasons to keep pushing farther outward.

The goal is not simply to unlock a map.

It is to gradually build a network across it.

📈 An Economy That Grows With You

Starwake's economy is designed to scale alongside your expansion rather than remaining frozen at early-game values.

As you explore farther, discover higher-tier systems, establish stations and moon bases, expand your fleet, complete Operations, and build a larger commercial network, the galaxy's economic scale grows with you. Markets, trade opportunities, rewards, and resource values evolve so they remain meaningful as your interstellar operation becomes more powerful.

Different systems still maintain their own local conditions, resource availability, and temporary market opportunities, so expansion is about more than simply making the numbers bigger — where you operate continues to matter.

Starwake also uses familiar World of Warcraft materials and themes throughout its economy to help the game feel naturally nested inside WoW. Ores, herbs, gems, magical materials, and other recognizable resources are repurposed as part of Starwake's economic and industrial systems, giving the galaxy a connection to the world you're already playing in.

This is strictly a thematic and immersive connection. Starwake does not attempt to invent, rewrite, or extend Warcraft lore, nor does it claim that its galaxy, factions, technology, or events are canon. It simply uses familiar WoW concepts where they fit so the game feels at home inside the client rather than disconnected from it.

The economy responds to your long-term progression, not how many Credits or materials happen to be sitting in your inventory at that moment. Spending heavily on a new station, fleet upgrade, or infrastructure project does not suddenly make the galaxy decide you've become poor again.

The farther you reach, the larger the economy becomes around you.

⚡ Play Your Way

Starwake is designed around a mix of idle progression, active strategy, and hands-on gameplay.

You can spend time actively flying sorties, mining asteroid belts, navigating systems, completing Operations, managing markets, or making strategic decisions about your fleet and infrastructure.

Or you can let the systems you've built do their jobs while you raid, quest, farm, PvP, or simply play World of Warcraft.

Your stations produce. Your fleets work. Trade continues. Infrastructure contributes. Long-term systems keep moving forward without demanding your constant attention.

Active play is intended to be rewarding without making passive progression feel pointless, and passive progression is useful without replacing the parts of the game you may want to control personally.

Play actively when you want to. Build intelligently so you don't have to.

🎮 Active Gameplay & Orbital Physics

Starwake's active modes are intended to feel like actual gameplay, not progress bars that happen to require clicking.

Local navigation uses a gamified orbital model where planets, moons, velocity, gravity, orbital stability, burns, and capture all matter. You can use gravity to shape movement through a system, establish orbits around celestial bodies, and transfer between local destinations rather than simply teleporting from node to node.

When you want something more hands-on, Starwake also includes dedicated active modes with their own mechanics:

• 🪨 Belt Sorties — Directly pilot your Fighter through asteroid fields using directional thrust, mouse-facing flight, cutters, tractor systems, cargo recovery, and specialized Fighter frames.
• 🪐 Orbital Operations — Hold stable planetary orbits while actively targeting and recovering known deposits.
• ⚔️ Combat Sorties — Pilot the Vindicator directly through hostile encounters using weapons, maneuvering, Tractor Shear, formation disruption, Resonance, Overdrive, and specialized combat objectives.
• 🚀 Local Navigation — Control your flagship through a living system where momentum, gravity, orbital capture, and celestial positioning all influence how you move.

These systems sit alongside Starwake's passive progression instead of replacing it, giving you reasons to personally take the controls when you want a more active session.

📖 Built-In Guide & Wiki

Starwake contains a full in-game guide and reference system designed to keep the player inside the game rather than constantly sending them to an external website.

The Guide documents Starwake's major systems, active gameplay mechanics, progression, resources, economy, navigation, infrastructure, fleet operations, Fighter systems, and other concepts as they become relevant.

Combined with contextual tooltips throughout the interface, the goal is for players to be able to answer "What is this?", "Why can't I do this?", and "How does this work?" without needing a browser open beside WoW.

As Starwake grows, the in-game Guide grows with it.

🎨 UX / UI Philosophy

Starwake is designed to feel like a game interface, not a spreadsheet wearing a space-themed skin.

Information follows consistent visual identities for resources, Credits, factions, systems, ship roles, and gameplay states. Tooltips explain systems and unavailable actions, important information is surfaced where it is actually needed, and the interface is continually refined to reduce unnecessary clicks, clutter, and ambiguity.

Active gameplay, management, idle systems, and the built-in Guide all share the same visual language so moving between them feels natural.

The goal is simple:

Deep systems without making the player fight the UI.

⚡ Performance

Starwake has been built from the beginning with WoW performance in mind.

Even though the addon maintains a persistent galaxy, fleets, stations, markets, traffic, production systems, active gameplay modes, and long-term progression, it is designed to have an extremely small impact on normal World of Warcraft gameplay.

Performance-focused measures include:

• ⚙️ Throttled and event-driven updates instead of constantly hammering every system every frame.
• 💤 Constant-cost offline simulation rather than replaying thousands of missed simulation ticks when you log in.
• 📦 Aggregate passive production calculations for long-running systems.
• 🚫 Active and discrete gameplay systems do not secretly replay while you are offline.
• 🎯 Rendering and active simulation are limited to the systems and views that actually need them.
• 🧪 Ongoing profiling and diagnostic tooling are built directly into development.

The goal is for Starwake to remain buttery smooth alongside normal World of Warcraft gameplay, despite the amount of strategy and simulation happening behind the scenes.

🛰️ Development Status

Starwake is currently being developed and tested specifically for The Burning Crusade Anniversary version of World of Warcraft.

Focusing development on a single WoW client first allows the core game, UI, simulation, persistence, and performance systems to be stabilized against one consistent API environment before expanding compatibility.

After Starwake's initial release, ports are planned for both:

• Retail World of Warcraft
• Classic World of Warcraft

There is no release date to announce yet. Development is progressing quickly, and the current target is to have Starwake ready around Phase 4 of TBC Anniversary, but that remains a development goal rather than a promised release date.

The current focus is finishing major active and passive gameplay systems, refining progression and economy behavior, completing the remaining visual/sound assets and preparing the addon for its first public beta.

Public Beta — Coming Soon