Junkyard Astronauts

JunkyardAstronauts

Build · Launch · Reach the Moon

Scavenge a junkyard, weld the scrap into a rocket of questionable structural integrity, and light it. Highest flight wins the shift — the Moon is 384,400 km up and your fuel tank is a rain barrel. 1–4 robots, one shared launch pad, no appeals.

Coming soon to Steam Support Privacy
The shift

The yard opens at dawn

You are a robot with a corner workshop, a number-row inventory, and a professional opinion about welding. Everything in the scrap lanes is yours if you can carry it: engines, fuel barrels, frame rails, ladders, a fridge that will absolutely serve as a crew capsule.

01

Scavenge

Six categories of salvage lie around the lanes — engines, tanks, structure, cockpits, fins, nose cones. Grab what you can carry and haul it back to your deck.

02

Weld

Sockets snap parts flush; grid and free placement exist for the deliberately stupid builds. Every joint has a grade, and the physics believes the welds — not your optimism.

03

Launch

Walk the finished rocket to the shared pad in the middle of the yard, set it down, and hit the big red button. The whole yard hears the range-clear call.

1–4 players

Your crewmates are the hazard

Co-op on one shared pad and with no shared restraint: collaborate on a single glorious stack, or draw a yard tool and shoot the parts right out of a rival's pockets. Whatever comes down rains back into the yard as salvage, and it belongs to whoever reaches it first.

Weapons go cold the moment a rocket is on the pad, so nobody's launch gets sniped. Everything before that is fair.

There is no text or voice chat in the game. Players interact only by playing, which is either a feature or a mercy.

End of shift · yard awards
  • Lawn DartFor the rocket that went up beautifully and came down on its nose.
  • Sideways EnthusiastFor a determined commitment to the horizontal.
  • Yard SaleFor scattering the most parts across the most yard.

The board is right about you. There is no appeals process.

Four robots, four workshops

Same power, different lies they tell themselves

Rivet

The all-round fitter. Good at everything, smug about none of it.

Gantry

The long-reach crane. Can put a part where nobody else can stand.

Dozer

The heavy plant that never tips. Slow, immovable, deeply pleased with itself.

Spark

The fast little monowheel with tiny arms. Gets there first, carries less.

The yard

232 metres of walled maze

You navigate by looking, not by a map. There is no minimap — just three bearing ticks along the top edge for your corner, north and the pad, and one mega-landmark per corner standing over the wall line: tyre mountain, car-bale stack, scrap crane, tank farm.

There is also a raccoon. It does not help.

Above it all, the board keeps score in metres, and the metres have opinions.

How high
  • Above the junk piles100 m
  • Scared some birds1 km
  • Airliner cruising altitude12 km
  • Stratosphere balloon territory35 km
  • Kármán line — you are in space100 km
  • ISS orbit height408 km
  • The Moon384,400 km
Screens

Nine tenths of it is other people's rubbish

The yard seen from 1.6 kilometres up: a walled square on a tiny planet, the rocket a speck climbing away from it.
A tiny planet
A robot with its yard tool armed, a bolt leaving the barrel toward a heap of salvage.
Armed
A raccoon lying in the sand in front of the scrap heaps, entirely unconcerned with the build checklist.
The raccoon
The whole walled yard from above, the shared launch pad lit at its centre and the range-clear call on screen.
Range clear
Ground level in a lane between two walls of scrap, the yard stretching away.
The lanes
The shared launch pad, empty, with its LAUNCH sign and the big red button waiting.
The pad
Plainly

What is in it, and what is not

In the box

  • Single-player, fully offline
  • 1–4 player co-op over Steam or a LAN
  • Full controller support — 14 actions rebindable per device, with Xbox, PlayStation and Steam Deck button labels
  • Saves and settings kept on your own computer
  • English

Not in the box

  • No text or voice chat
  • No account to make — none of ours, anyway
  • No in-app purchases, no ads, no analytics, no trackers
  • No Steam Cloud, achievements or online leaderboards. The altitude board is per-session and local
  • No competitive PvP mode. Shooting your crewmates happens inside co-op, where it belongs
Minimum specifications

What it needs to run

Windows
OSWindows 10 64-bit (1909 or later)
ProcessorQuad-core Intel or AMD, 2.5 GHz
Memory8 GB RAM
GraphicsDirectX 12 / Shader Model 6 — GTX 1060, RX 580 or Arc A380
Storage2 GB available
macOS
OSmacOS 13 Ventura or later
ProcessorApple silicon (M1 or later). Intel Macs are not supported
Memory8 GB RAM
GraphicsIntegrated Apple GPU (Metal 3)
Storage2 GB available

Online co-op needs a broadband connection. Integrated graphics will run it — the game starts itself on LOW quality when it finds one. Recommended specifications are on the support page.