Sigma 16 [Sci-fi Survival Crafting LitRPG]

Self-Published

Community Rating

Description

Talia, the daughter of a wealthy conglomerate CEO, harbors an unquenchable adventurous spirit.

Wishing to make her own mark on the universe and avoid the boring life of corporate drudgery, she joins the droves of new human explorers combing through unexplored space in humanity’s newest diaspora from the core worlds.

Her resilience is put to the test when her brand-new exploration corvette crashes onto an uncharted planet, Sigma 16. Despite the sudden and unprecedented systems failure, Talia is far from deterred. Equipped with a state-of-the-art exo-exploration suit, a semi-operational colony bootstrap system and a sometimes annoying AI companion, she sees this as an opportunity to claw her way back to orbit with all the discoveries she plans to uncover.

Join Talia as she builds her base and combs through the expansive dunes and jungles of Sigma 16 in the search of precious resources and alien data.But the planet might not be as uninhabited as it first seems, and with untamed wilds teeming with potentially territorial wildlife can she unravel the secrets of the planet's inhabitants and mysteries before falling to disaster? Looming over her is the threat of a potentially hostile and deadly alien species with weapons and technology just as advanced as her own.

Ready yourself for an interstellar adventure, full of exploration, resource management, and equipment crafting in the face of adversity on a wild frontier world in this new thrilling Sci-fi Survival LitRPG!

Inspired by games like Subnautica, Empyrion: Galactic Survival, No Man's Sky, Factorio, Icarus, Planet Crafter and a lot more!

Information

Status: Hiatus
Year: 2023
Author: Erios909

Royal Road Stats

Rating: 4.6/ 5.0
Followers: 4,022
Views: 1,503,847

Reviews

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Community Reviews(10)

Aaron Sofaer (aka Pastafarian)Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Earns all five of its stars many times over.
There's a real dearth of crafting stories out there. Erios delivers this one with impeccable craft, making it one of the few stories that genuinely not only keeps me reading and full of joy but inspires me to write as well.
AcrinoeRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
Style: Erios909 boasts a very clean writing style that is extremely well paced, informative, funny, and descriptive. Her writing flows smoothly, not too fast and not too slow. It's a very nice blend of introspection, dialog, and action.
Story: The story starts with some shock and awe of crash landing on an unsurveyed planet. Fortunately our main character has some very advanced technology. Advocates of extremely hard SF might quibble over the amount of power/flexibility of the character’s multi-tool, but the author doesn't abuse it and operates within self defined rules of function that are consistent. The central theme is an addictive resource management, real time strategy, base building theme that requires the survivor to meet the many challenges of an unknown world. Lots of worldbuilding at play here with hints for lots more to come!
Grammar: very clean work overall, I did note a couple minor mistakes, but none were big enough to be bothered by. Most will not notice any.
Character: A very convincing main character, that's easy to sympathize with. She makes mistakes, she has regrets. She has a backstory that's slowly being realized. The only real issue here is lack of support characters to really interact. The aliens and AI assistant are entertaining and amusing but can’t offer a significant counter point to the main character. There are hints that the AI might become more important in the future and I look forward to that evolution!
Overall: This was a welcome binge read, but I can certainly see it working well with scheduled drops. The included art and lore drops were welcome additions, especially as the author has a distinct style that works extremely well to enhance the story line. Bravo!
Papa LegbaRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
The story is great. It is a breath of fresh air to the genre. Good progressing and a main character with a sensible and relatable thought process. I love the fresh take on the system being a paywall. It's a bit more depressing but makes a lot more sense and the tongue in cheek, humourous, whatareyagonnado aspect more than makes up for that. 😄
TerebinthRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This has been one of my favorite yarns on RR. Mostly because the Main Character is like an amalgam of 2 of my younger sisters, whom I adore. Smart, plucky, persistent, curious, and kindhearted. We always had animals around -- mostly cats, sheep, chickens, ducks, and cows as opposed to (spoiler:) spiders -- but its the principle of gathering useful pets and treating them like members of the family that sticks.
My family are also all suckers for space exploration -- Dad raised us on airplanes and model rockets.
My only major dislike is the high tension between the MC and her family. I hope that gets resolved.
I'm very much looking forward to seeing where this goes.
stadsRoyal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
love the over all story and the survivor aspects of it
there is fun banter with the system and the discovery of friend
interesting planet with plenty of mystery and discovery to be had
character growth is fun to see and seeing the mc settle in her roll
tech development follows a fun path with both resource and points so nothing to OP
tomjel45Royal Road
★★★★★ 5.0
This book is great so far with a strong and unique premise that evoke strong vibes of subnautica and metroid with the lone explorer/survivor aesthetic and while theres not a whole lot there right now it shaping up to be better than ship core with the way things are going though thats only my personal opinion it can't be helped as an avid enjoyer of survival exploration games such as subnautica and metroid prime the story is well written with no particularly glaring flaws in grammar or storytelling and while the chapters feel a bit short there is only nostalgia and enthusiasm as I read.
Toby ZieglerRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
First chapter, so there will likely be updates later.
Talia's first seconds in the story are enough to show us she lives in one of "those" universes. You know, the ones where penny-pinching corporations give you the least they can and get away with it? The ones where every little feature that should be built in is an expensive extra? The ones where a good bump cracks the equipment and makes it practically useless?
One of those universes.
It's already a merry romp full of humorous calamity. A recommended read so far!
filwiRoyal Road
★★★★★ 4.5
If you like sci-fi, base building, and some quirky yet cozy characters that aren't snarky, then Sigma 16 is the story for you!
Featuring a run-away heiress stranded on a hostile-ish world, her very literal AI compatriot, and a host of side characters ranging from a auto-translator, to primitive spiders, to magic handwavium snorting evil aliens, there is no lack of wonder and setting in the story.
Talia is a lovable character that isn't OP, and doesn't aspire to be. The base building is at the core of the story, but it is the character development and side arcs that make it great - to there's simply so much work to explore, and so many new things to discover, learn, harness, and fight.
The story is mostly high-paced, but there are some slower parts that can be either a resting place from the mad-dash pace, or places to be skimmed, depending on how you like your stories. For me, there were moments where I skimmed, but I was never tempted to abandon the story, as the plot, setting, and characters were enough to keep me engaged.
Overall, I found this one enjoyable, even if it doesn't do exponential growth as I would have expected it to. There are all the possibilities, but maybe it will happen in the next arc.
(Reviewed at the end of book 1.)
Irina StarveilRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
Have read up to and dropped at chapter 51. Spoilers below.
The best part of the story is the grammar, haven't seen many mistakes, and the worst part is probably the main character.
The setting is pretty nice, crash-landed on a sorta barren planet with not that much tech to help you out, so you have to creatively solve problems. Similar to Subnautica in a few ways actually. I would say it's executed decently.
The MC is sloppy and irrational, she's going to the far fringes to find a planet to colonize (prepare for colonization?) but she seems to just barely be prepared, with seemingly the cheapest stuff available even though she's the daughter of some megacorp. The survival pod wasn't even properly setup.
She encounters 2 seemingly sapient species, giant alien spiders and blue humanoids. She only tries diplomacy with the spiders and even that only happened through, essentially, dumb luck. With the blues she doesn't try talking a single time in all these chapters.
She doesn't know a lot about the blues and neither do we. They are technologically inferior to her by a lot and she isn't in any real danger apart from one time. She, ofc, gets saved by some hidden military AI override.
In none of the encounters with the blues, regardless of how safe she is, does she try to communicate. At all. It usually ends with the blues being obliterated. She never gives them the option to surrender or to leave. Her justification is that they're a potential danger even though they have barely been an inconvenience to her.
I would not recommend this story if you can't stomach a genocidally hypocritical MC.
TheForthcomerRoyal Road
★★★ 2.5
While the initial premise was engaging, the story and characters lacks depth and I'm getting bored.
A Satisfactory-inspired Sci-Fi survival story sounded interesting, but the issue is that the story feels too much like the game. In the game, there's some initial story setup but that's all quickly forgotten about as the player focuses on building their factory - working on resource building, technology advancement, and component automation. Similarly, the story (at least so far) only focuses on these aspects. While fun to play, I find it's not that fun to read about.
There's a lack of broader motivation or problems in the story, leading to a broader issue of lacking stakes. Again, that's fine in a video game about having fun building things - but in narrative form it's much less engaging.
Yes, the MC has crash landed and seems to want to leave the planet, but why? Seemingly they've run away from home to build a new life for themselves in the outer planets - why not just stay right where they're at? Are there family members they miss, goals they want to achieve, problems that needed to be solved? None of these questions have been addressed.
While there are whisperings of a broader intergalactic empire ruled by techno-feudalist corporations, so far it's just been effectively flavour text - it makes no impact on the narrative.
While there was the event of the MC's systems getting taken over for some reason - it feels poorly executed and explained, with a feeling of 'This really weird thing happened and a random military robot was made, and now I can use all military technology but *shrugs* - oh well, let's just keep going'.
While I am sure this will be explained and explored later on, I am completely uninterested in the story and characters at this point.
One thing I did actually like in the story was the use of AI art to show the technology introduced. Some Sci-Fi stories spend an extreme amount of words describing the minutia of the technology in their story, generall