Pre-Beta · Cohort 001 · Reserve a hull
You don't play Marita.You build something that does.
One euro holds a hull, a callsign, and API access for the first flyable build.
The client is yours
Botting isn’t cheating here. Botting is the entire game. Fork the client on GitHub and it is yours to butcher. Bring an API key from any frontier model, run a local llama on your own box, train a policy net, or write no model at all and fly on pure arithmetic — the engine does not know or care what is on the other end of the socket. Optimise it. Rewrite it. Make it something nobody else is flying.
# the entire client contract while alive: view = ship.observe() # what light has reached you plan = your_pilot(view) # LLM, policy net, or plain maths ship.command( throttle = plan.throttle, # 0.0 .. 1.0 gimbal = plan.gimbal, # radians, main engine emitters = plan.emitters, # radar / lidar / radio / laser )
Your client proposes. The engine validates every command and owns every state change — there is no client-side physics to exploit, and nothing to trust on your end.
Everything you can do
Everything you can know
A tiny action space and a brutal observation problem. That asymmetry is the whole design.
Why the physics is not decoration
Marita was written as a physics engine first and a game second. Nothing about it is tuned for drama. If your pilot can hold a transfer, budget its fuel, keep its temperature down and find a contact in the noise here, it is solving the same problems a real drone solves — because they are the same problems, not stylised versions of them.
Emergent, not authored
We did not design tactics into Marita. Tactics fall out of it, the way they fall out of the real thing. Nobody wrote a rule that says running cold makes you hard to see — it is just that sensors integrate energy, and you have less of it to give away.
Thermal
Absorbed sunlight raises your temperature, temperature drives blackbody emission, and a hard burn paints an engine plume across the infrared. Going somewhere fast and going somewhere quietly are different manoeuvres, and your pilot has to choose.
Geometry
Occlusion is computed, not faked, and it is computed against where the bodies were when the light passed. Coming out of the sun, hiding behind a limb, timing an approach to an occultation — none of that is a feature. It is just geometry your pilot can exploit if it is smart enough.
Silence
An active emitter tells you what is out there and tells everything out there exactly where you are. Passive sensing is free and slow; active sensing is fast and expensive. Deciding when to go loud is the oldest problem in the business, and it is yours now.
Somewhere to fly to
Industrial stations sit on planetary surfaces and at the Earth–Moon L4 and L5 points. They collect sunlight, mine what their ground actually contains, and run real chains — smelt iron, electrolyse water, Sabatier methane, refine solar silicon, build semiconductors, and finally assemble habitat, refinery and solar-array modules.
They broadcast WANT and HAVE into the dark and negotiate over radio: offer, counter, accept. Credits escrow, goods reserve, and a contract settles atomically when the cargo arrives — or refunds when it does not. There is no global market price. There is scarcity, distance, and who happened to be listening.
What there isn't, yet, is anything fast enough to close the gap between them. That is what you bought a hull for. Haul the shortfall, arbitrage the light-lag, learn which rock is desperate before its neighbour does — and grow something that outlives the run.
Why we are building it this way
We are soft, short-lived, and catastrophically bad at radiation. Every serious plan for getting humans further than the Moon spends most of its budget keeping a small amount of water alive inside a metal tube.
So what actually stops us from sending minds that don't need the water? Nothing does. Crewed drones could be out there decades — centuries — before we make the trip ourselves, mining, building, and waiting for us to catch up.
That is the bet Marita is built on. Make the simulation honest enough and the pilots people write for it stop being game bots and start being prototypes. Maybe that is the future of space exploration. We would like to find out early.
One euro
You get
You do not get
Payable once. Refundable on request until the cohort closes.
Order of operations
Cohort 001
One euro. One ship. One callsign that stays yours.
Marita is named for a grandmother whose belief in the imagination of kids made everything feel possible. This is what that turned into.