Space Station 14: Open-Source SS13 Remake Built on a Custom C# Engine

A Remake of Space Station 13 Without BYOND

Space Station 13 is a multiplayer game with a reputation for social complexity: players take on roles aboard a space station, manage crises, and uncover impostors or saboteurs. For most of its history it has run on BYOND, a proprietary game engine and platform that the original game was built on.

Space Station 14 replaces BYOND with a custom C# engine called Robust Toolbox, developed in-house by the space-wizards team. The stated reason is to give the game a modern, open foundation that players and server operators do not need a proprietary runtime to run.

SS14 is available on Steam and as a standalone download from spacestation14.com. Both are free to access. The game is described in the README as being about paranoia and chaos, capturing the social deduction and role-playing nature of the SS13 formula: most of the game's depth comes from player interaction rather than authored story.

The Content Pack Architecture and the Engine Submodule

The game engine lives in its own separate GitHub repository and is included in the SS14 repository as a submodule. The client and server both load a content pack at startup. The content pack contains everything needed to play the game on one specific server.

This split is intentional. The README explains it exists to prevent people from forking the engine independently. If you want to host a server with custom game rules, you fork the SS14 content repository, not the engine repository. This means different servers can run entirely different content packs on the same underlying engine without diverging the engine itself.

The docs site at docs.spacestation14.com covers the content system, engine internals, and game design. Two specifications, for generic asset attribution and for station image handling, are documented there and specify how asset authorship must be credited in metadata files.

Building Space Station 14 from Source

The build process requires Git, Python, and the .NET SDK. The README provides three steps:

First, clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/space-wizards/space-station-14.git

Second, initialize the submodules and load the engine by running RUN_THIS.py from inside the project directory:

cd space-station-14
python RUN_THIS.py

Third, compile the solution:

dotnet build

The README links to a detailed setup guide at docs.spacestation14.com for troubleshooting. The repository includes run scripts for both client and server (runclient.bat / runclient.sh and runserver.bat / runserver.sh) for running locally once the build succeeds. A Nix flake (flake.nix) is also present for NixOS or Nix-based development environments.

Contributing: No AI-Generated Code, Art, or Documentation

The README contains an explicit AI-generated contributions disclaimer. The project does not accept low-effort or wholesale AI-generated contributions. The examples it lists include any code (including YAML) generated by tools like GitHub Copilot or ChatGPT, AI-created artwork or sound files, auto-generated documentation, issue reports, or pull request descriptions.

The only exception the README notes is simple IDE tools like Rider's single-line completion.

Contributors are directed to the project's Discord to coordinate, and the pull request guidelines at docs.spacestation14.com detail the process. The project also notes it is not currently accepting game translations on the main repository: translations should go to a fork.

This policy is unusually explicit among open-source projects and limits the contribution surface for anyone who relies heavily on AI coding tools.

Licensing: MIT Code, Mixed Asset Terms

The code in the content repository is MIT-licensed. This is a permissive license: you can use, modify, and redistribute the code in proprietary projects without publishing your changes.

The asset situation is more complex. The README states that most assets use CC-BY-SA 3.0 unless stated otherwise. CC-BY-SA requires attribution and that derivative works share under the same license. Each asset's license and copyright are recorded in a metadata file alongside the asset. The README gives the crowbar as an example: its metadata lives at Resources/Textures/Objects/Tools/crowbar.rsi/meta.json.

Some assets use CC-BY-NC-SA 3.0 or similar non-commercial licenses. The README explicitly states these assets will need to be removed for any commercial use of the project. Before building a commercial server or product on top of SS14, auditing the asset metadata for non-commercial licenses is a required step.

Space Station 14 vs Space Station 13: What Changed

Space Station 13 runs on BYOND, a proprietary multiplayer game platform. BYOND is required to play SS13; it is a separate client download. The game language (DM) and its networking model are specific to BYOND.

SS14 removes this dependency entirely. Players download an SS14 client that runs natively without an intermediary platform. The engine is open-source and written in C#, a widely known language that makes the codebase accessible to a larger pool of contributors than BYOND's DM language.

The gameplay loop and tone are inherited from SS13, but SS14 is a fresh implementation. Code and content from SS13 cannot be ported directly. Server operators who ran SS13 servers and want to move to SS14 start from the new content base rather than from their existing SS13 code.

The last push to the repository was on 2026-09-25, and the most recent release is v2026.07.27.1, dated 2026-07-28, indicating ongoing development.

Editorial conclusion

Space Station 14 is the right download for anyone who wants to play or host an SS13-style multiplayer game without depending on BYOND. The free Steam release and standalone downloads make it accessible to players; the MIT license and public GitHub repository make it accessible to developers who want to run a custom server or contribute content. Before forking to build a custom experience, read the CC-BY-NC-SA constraint: some assets are non-commercial only and must be removed for any commercial use. The project does not accept AI-generated code, art, or documentation, so contributors should read the contribution guidelines before submitting.

Frequently asked questions

Official sources

1. Official documentation
2. Official README
3. Project repository
4. Release notes