Sketchy's Contract Loot planets, survive the night

Up to eight players share one contract, and the jobs split naturally: someone mines, someone fights, someone hauls the heavy stuff back to the ship. You can revive fallen friends instead of leaving them to spectate, so a bad encounter rarely ends the run for everyone. The planets are hand-built rather than random, which means after a few visits you start to know where the ore veins and locked doors are, and the group argues about routes instead of wandering blind. It is a game that rewards shouting "behind you" over voice chat, and it punishes groups that split up carelessly.

Every contract asks for loot, and there is more than one way to get it. Dig up buried treasure, mine ore and harvest herbs with a single click, search buildings for scattered crates, or hunt the local wildlife and carry the corpses home. Some kills are too heavy to lift until you shrink them down first. The map is divided into Security Levels, and access crates hold the codes that unlock the next tier, where the loot gets more valuable and the security gets less friendly. Whether you play it as a mining trip or a safari is up to the group.

At 21:00 the crew votes: leave the planet safe, or stay until morning. Staying means more hours to explore, access to loot that only appears at night, and enemies far deadlier than anything you met in daylight. It is the game's best risk-and-reward lever, and the reason a routine contract can turn into a horror story in one vote. If you have ever watched a friend get snatched while you waddled away pretending not to have heard anything, this is where that happens.

Between contracts you run a burger shop, and it is more than a joke. Restock its shelves with certain loot to unlock perks: cooking burgers that heal you to full plus regeneration and a damage boost, brewing coffee, and a Black Market vendor who appears on random planets selling pricey, powerful gear. The catch is that aliens eat there too, nibbling your stock while you are out working.