The best gun you'll never bring

In SHIPLESS you dive the Erebus, and most of the time you die there. When you escape, you drag out whatever you found and it banks into a stash. When you don't — and you usually don't — the loadout you carried in is gone. Not damaged. Gone. So every run opens with the same small, awful decision: do I bring the good gun, or the one I can afford to bury?

That's lifted straight from extraction shooters — Escape from Tarkov, Dark and Darker — where the fear of losing your kit is the whole point. It has no business working in a twenty-minute dice game. It works because the dice game is already merciless: the escape rate sits around one run in five, so gear is supposed to be scarce, and a loot loop that hands it back too gently would kill the dread we spent a year building.

We modelled the loop before we built the UI — a day-by-day simulation of dives, deaths, drops and sells. It caught two failures a pretty inventory screen would have hidden completely.

Break one: the chase items you never keep

The obvious policy — "always equip your best" — quietly destroys the fantasy. Any epic you found got equipped, carried into the next dive, and lost before a second one could ever bank. Thirty simulated days in, the stash held zero epics and zero legendaries. Loadout power flatlined. The chase had no ceiling to climb toward, because the ladder ate its own rungs.

The fix was the fantasy all along: you don't dive with your best. You hoard it.

Real extraction players carry disposables — commons, rares, the stuff they own three of — and hold back the chase gear for the run that's actually worth it. Once the sim adopted that policy, epics started to accumulate. So we made "afford to lose" legible in the UI: a lock on your last copy of anything, so the game never quietly talks you into burying the one relic you'll never see again.

Break two: playing more made you poorer

Then we simulated a grinder — eight dives a day, a punishing 20% escape rate — and watched them end bare. Deaths outran income; every session stripped the stash faster than loot refilled it. The economy had inverted: the more you played, the less you owned. That's the exact opposite of what a loot game is supposed to feel like.

The fix is a floor, not a faucet: a little scrap scavenged on every death, and a salvage crate every few dives, so a losing streak stings without becoming a spiral you can't climb out of. Quests top it up from the side. You can have a terrible night; you can't be zeroed by one.

"So gear just lets you win, right?"

The question every dice-crawler player asks. We measured it. A fully-kitted four-item loadout — best gun, sidearm, armour, a medkit — raises how far you get by about seven times: reaching the final boss goes from a few percent to roughly a quarter of runs. And your actual win rate? It barely moves — a point or two. Gear buys you survival, not victory. The boss stays skill-gated; the good loadout just gets you to the fight with your hands shaking.

That's the number that lets the whole thing exist. Because gear makes you last, not win, we can reward it, sell cosmetics around it, and let you agonise over it — without ever turning the game into pay-to-escape.

One more thing, for the purists: none of this touches the printed game. The stash, the extraction, the currencies — they live only in the digital layer. Put SHIPLESS on a table and it's a clean, self-contained run with no app and no ledger. The gear-fear is a thing the screen adds; it's never a thing the box needs.

The best gun you own is the one you're afraid to bring. Bringing it is always the wrong call, and always the one you make. Go lose something on the Erebus, or get the launch signal.