Fuel Up

Fuel Up casts the player as a new employee of the Habitable Planet Coalition (HPC), a fictional planetary engineering authority. Working from an orbital office, the player is tasked with carrying out interventions to save planets from problems such as failing magnetospheres, runaway greenhouse effects and severe seismic activity. The corporation monitors the player’s progress and surroundings through an internal camera throughout each shift.

The core of the game is multitasking against a countdown. Players build drones capable of flying through a planet’s atmosphere and tunnelling beneath its surface, while also responding to alarms and recalibrating drones that go off course, such as a Plasma Torus Drone falling out of orbit. Failing to keep up with these demands lowers the player’s efficiency score.

During play, the player receives unauthorised emails from a group called the Clockwork Multiplanetary Scientists and must decide whether to follow company policy or adjust their interventions to match the scientists’ requests. These decisions lead to five different endings, and an understanding of geology is required to achieve the Science Spectacular outcome. Development of the game was supported by National Science Foundation award #2310324.