A roguelike in space

In an unexplored sector of space humanity is trying to establish a permanent presence. Megacorporations employ freelance prospectors to find exploitable resources and map unknown planets for them. The player commands one of those scoutships, trying to become filthy rich as a prospector.

More information to be found (soon) on the new Wiki Please help it grow!

Prospector now has its own forum. If you got questions or comments, thats propably a good place to post them. You can find it here: http://prospector.freeforums.org/index.php

Other News: Every Monday on 6:00 AM CET the source repository is updated. Since this update is automated, it is entirely possible that there are no changes, changes that don't work, debugging flags turned on and other things, but you can play with the latest and greatest version of Prospector! Detailed instructions on how to compile are on the way.

Want to support this project with a donation?

17. Jan 2012 - New version 0.2.4 released

• You can now join in NPCs space battles
• It's harder to make other ships follow you in spacebattles
• New System type: Rogue gas giant
• New Item: Hydrogen scoop (Improves gas giant scooping and collects fuel when in gas clouds)
• Further stacking the deck: very dangerous planets are now always in gasclouds
• Spaceships now have speed differences
• Tiles out of sight are now darkend
• Savegames and Highscore entries now have dates
• New command \Cs shows the current standing with the factions
• You can change the spacemap size in config
• All away team members now need armor to be on a hostile-environment planet without being damaged.
• New item: spacesuit (counts as armor and is dirt cheap (see above))
• Fixed a bug that overwrote current science officer with Tree
• Fixed a bug that allowed you to recruit more than your ship could carry
• Autoexplore now can go around planets

10. Oct 2011 - New Release 0.2.3a

• Eris-apollo interaction works now
• Inspecting the corpse of your opponent in the arena no longer affects your payout
• Fixed leveling & XP bugs
• Awayteam members grunt when they take damage
• some more minor bugs fixed

18. Sep 2011 - New Release 0.2.3

• 4 new artifacts
• Autopilot routefinding is now less reckless
• Autoexplore for more convenient planet mapping
• You know can fully customize your crew: No fixed slots anymore for officers and redshirts
• Additional officers can contribute in certain positions:

Pilot - This is a one person job, addtitional pilots don't help Gunner - Addtional gunners help as long as there are weapons for them to arm Science Officer - Addtional SOs help up to the max sensor rating of the ship Doctors - No limit The final rating is determined as follows: Each additonal officer adds his skill divided by his position. If you have 3 SOs its SO1/1+SO2/2+SO3/3 Fractions of a skill point get dropped

• You can now fire crew members or train them (Forcing another leveling roll for half standard wage)

6. Aug 2011 - New Release 0.2.2c

• new rumors about special planets
• you now can save the star-creatures with environmental problems
• game now actually reads savescumming option
• some cave entries were invisible in tiles mode
• special planets now get marked in tiles mode too
• some balancing
• Camo (including the artifact) and firing several weapons at once in space combat works now
• Some minor bugs fixed

0.2.2b

• Some bugfixes
• Linux version

0.2.2a

• Crewmembers express high morale now too
• New game at the casino
• Fixed some bugs

0.2.2

• You can now circumnavigate planets east to west
• Critters don't blame you anymore if someone else killed their friends
• 5 Easy Systems close to the starting station should make the early game easier
• Companies pay bonuses for certain milestones reached
• New PDF Manual
• Shouldnt crash anymore on doomed planet & with ship fire
• Firing weapons on a planets surface now generates heat, and causes reload time
• New unique planet
• Dying planet is now a semi special
• Improved Logbook and Autopilot for more comfy exploration of the universe
• New Item: Gas Giant Mining probe
• Some portals that were invisible now have the tiles they need
• Some bugs and glitches fixed

0.2.1

• New Tileset by Deon
• New events that can happen on small space stations
• Some bugs fixed

0.1.17

• 2 New semi-unique planets
• reading ctrl+ combinations finally works
• Enemy ships no longer fly into their own plasma streams (as often)
• And they even go towards you now, when they get you on their sensors!
• Stations buy undeliverable cargo
• Some bugs fixed

0.1.16

• New Items: Deep space probes
• Each ship gets some specific starting equipment (TT still gets 5 vets, nothing added there)
• redesigned diseases
• Intelligent critters now build castles too, not just pyramids
• Passengers hang around in bars
• Some UI improvements
• Some bugs fixed

Launching probes for fun and profit

0.1.15b

• Fixed some minor to major bugs
• New things in Dungeons
• Grenade launchers can be weak or powerful
• Endgame has been beefed up

0.1.15a

• Fixed some minor to major bugs
• Groundpenetrating radar now comes in 3 different qualities

New in 0.1.15

• 3 New types of crewmembers
• New Items
• New radio command
• Ship Designer allows you to create your own hulls
• Crewmembers voice their displeasure at your command
• Fixed biodata and some other bugs

New in 0.1.14

• Graphical Tiles (Almost for real this time)
• PPMMIHTML (Prettier Post Mortems Made in HTML)
• 3 New grenade types: Flash and 2 for stunning
• Maneuvering Jets no longer take up weapon turrets, but generate heat
• New Crew Augments
• New Item prefixes: Sturdy and Acidproof
• New Shop: Item Customizer
• Bones Files make it possible to run into the remnants of your former missions
• New stuff to sell: ID Tags
• sleeping critters now get marked with a pink z
• You can now order items in space station shops
• It's night in caves now
• Some minor and major bugs discovered and squished
• Added a list of babylon 5 ship names to feed to the autonaming routine. Just add the filename as a second line to your register file

Here are some gameplay videos:

Final Battle

Down the wrong wormhole

The last adventure of captain jerk

'Do you really want to drop the alien bomb?'

Trading 101 with horace bury pt1

Trading 101 with horace bury pt2

0.1.13 Ah well... it's less buggy than 0.1.12 in any case. Consider this a 0.1.13 Beta version.

• Random alien spacefaring races
• Better FOV algorithm
• changed humans from @ to H to avoid confusion with ships
• Fixed the killed upon landing by superspeeded monsters bug d
• Found and fixed some monster killing confusion
• I am fairly certain i found and fixed the "ghost-doctor" bug
• Some minor bugs discovered and squished

0.1.12a Savegames not compatible with 0.1.12

• prospector now checks for double bound keys in keybindings
• merchants now have traderoutes avoiding anomalies & gasclouds
• new possible action for critters
• fixed bug with generated stranded ships
• fixed some display glitches

0.1.12

• customizable tile & textsizes, should fit even the most exotic display now
• new retirement system
• redid postmortem
• a new anomaly type
• new item: All-terrain landing gear
• some attempts at balancing
• some medium to major bugs squished
• some UI improvements

0.1.11a

• Anomalies come now in 3 different types
• Fixed a bug in a radio command
• Fixed some display glitches
• Highscore counted pregenerated planets as discovered

0.1.11

• 3 new unique planets
• Space-time anomalies
• Double buffering
• Fixed a bug causing a crash after solving Omega Bioengineering quest
• Ted Rofes was paralyzed and respawned!
• Cephalopods now can swim, robots can fly even when in your awayteam
• Fixed one more stock market bug
• added Autofire(F) on planetsurfaces and walk command in space
• turned off message delay for damaged tile messages
• Mining station in distress is no longer a unique, but a event that can happen more than once
• inventory lists are now sorted by type
• you can now change the color of your awayteam and ship, by setting shipcolor and teamcolor in config.txt

0.1.10a: Bugfixes

• Fixed a bug in saving and loading (Shipweapon shops would not load)
• Fixed a bug in space combat critical hits
• Fixed post mortem unique planets list
• Fixed autoselling
• Fixed sickbay
• Fixed resources
• Buying augments for all now starts with the first redshirt (you need to do officers by hand)
• Armor is more effective now
• Fixed several minor bugs and glitches

Changes in 0.1.10

• 3 new alien artifacts
• 2 new ways to die
• 3 new goods to trade
• several new modules to add to your ship
• 1 new unique planet
• cosmetics: Tiles that require jetpacks or hoverplatforms to pass get a background color

Reptiles are now L(izards) to distinguish them from R(obots) Upper case Monsters have more HP, color depends on Armor, Red monsters have weapon>2 upped chance for gold/dark yellow monsters(still the strongest standard critters)

• Balancing: Asteroid mining yields more resources, Wormholes do less damage, Live animals get a bonus
• Fixed 2 Unique Planets
• Stock market bugs fixed
• Pirate refit is now buyable and actually works
• some item bugs & typos fixed
• forgot to add descriptions for the 5 new unique planets
• 4 of the new uniques could cause wierdness on the map. Fixed
• if your ship lands on critters it hurts them
• found a bunch of tiles that should have been shootable yet were not
• managed to fight savegame bloat a little

Above: Fighting off hordes of aliens in a cave

Changes in 0.1.9

• 6 Biotech augmentations to buy for your crew
• added Prefixes for weapons, armor and some misc equipment
• More resource variation
• Critters behave minorly more intelligent
• Random Critters get stored after generation (Allowing to do some neat new things with them)
• Comments to make the logbook a little more usefull
• You can now assigne favourite weapons to awayteam members
• toughness talent works now
• Fixed some bugs in quests
• a certain alien scoutship now displayes the correct statbox
• Fixed a bug in space rescue
• Audio alerts now work with aux. oxygen tanks too

Changes in 0.1.8d

• fixed a bug that made collecting quest rewards impossible
• fixed a displayglitch
• fixed a bug with plasma streams
• fixed comments
• The wrong ship was landing on the pirate planet
• fixed a bug that caused a crash when viewing shipstatus with too big an inventory
• some balancing attempts in space combat
• added anti ship mines
• oxygen tanks don't stack anymore as they were supposed to

Above: Exploring the famous micky craters

There were some rather critical bugs in 0.1.8b, so while i haven't caught them all i decided to put out a bugfix version anyway already. Here is what I caught so far:

Changes in 0.1.8c

• Fixed a Talent mixup
• Fixed Alien naming bug
• added some saveguards concerning item&monster buffer overflow
• fixed some pirate problems
• fixed a bug that could cause a crash when the restart option was on
• fixed a bug with sensors
• yes key is now bindable
• added a flat 500 cr reward for towing in ships that have run out of fuel
• fixed a unique planet
• Creatures born on airless worlds are now adapted to their environment
• E now shows all your stuff, W doesn't exist anymore
• fixed jetpack fuel
• added distress beacons
• New position for system maps (But you can put them back on the bar in options)

Changes in 0.1.8b

• Savegames are not compatible with 0.1.8a!
• added some saveguards so that you don't stay sick if you aren't
• finally got visibility+lighting right
• rewrote FOV, adding an option to mark actually visible squares
• Crew talents
• Stations now pay less for goods
• Fixed some map generation bugs
• Tries to save the game if encountering an error
• fixed (yet another) door bug
• Added teammember overview
• fixed the black market
• fixed a bug with shop rerolling
• fixed an autoequip bug
• fixed some bugs with catching life monsters

Changes in 0.1.8a

• Added sickbay to station
• Toning down of Diseases and Quarantine
• Moved some external files to a data directory
• added a quest and upped the chance of getting one
• fixed the black market
• fixed minor to medium sized bugs

Changes in 0.1.8

• new unique planets
• more quests
• New things to plunder in space
• New possible end for pirates
• New atmosphere type: corrosive
• New Officer: Ships Doctor
• Diseases
• W shows all items you have not equipped and their descr.
• E does the same with equipped items.
• O opens/closes the helmet switching from suit air supply to atmosphere and back
• A lets you chose wich officers join you on the awayteam
• new item: auxillary jetpack fuel tanks
• Mining drills ignore damage reduction of walls
• Added day/night cycle to planets
• Suffocation damage ignores armor
• Gasclouds come in different densities (low density is less dangerous than in earlier versions, high density clouds are more dangerous)
• Pilots can save your life! (financially speaking) (I hope that is cryptic enough)
• Lowered basedamge & increased to hit for ground combat, making weapons and tactics more important
• fixed a bug when picking up artifacts
• fixed a bug that caused locked doors to be harder to open by better science officers
• fixed a bug with smoking geysers
• fixed a bug with loading savegames & autorestart option
• fixed a bug with binoculars and portable sensor sets
• fixed a bug with finding random points (thanks to xenomorph for the hint to find it)
• fixed a bug in damage routine
• fixed a bug in highscore
• rewrote awayteam HPs
• slowed monster respawning, speeded up pirates

Changes in 0.1.7a

• One planet type was supposed to have alien artifacts on it
• Asking for number of items to buy should have used plural
• minor display glitch when landing from scanning screen fixed
• Display glitch with insect warriors+scout ship rescue fixed
• "Water" in planet display now counts all liquids &frozen water (And i was wondering why it wasnt snowing ever...)
• some tweaks to rogue planets discovery/display
• planetside trading bugs fixed
• beefed up pirate ships a little
• vi keybindings included in zip now

Changes in 0.1.7

• 5 new unique planets (actually 10, but 5 are pretty similiar to each other)
• Bigger spacemap
• Wormholes
• Gas giants
• selling disabled if you have no cargo
• UI Improvements: You can land from the scanning screen, System overview shows atmosphere
• Balance tweaks: Jetpacks need fuel, Firearms have more punch, Lower tier short range Weapons are more expensive
• Fixed some glitches and bugs
• Fixed some Typos again

Changes in 0.1.6d

• Some minor glitches and bugs fixed

• Bug fixed: Ship dissapeared under special cricumstances
• Bug fixed: Planets dissapeared under special cricumstances
• Bug fixed: Comsat shouldnt dissapear anymore

• improved base placement
• scrolling through manual wasn't working
• dead science officers caused negative biodata on examining plants
• drills didn't equip
• some displayfunkiness solved
• some typos fixed
• enemy awayteams are a little slower
• thugs don't look like trees anymore

Changes in 0.1.6

• some balancing in the upper grade ship tier
• some trade balancing: maximum possible price is lower and minimum higher
• More variation & some random equipment at game start
• some balancing in ship weapons & new weapons: as a rule missiles have a better range than energy weapons
• Systems in gasclouds have better resources
• System types follow the harvard classification (except for F because there have to be green stars!) have an effect on resources found
• Officers can die on planets and need bunks to sleep in.
• New (hidden) feature in space stations
• Tactics command added affecting ground combat
• close combat weapons (Only effective against monsters, others stuff you still have to shoot)
• "done" special planets give another description on scanning after they have been "done"
• one new special planet
• 2 new quests
• Unlocked houses stay unlocked
• New way to generate gasclouds
• you can't buy the same hull like you already have anymore
• speed is dependant on max armor of ship instead of current (as it used to be since 0.1.0)
• Added description to communication sattelite, to better represent it's new features
• Monsters can have some new stuff, affecting their stats
• They also have a higher tendency to come in groups with allied members
• Monsters can attack monsters now
• Herbivours eat grass, Scavengers eat corpses, predators eat herbivours & scavengers
• Monsters don't talk in coordinates anymore
• Monsters build huts like they were supposed to
• Inspected corpses don't show up anymore
• Some more cosmetics to planet maps in relation to temperature
• Keybindings may be altered by editing keybindings.txt
• abandoned the silly everything is uppercase concept
• 2 new map types
• there is a way to mark already examined plants now
• fixed a bug in shiphull upgrading (engine, sensors and shields above max didnt get reduced)
• fixed about a gazillion typos
• fixed a bug that could cause the game to freeze on scanning
• fixed a bug that caused shops to only get triggered if you moved sideways into them
• fixed bug: Gifts recieved from aliens are worth money now
• fixed bug: Double items in shops are gone
• fixed bug: in item scanning
• fixed bug: that could lose items
• fixed bug: fleeing from a fleet doesn't count as a kill anymore
• that cave was not supposed to be green
• blue and redcaps were supposed to yield biodata, and drop gaussguns instead of rifles
• fixed a bug in cave generation on the redcap and bluecap planet
• fixed a bug in cargo selling

Changes in 0.1.5f

• (I)nspect command repairs ships and gathers biodata from corpses and plants.
• Fixed a major bug that caused the game to crash if you had too much inventory. Fixed a bug in ship repair and survivor rescuing, Fixed several bug in shop display & generation, fixed a minor display bug with cave entries, weapon selection bug fixed, autosaves save on on instead of off, and get deleted if you die.

Added to config:

• Autosave on station entry
• Minimum safe distance for pirate base generation

Changes in 0.1.5

• added 15 shiptypes, with scout/explorers being the most general purpose, merchants and fighters specializing in cargo and space combat respectively and troop carriers who are best for transporting big awayteams
• Fuel and Crewquater module to add to your ship
• Added more pirates! (Because more is always better, at least as far as pirates are concerned)
• And destroying their bases now counts towards pirate kills!
• Also they really really come after you when you got high price cargo. For real this time. I hope.
• Docking on first turn doesn't cost money anymore
• Added a new command for your ship
• descriptions for shiptypes and items in shops added
• "That's a weapon too" Ship engines leave a trail. flying into it hurts.
• Fleets meet when they are adjacent to each other, used to be when they hit the same square
• planets above 100ø surface temperature don't have open water anymore and planets below 0ø as well
• 2 new monster types
• 1 new unique planet
• intercepting radio messages happens less often
• warning for earthquakes
• station shops are better stocked
• Kills with grenades and shipweapons now yield biodata
• Fixed a bug in fleeing space combat
• Fixed a bug with special tiles on planet surface (Couldnt enter shops unless you were dead)
• Fixed a bug that could cause tiles to become blocked/unblocked that shouldn't
• Fixed a bug that could cause starsystems to sit on top of each other
• Fixed bug: unidentified alien artifacts dissapear again
• Fixed bug: Teleportation device doesnt dissapear on next landing anymore
• Fixed a typo, here and ther
• Tiles changing outside your visual range no longer show up immediately
• Menu bars remember their former position
• Config.txt now works with on/off too
• Unique planet descriptions don't get mangled anymore
• Added soundeffects

Changes in 0.1.4

• "C"ommunicating to aliens might be a bit more interesting
• CTRL+X opens the configuration menu where you can
• Toggle autopickup
• Toggle a Beep on low oxygen warnings (may not work on all platforms)
• Toggle if you want to select items by hand or always want to use the best item
• Toggle diagonal movement: if you move into a direction and its blocked a diagonal is automatically chosen

(This may help those who dont have the luxury of a numpad)

• Toggle save screenshots (Converts extended ascii characters when making a screenshot)
• "," Picks up an item when not in autopickup
• "D" drops an item
• "O" offers an item to an alien
• shallow water no longer blocks movement, but uses oxygen
• oxygen gets replenished in areas where there is enough of it
• New Items
• 2 new unique planets
• Fixed a bug that "lost" unique planets
• Botany works slightly different
• New algorithm for making planet maps
• New plants & "water" for exotic atmosphere planets
• Fixed a bug in monstergeneration
• Fixed a bug in a quest
• Fixed a bug in item equipping
• Fixed a bug that caused all your officers to retire when visiting the pirate bar
• Fixed a bug that payed 250 Cr. wage to each missing officer
• Shop inventorys on planets dont get reset on each entry anymore.
• Killing trees doesnt get rewarded with 1.000.000 Credits anymore.
• Rescuing the scout doesnt make you immortal for the planet anymore, and chances to find people alive are a lot higher

Changes in 0.1.3c

• Bugfixes: Items didnt equip, Monsters used the wrong dice to roll for HPs, One mission could cause the game to crash

Changes in 0.1.3

• added the amulet of yendor
• "G" throws grenades
• "H" uses medpacks on awayteam
• "R" on planets allows to call your ship by (R)adio. Mountains block contact. Some (on purpose) undocumented commands may be issued to the crew on board. (I take requests for additional commands, if you can think of anything)
• "@" displays ship information
• New type of dungeons
• New type of planet maps
• expanded & random shop inventorys
• new stuff that can be found on planet surfaces
• changed chances for acid rain & high winds
• attacking monsters on impassable terrain is now possible by bumping into them
• shooting monsters now have visible weapon beams
• item system rehauled: an awayteam of 10 won't be able to fly with 9 jetpacks, 5 gaussguns are worse than 3, 10 aren't better than 8 when the awayteam consists of 7 people etc.
• resources are a little more descriptive and variate much more in value
• visibility is affected by orbit (the farther out, the less light)
• maps for hard to map planets pay more
• some new tiles for the new dungeontype
• Fixed minor teleport bug (Cursor appeared at 0,0 instead of at player position and display didnt refresh)
• Fixed a bug in LOS calculation
• fixed some mistakes in monster generation while rehauling it
• Changed post mortem files from .flg to .txt
• minimum visibility reduced (from <=1.5 to <1.5)

Changes in 0.1.2

• there are 3 quests (Slay the dragon, rescue the princess & deliver the package)
• reworked fleet system
• reworked tile system
• you can become a pirate now
• added 1 item (that doesnt sound very impressive does it?)
• upped some equipment costs (you are not buying a single gauss gun, you are upgrading your ships armory)
• added 1 special planet and reworked 5 of the old ones
• cave systems are less uniform (they variate on "cavyness" and "tunnelyness")
• consistent warnings on low oxygen levels
• Jumppacks allow for the daring "emergency jumppack jump" maneuver
• invisibles are really invisible now
• Stations now attempt to offer entertainment to their customers
• pirates really get agressive when you have high price cargo (In 0.1.1 only one pirate got agressive, and always the same one too)
• another nerf to scanning (your level 5 science officer also needs level 5 sensors)
• nerf to orbit correction : Its less nagging now, but it also won't kill you
• warning if you leave the station with an officer missing
• missing officer now has a skill of -5 instead of just 0
• docking on a station with a missing officer caused a division by 0. fixed