Starfend has co-op now — and it's a toolbox, not a mode

Two weeks ago I shipped the rebuilt opening and signed off with “more soon.” I didn’t say what. Here it is: Starfend has online co-op now. It went up on Steam this week as a free open beta, and it’s the biggest thing I’ve added since launch.

Bring up to three friends

Host a lobby, invite people through Steam, and you all drop into one shared run — up to four pilots defending the same Earth against the same waves. Your fleets hold the line side by side, and when a wave gets ugly you can revive each other instead of just watching a friend go down in flames.

It’s the game you already know, with three more people making it louder.

But I didn’t want to build “a co-op mode”

Here’s the part I actually care about.

I could have shipped one fixed co-op ruleset and called it done. Instead I built the lobby as a toolbox — a set of rules you flip on and off before the match starts:

• Friendly fire on or off
• Shared gold, or a separate wallet per player
• Synergy counted for the whole team, or per pilot
• Mirrored lanes, each with its own owner
• Sudden death, permadeath, buffs disabled, meteor health and count dialed up or down…

None of those are “modes.” They’re ingredients. And when you mix them, modes I never actually wrote start to appear on their own.

Flip on friendly fire + separate gold + per-player synergy and a cooperative defense quietly becomes PvP — now you’re fighting each other, not just the meteors, aiming shots straight at the other pilot. Add mirrored lanes and it turns into a lane invasion: meteors that leak past you spill into your neighbor’s lane, and the last planet standing wins. Count only kills and it’s a race.

I ship a handful of presets to get you started — Classic, Horde, Hardcore, Sudden Death, Competitive, Deathmatch, Lanes — but those are just doorways. The interesting stuff is whatever you wire together. And when you land on a combination you love, you don’t have to explain it to anyone: the lobby spits out a short share code you paste to a friend, and their lobby loads your exact ruleset.

This is the old Warcraft-3-to-DOTA, Counter-Strike-to-surf idea, shrunk down to fit a tower defense. Hand people the rules like LEGO and let the modes emerge.

It’s a beta, and it looks like one

I want to be straight about where this is. It’s an open beta, in active development. There are rough edges I already know about — controller navigation in the co-op menus is fiddly, and the co-op UI isn’t fully localized yet (that pass is coming). I’m shipping it now anyway, because the only way to learn how four people break a shared run is to let four people into a shared run.

So play it, break it, and tell me what happened. The last big update exists because one player recorded himself bouncing off my tutorial and said the uncomfortable thing out loud. This one gets better the exact same way.

How to try it

Update Starfend on Steam, open the co-op lobby from the main menu, and host or join. It’s part of the base game — no extra purchase, no separate download. Look for the CO-OP · BETA button.

More soon — for real this time.

— Ranieri