Starfend

Starfend is a 3D sci-fi tower defense roguelite where you build a fleet, pilot your own drone, and defend against endless waves of meteors. Every run is built from scratch, your choices before the first wave determine how the next thirty play out.

Build Your Drone Before Each Run

In the Prepare Phase, you build your main drone from the ground up. Pick a body, attach arms, and equip guns by color. The colors you choose determine your available synergies, your base firepower, and the upgrade paths open to you during the run. There's no default loadout, every run starts with a decision.

Pilot It Actively

Your main drone is not a static turret. You fly it across the battlefield and keep it alive. Three active abilities give you control under pressure:

• Teleport — blink out of incoming fire with a short cooldown
• Shield — manually block damage when you need a hard stop (Shift key)
• Repair — spend gold to restore hull integrity at any time

Ambient meteors actively hunt your drone between and during waves. Stay mobile or lose it.

Wave Buff Cards

After each wave, choose 2 upgrade cards from 5 random options. Cards are split into two groups: Cannon upgrades (crit chance, attack speed, attack power, attack range, tied to the gun colors you own) and Utility upgrades (drone speed, pickup range, shield cooldown, teleport cooldown, instant repairs, and more). With 48 cards in the pool and no fixed order, each run builds differently. A sidebar tracks every buff you've stacked so you can see your build grow in real time.

Giant Meteors

At the start of each run, 10 massive meteors enter orbit around the map — each with its own radius, direction, and trajectory. They do not shoot. They orbit constantly, and if one touches your drone it kills it instantly.

Every Giant Meteor has color-coded defense: projectiles of the matching color deal significantly less damage. To take one down efficiently, hit it with the colors it does not resist. Click directly on a Giant Meteor to lock your fleet onto it.

Kill one and it drops a Skill Reward: 2 choices based on the meteor's color. A Grey meteor offers the Grey skill. A GreyGreen meteor offers Grey or Green. The colors of the meteors match the enemies in that run — so before the first wave, you already know which skills are reachable.

Skill System

Skills are active abilities you earn mid-run by killing Giant Meteors. Because meteor colors match the enemies in each run, you can plan your skill path before the game starts — and equip cannons of those colors to maximize synergy.

• T1 Skills (8s / 60s cooldown) — single-color effects: Grey multiplies fire rate, Red multiplies damage, Green reduces enemy armor by 50%, Blue reduces enemy speed by 50%
• T2 Skills (10s / 45s cooldown) — earned automatically when you collect two compatible T1 skills. Combines both effects in a stronger form
• Combos (12s / 30s cooldown) — triggered automatically when you collect a T1 and its compatible T2. The most powerful tier. Each run has a limited combo path defined by the enemy colors

Skills activate with hotkeys 1–4. Radial cooldown timers display on the HUD. The skill layer stacks on top of Wave Buffs and Stones — they are separate systems that reinforce each other.

Stone Loadout System

After each match, you gain 2 stones with randomized buff values — plus 2 more for every Giant Meteor you killed during the run. Your inventory holds up to 200 stones. Collect crystals to buy more from the shop. Stones come in three tiers — Tier 1 grants 1 buff, Tier 2 grants 2, Tier 3 grants 3. Equip up to 30 stones across your drones (3 per drone, one of each tier) and filter by color and tier to assemble the exact loadout your build demands.

Color Synergy Combat

Combine drones of matching colors — Grey, Red, Green, Blue, and 6 hybrid variants, to unlock global damage multipliers that amplify your entire fleet. Stack multiple active synergies and the effect compounds. The deeper your color investment, the harder everything hits.

Permanent Progression

Between runs, invest resources into a persistent Skill Tree. Unlock new drone types, new gun colors, hybrid combinations, and fleet upgrades. Every session builds your roster, even when you fall short.

Score and Compete

When the last wave ends, Survival Mode begins automatically. Enemies keep spawning, progressively faster and tougher. You already won — now it is about how long you last. Every minute you survive earns crystals. Every Giant Meteor you killed during the run adds extra stones to your final reward. A breakdown panel shows wave depth, game speed, survival time, and exactly where you scored and where you lost points. Climb the Steam leaderboard and fight for a spot in the Top 10.

If you enjoy the build depth of , the strategic layering of >i class="BB_Italic _3TPGDj4kc0QGKvO8FJmGz8">Dungeon Warfare 2, or the "one more run" pull of 20 Minutes Till Dawn — Starfend brings that same obsessive loop to 3D space tower defense.

No two runs. No two builds. No mercy.