Space games where you can walk inside your ship: what it takes, and how COLONIZED builds them

Walking from the cockpit to the bunk changes what a ship is. A ship you can stand up in is a home and a base, not only a vehicle, and that matters most in survival games set in space, where the ship is where you sleep, store what you gathered and come back to. Several space games already let you walk aboard, with different focuses: crews in a persistent universe, ships you build yourself, engineering sandboxes. This guide is about what makes a walkable ship work, and how COLONIZED, the space survival MMORPG we are building, designs the interiors of its seven ships.

What a ship you live in needs

1. Real scale. If the corridor is too narrow for a person or the bunk too short, the illusion breaks on the first walk. Interiors have to be measured, not eyeballed.
2. Rooms with a job. A cockpit, a place to sleep, somewhere to wash, a hold you can load. Empty volume reads as decoration.
3. Honest cargo. Cargo should be counted in crates that physically fit through the door and stack under the real ceiling, with the aisle clear.
4. A clear way in and out. Ramps, doors and ladders that a person can actually use, from the ground and in a hurry.
5. A reason to be inside. Stations to man, gear to store, a bed that means something in a survival loop.

How COLONIZED designs its interiors

Every ship in the COLONIZED hangar is built to the same rules. Doors, seats, bunks and ladders are measured for pilots from 1.65 to 1.85 m. All cargo moves in crates of one universal unit, the UU: 1.5 m³, a cube of 1.145 m per side, with larger crates in whole multiples (2, 4, 8, 16 and 32 UU). Every hold is counted on its real floor, under its real ceiling and with the aisle clear. And because everything is built to the MMU standard, any weapon of a size fits any mount of that size.

Ship	Overall length	What you walk through
William’s XASTER X	7.14 m	A single seat that lowers the pilot to the ground
William’s XASTER S	12.48 m	A single-seat cockpit under a slide-back canopy
William’s XASTER M	14.88 m	The first XASTER you can live in: a 2.00 × 0.95 m bunk in its alcove, a wet cell with shower, washbasin and toilet, a locker, an armoury and a hold behind a 2.10 m ramp
William’s XASTER L	18.03 m	A whole deck to live on and a bridge with its own anteroom
William’s XASTER XL	23.01 m	Two seats side by side, a galley, a bathroom and a double cabin
CHALLENGER ALPHA M	21.02 m	A 64 UU hold with a rear ramp and sliding side doors
MVG RVN-1000T Revenant	54.48 m	A 358 UU double-height hold, sixteen jump seats and a mezzanine above it

You can walk around all seven, open them and see them at scale next to a pilot in the hangar, and the full specifications are in the ship dossier.

What is still in development

• Ship flight and landing: built and tested in the engine on a test ship, not in the main build.
• Multi-crew: in development, together with a capital ship.
• Walking aboard in flight: being worked on, not promised.
• The seven ships in the engine: they are modelled inside and out and shown as renders and in the web hangar; what you can fly in each alpha wave will be listed in the alpha notes.

We label this so clearly because a walkable ship is one of the easiest things to promise and one of the hardest to ship. The state of every system is in the October devlog.

Where to go next

If you want the bigger picture of the genre, what is a space sim explains flight models, scale and how a space sim differs from a space MMO. If you are looking for a first-person space universe with walkable worlds and persistent servers, this is what COLONIZED offers. The first closed alpha wave is planned for winter 2026-2027, and applications are open.