Vermillion Online vs From the Depths

We'll say it up front: Vermillion's ship building exists because of From the Depths. The idea that a cannon isn't a single block you drop on a hull, but a firing piece with barrels, autoloaders and gauge increasers you have to find room for, is Brilliant Skies' idea. We loved it, and we wanted to know what happens when those ships live in a shared world where losing one costs you something.

So this isn't a "which game is better" page. FtD is a finished, deep game. Vermillion is an early online playtest. The table shows where they split.

The ideas we took from FtD

If you've built an Advanced Cannon in From the Depths, the cannon in Vermillion's designer will look familiar. It's a firing piece plus barrels, clips, autoloaders, gauge increasers and recoil absorbers. Gauge runs from 12 to 300 mm and you pick it per gun. One big gun or six small ones is a real decision, because every part takes space and adds mass.

The rest of the ship works the same way:

• Engines are a core plus cylinders plus coolers.
• Thrusters are a nozzle plus amplifiers plus coolers.
• Radar is a core plus emitters plus a dish.
• Mining lasers are a head plus focusing lenses.

Add parts and you get more output, and pay for it in mass and heat. Power, fuel, heat and ammo are all simulated. And damage is per block, so the part of a gun that sits behind armour matters as much as the barrel sticking out.

From the Depths multiplayer, and why we went server-side

From the Depths does have multiplayer. You can design together, play the campaign in co-op and set up adversarial matches. One player hosts, and everyone else connects to that machine. With FtD-sized vehicles that's a lot of physics for one PC to run and send to everyone, which is why searching "From the Depths multiplayer" turns up so many forum threads about lag in bigger fights. That isn't a knock on Brilliant Skies: FtD was built first as a single-player game.

Vermillion was built the other way round. There is one dedicated server, and it has the final say on everything: flight, hits, cargo, the market. Your client sends inputs, and the server only sends back the contacts your sensors actually detect.

To be straight about scale: it's one EU server, and our playtests so far have had a handful of pilots at a time. It's built as an MMO. It's not crowded yet.

What's different about building in Vermillion

Coming from FtD, these are the things you'll notice first.

• Space only. No water, no buoyancy, no air. Flight is Newtonian on six axes, with flight assist you can switch off.
• Thrust placement is the handling. Thrust comes from where you put the thrusters. Put too much at the back and too little at the nose and the ship won't stop well. A badly balanced ship flies badly, and that's on purpose.
• No speed cap. Top speed comes out of thrust, size and mass. Typical ships land around 150 to 300 m/s.
• Fewer blocks. 68 armour shapes (slopes, corners, tapers, plates, rounded shells) in Steel, Aluminium, Titanium, Iridium composite and Glass, plus about 140 functional and structural parts. That's hundreds of block types, not FtD's thousand-plus.
• Test flight is free. Hit test flight in the designer and you fly the ship straight away, even against test rocks for mining. Building it for real costs refined materials.
• You walk inside it. Magnet boots hold you to any deck, wall or hull. You can EVA with a jetpack, sit in a gunner seat, board and repair. Friends can crew your ship as gunners.

Combat: shells against blocks

Shells are simulated projectiles. They chew through blocks until their penetration runs out, so armour layout and what sits behind it decide whether a hit kills a gun or just scars a plate. When enough blocks go, the hull splits into drifting fragments. Turret rings give you 360° guns.

The weapon list is short today: cannons, plus the mining laser. Missiles and lasers in the FtD sense, custom ammo types like HE and AP, and more weapon families are coming, but they aren't in the playtest. If missile design is your favourite part of FtD, that's worth knowing before you download.

Loss: the part From the Depths doesn't do

In FtD, a lost vehicle is a resource problem. In Vermillion it's an economy event. Ships are fabricated at a station from materials someone mined and refined. When one dies, half its cargo is destroyed and the rest spills into the wreck for whoever gets there first. Other players can salvage the hulk. Everyone aboard dies with the ship, and a dead character drops a body bag with everything they carried.

Where you fly decides how likely that is. Secure space has no damage at all. High security lets attacks land, but the attacker turns Criminal and is destroyed by police after 20 seconds. Low security has no police. Lawless has no rules, and it's the only place Iridium ore exists. A free Rookie Ship means you're never locked out.

Where From the Depths is better

• Depth of building. Over a thousand blocks, missiles, lasers, particle cannons, breadboards and custom AI. Nothing in Vermillion comes close yet.
• Content. A full campaign with factions, plus an adventure mode. Vermillion has guided onboarding missions and a player economy, not a campaign.
• Your own pace. Pause, save, experiment for hours. Vermillion's world keeps running when you log off.
• No risk unless you want it. Nobody takes your best design off you in FtD.
• It's finished. Years of updates and a Steam Workshop full of player designs.

Who should play which

If you design for the joy of designing and want the biggest toolbox, stay with From the Depths. If you've ever finished a build and wished someone else had to deal with it, someone who wants your cargo and has a design of their own, Vermillion is the game we're making for you.

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