Transcendence

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The Goddess Domina calls you to join her in the galactic core, home of the gods. Thus, you left your life behind and try to reach it. Of course, between you and the core, dozens and dozens of pirates, slavers, genetically-engineered humans, and other stuff are waiting to kill you.

Transcendence is a freeware video game described by its creator, George Moromisato, as the fusion of Nethack and Star Control. You choose one of three starships to travel between systems, gathering things to upgrade your ships to survive the more and more dangerous enemies, and trying to make it out alive.

Can be found here. While entirely playable and winnable, the game is still unfinished, ending about halfway through the planned storyline as the player leaves human space.


 * Acceptable Breaks From Reality: The game would be completely unplayable if the game used realistic physics (invisible lasers, relativity, among other problems).
 * AI Is a Crapshoot: The Luminous Drones and assemblers are controlled by a rogue AI.
 * A certain class of Auton will also malfunction when used and turn on its owner.
 * Arbitrary Maximum Range: Played straight, but with good reason: friendly fire is always on, so it's better to have this than if you accidentally destroy a friendly station that is half a system away, getting you more enemies.
 * The Relativistic and Howitzer weapons are nearly an aversion of this trope—they fire to well outside your scanner range, way, way beyond what can actually be seen—and if they hit someone friendly, they do a metric fuckton of impact damage.
 * Ballistic Discount: You can blow up corporate stations and plunder them. However, they send a heavily-armed corporate cruiser after you to discourage this, and you'll be arrested if you ever set foot on another corporate station.
 * Big Bad: Oracus, an unknown entity, supposedly bent on destroying the galaxy.
 * Boss Battle: there are several of them, some of which are entirely optional. (They are listed in order of appearance)
 * Warmup Boss: Arco Vaugn, leader of the Centauri Warlords.
 * Boss Rush: Once you get past the qualifying rounds, the Arena is this. The final boss of the Arena is the Slicer, who flies a custom gunship equipped with a suite of linked weapons.
 * Degraded Boss: This was true of the old arena final boss, the Tripoli-class destroyer, until it was replaced with The Slicer as the final boss of the arena.
 * Boss in Mook Clothing: Charon Frigates, an early-appearing vessel armed with a pair of turreted turbolasers and a hold full of homing missiles.
 * Flunky Boss: The Fortress of the Charon Pirates, and the Xenophobe Ark.
 * Wolfpack Boss: The squadron of Aquila Cruisers you can choose to fight in the Dantalion system.
 * Climax Boss: The Iocrym Command Ship, encountered just after the player character breaks the quarantine. Can be disappointing, since it moves slowly, and it's all-but impossible to get this far without installing a point-defence weapon that negates its only long-ranged attack
 * Bonus Boss: The Xenophobe Ark.
 * Bottomless Magazines: Most of the lower-level kinetic type weapons generate bullets from the ship's reactor.
 * Breather Level: St. Katherine's Star is almost totally peaceful and has plenty of chances to resupply and get high-end military gear. It's a nice break between the Charon system and the Sung territories.
 * Call to Adventure: Domina calls to the player to venture to her at the core...
 * Jumped At the Call: ...and you took it, leaving somebody behind.
 * City Guards: The guard ships at friendly stations, the heavy weapons on the station itself, the Corporate Cruiser which pursues you for destroying a corporate station, and Ferian Warriors for a Ferian station. However, if you manage to somehow fight off these hazards, nothing stops you from going on a piracy spree.
 * Continuing Is Painful: If you bought insurance, the next time you buy it, it costs considerably more. If you choose to resurrect without insurance, your score takes a massive hit.
 * Debug Room: A certain switch can be used to run the game in a debug mode, allowing scripts to be entered into its console.
 * Development Hell: It took seven years for the game to get from initial announcement to a 1.0 release.
 * Disc One Nuke: The X-ray Laser. While it's a rare item, when it does appear, it's found very early on, delivers high damage at a fast rate of fire, and since it's a laser, you can use a collimator (also found very early) and get an unmatched weapon until particle weapons come along.
 * Difficulty Spike: The Charon system. After St. Katherine's Star, the curve got considerably steeper too.
 * Dummied Out: A number of stations and ships appear in the game's resources that are unused. Since then, modders have taken to including them.
 * Earth That Used to Be Better: Earth was (partially) destroyed when Syrtis Conclave suddenly decided to annihilate Earth. Mars was turned into a radioactive charred husk of a world. Earth is mostly better now.
 * Escape Pod: Never seen, but mentioned by certain characters.
 * Everything Trying to Kill You: Take a look at this picture (spoiler, though). See the names in red? They're all trying to kill you, the one in white will turn against you if you so much as land a shot on them, and the ones in green and yellow can be turned against you if you shoot them enough. If you piss off the friendly or neutral factions, then literally every ship in the game will shoot on sight.
 * Fragile Speedster: The Wind Slaver and the Anarchist battlepods are insanely fast and can out-turn almost every other ship in the game, but they will fall apart if you sneeze on them even with low-level weaponry.
 * Game Mod: The game supports making modding a very simple process, easy to do; the developer even goes out of his way to make the game more modifiable! This has resulted in a spectrum of mods exhibiting various tropes (primarily quality-related ones)
 * Development Hell: Like the main game itself, the most ambitious (and rightfully so) mods undergo very long development times.
 * Expansion Pack: Several of these are in development (Development Hell to be exact), TX 2 (Transcendence eXtended 2) being a hybrid of the two (It replaces the original games script and coding content with an expanded version of the original universe)
 * Debug Room: One mod is used specifically for this, designed to give the player absolute control over the game's universe; its called G.O.D. Mod. It even comes with a Big Red Button which causes hilarity to ensue.
 * Global Currency Exception: Get out far enough, and you will encounter genetic-engineered humans that don't accept credits, but use Rins instead.
 * Guide Dang It: Fabricators. Getting the most out of them is all-but impossible without either script-diving or reading spoilers.
 * I Fought the Law and The Law Won: The Black Market has some of the harshest law enforcement, in the form of bounty hunters.
 * Imported Alien Phlebotinum: The alien technologies of the Iocrym, Ancient Races, Domina and Oracus are all used in this manner.
 * Infinity-1 Sword: The IM90 Multitarget Cannon and Iocrym Fracture Cannon appear to be favourites among seasoned players because they can at least be bought in the last few systems with thousands of rin.
 * Infinity+1 Sword: The Lamplighter Archcannon and the various halo gems, particularly the Gem of Contrition and the Gem of Sacrifice.
 * Interface Screw: The Heliotropes' blinder cannons will temporarily obscure your HUD. A Defective Visual Display Enhancement ROM will do this as well.
 * Jossed: In a confusing moment of both Jossing and Fanon Ascention, the Ranx Warlords were rebranded the Ranx Empire, with a backtory; one change in the TX 2 Fanon during its ascension that disrupted TX 2's continuity so critically that TX 2 is undergoing a hiatus while the plot is checked with the developer to prevent that from happening again.
 * Leet Lingo: The style of the words is played straight in the dialogue with the Luminous and Zoanthropes as well as on the labels for some of the Luminous-related control cubes. The Leet style of grammar however is not used as often with them.
 * Lost Forever: A few old ship designs from the early alpha versions of the game were removed prior to the first public release of the game. In the in-game sense, non-randomly appearing items can be destroyed permanently in many ways, including placing them on wrecks or in boxes and destroying the wreck or box. Some unique ships and the unique items they hold do not always leave wrecks, resulting in those items also being Lost Forever.
 * Knights Templar: The Syrtian leadership believe they are acting on the words of Domina and will commit any acts in her name (and they apparently believe themselves, though nobody else in-game would think Domina would cause the 80+ year long Syrtian war). The Iocrym use the same reasoning.
 * Lightning Bruiser: The Ares' Deimos-class destroyer and the Commonwealth's Britannia-class gunship are AI examples. If you set up your ship right and survive all the way to the final system, you are most probably this as well.
 * Lockdown: The Iocrym initially disabled the Sol stargate because they found life on Earth, and made it a nature preserve. After humans reactivated the gate and started exploring space, the Iocrym made first contact with them, studying the cause of the gate's activation, and then locking humans out of the rest of the galaxy "because of an unspecified threat".
 * Made of Explodium: Station and capital ships explode rather violently, especially late in the game; also anything with enough fuel and ammo will explode rather gratuitously too.
 * Subverted with the Iocrym Command Ship and the Teraton stations which have rather underwhelming explosions.
 * Made of Iron: The Salvager Nomad. This brown behemoth mounts a single turbolaser cannon, but is equipped with 36 quad titanium barricades - four layers of the same kind of armour used to reinforce space stations - placed evenly across the whole ship.
 * Mighty Glacier: Both the Iocrym Sentinel and the Iocrym Command Ship can easily reduce any other ship in the game, as well as every single space station in the game, into their component atoms in a matter of seconds, but they are painfully slow and lack long-range weapons. Ships twice as large as the Sentinel, such as the Ares' Phobos-class dreadnought, are more able at hauling their weight around.
 * More Dakka: The Ares' Lightning Turret, as well as the Fast-Fire Laser Cannon, among others.
 * The Mothership: The Worldships and Arks of the Bennin Xenophobes.
 * Nonstandard Game Over: Aside from being killed by other ships or finishing the game, the player can also be arrested, die in a variety of rather gruesome medical experiments ("anything for science!"), be eaten alive, run out of fuel, or die from radiation exposure. This game is inspired by Nethack, after all.
 * Painting the Fourth Wall: See Interface Screw - the game's interface is referred to in-game as the HUD.
 * Point Defenseless: The game provides several different ways to avert this, and doing so is all-but essential by the time you reach Heretic.
 * Poison Mushroom: Various examples. Several of the game's usable items have defective versions, and barrels that could contain anything from armour-repairing nanos to high-level radioactive waste tend to have extremely uninformative labels.
 * Portal Network: Stargates.
 * Power-Up Letdown: After you upgrade an item, further upgrades have no effect. So if you try out a random barrel, odds are you'll permanently stain your armor with something you don't want.
 * Saving the World: That's what the entire premise develops (literally the word of an in-game god-like entity ... and also as given by the developer - so far) into (stopping Oracus),
 * Sealed Evil in a Can: Apparently Oracus was this, however he broke presumably a few hundred years prior to the game's events.
 * Shout-Out: Lots of these, some better hidden then others. A number are references to the usernames of some of the more prominent members of the community.
 * Space Friction: Averted, unless you have an inertialess engine, which causes you to stop as soon as you turn off the thrusters. Flying in purple nebulae also causes your ship to slow down after a while.
 * Space Pirate: The Centauri Warlords and Charon Pirates in general, but there are other smaller factions that count too.
 * Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: Played straight with the Ares, including several classes of light ships, a freighter, a missile boat that is essentially a space gun, a destroyer, and even a dreadnought. The Commonwealth and Sung also play this trope straight to a degree. Subverted with several of the other factions, a few of which use only light ships.
 * The mod TX2 plays this straight with several other factions, many of them all new, including the Ranx Empire, the Therrusians (who even get an awe-inspiring behemoth mothership that is a world ship crossed with a Dyson Sphere (if an extremely small variant with an artificial star) and a dreadnought - and on top of that ), the Commonwealth (more-so than already), the IPC, the solarites, the luminous, and the list goes on.
 * Spoiler Opening: The main menu in 1.0RC7 and later shows a lot of ships that the player will be facing much later. If anything, the screen saver shows even more of them.
 * Stone Wall: The Commonwealth Star Carrier. It is the slowest thing next to a space station, and it is only equipped with four TeV 9 blasters which, compared to most other weapons used in the outer regions of human space, are mere peashooters. However, it can easily fend off everything short of a dreadnought simply because it is equipped with nigh-invulnerable, regenerative hull plating.
 * Take Your Time: You can simply decline most missions, no matter how urgent they sound, and come back later. Korolov Shipping is an aversion, though, as if you refuse to escort a freighter it will eventually leave without you, and when they prepare to assault the fortress in a system they will launch the attack whether or not you agree to join them.
 * The Many Deaths of You: In spades, including: dying in a dead spaceship because you ran out of fuel, being murdered by a criminal mastermind, being executed, being frozen, dying in a range of horrific medical experiments, and the rather charming experience of being eaten alive by a tentacled horror.
 * Time Stands Still: The effect of one of the three halo gems.
 * Took a Level In Badass: The player, depending on the player's style of gameplay. A number of players will skimp on upgrades for an absurdly long time to save enough money to prematurely buy an extremely powerful piece of equipment or two (usually a Hyperion reactor, the most powerful reactor in the game and a high power-use weapon or shield) - they go from skirting on near-death all the time to kicking everyone's asses without the slightest bit of trouble. Also used to happen where incredibly strong armor could be made from ores mined in the first system. This was fixed (much to Unpleasable Fanbase dismay).
 * Inverted with Kate Morgental, where she goes from having an absurdly over-powered ship (at least for that level) to a ship without a single weapon on it.
 * Some mods also allow wingmen and autons to do this. TX2 does this with a few factions.
 * Unexpected Gameplay Change: The mission involving the.
 * Units Not to Scale: Planetary objects are on scale, though it's an exponential scale.
 * Useless Useful Spell: While weapon special effects can be useful when they are first introduced, they quickly become obsolete. Radiation-immune armour, for example, appears very quickly once you've gained access to radiation weapons. Even enemies suffer this—you can easily obtain a full set of disintegration-proof armour well before meeting the one enemy in the game with a disintegration attack, for example.
 * Vendor Trash: The game has a dizzying array of different trade goods, although few of them are absolute examples—many items can also be donated to various causes, in exchange for various benefits such as information, future assistance, and even new Domina powers. Some items also have obscure uses—having the right medical supplies will make you more likely to survive medical experiments, for example.
 * Video Game Cruelty Punishment: Ferian miners show up as friendlies and are inoffensive miners who ordinarily retreat when attacked and carry precious ore ripe for the taking. You can freely play Space Pirate and attack the little fellows ... but if you're careless, you can then die in the space of a second when they decide to swarm you instead of running, cutting you into fragments with their surprisingly-powerful plasma torches. Attacking their mine will prompt them to.
 * Wave Motion Gun: Several examples, including the Fracture Cannon, the Avalanche Cannon, and the Ares Plasma Archcannon.
 * What Could Have Been: Partially subverted; the concept art on the official site depicts ink drawings of ships take look startlingly similar to the ones in game - however, this is played straight with several ships which have been remodeled multiple times or even outright replaced (or never made it into the game in the first place).
 * Wizard Needs Food Badly: Fuel here serves the same purpose - consumed at a regular rate, and if you run out, you die. Different reactors require different kinds of fuel, but the game provides ways to get this free of charge.
 * Wrap Around: The Heretic System does this until you lift the quarantine, to prevent you from reaching the stargate.
 * X Meets Y: As mentioned above, the creator calls this game "Nethack meets Star Control 2".