Derelict ship map generator

Made by an AI agent: it wrote the tool that draws these maps and this page. The maps are drawn by code on a grid, not by an image generator.

Sci-fi horror runs on derelicts: the ship that stopped answering, the hold that's open to vacuum, the medbay still running on battery. Bulkhead's generator makes one in a click — a real deck plan with breaches in the hull, most lights dead, and a room key whose notes already lean sinister — then lets you edit every square.

Generate a derelict in the demo Five free derelicts, ready made

One it made earlier

This is Vantage Station, the daily derelict for 22 September, exactly as the generator wrote it. Nobody edited it.

Vantage Station, a derelict station deck plan in blueprint style with hull breaches, numbered rooms and doors

Vantage Station took a micrometeoroid swarm broadside about six weeks ago. Half the hull is open to space, the rest is holding by habit. Crew of nine: three bodies aboard, one pod launched, the others unaccounted for.

Hazard Cracked O2 line. Sparks here mean fire, then no fire, then nothing at all.

Log fragment (Tech) “Sealed sections 3 through 7. If anyone is in there, they are not answering the comm.”

Log fragment (Eng.) “Patched the aft seam twice. It will not hold a third time. Told her. She knows.”

Salvage Autodoc still charged. Two courses of trauma meds, one vial with the label scraped off.

Hook The salvage claim on this hull was filed two days ago by someone who has not been here.

The whole GM key, room by room · open this one in the editor

What makes it a derelict

Breaches — two to four holes in the hull, so rooms open onto space and the wall data reflects it.
Darkness — half the lights removed; in a VTT with dynamic lighting the crew's torches do the rest.
A story — every derelict gets a cause of death (reactor scram, quarantine, mutiny, boarding, misjump, cold-soak, a specimen loose, a debris swarm), a GM brief, hazards and log fragments placed in the rooms they belong to, salvage, and a hook. Sixteen openings, forty-eight log fragments, so no two read alike. One trail runs through three rooms, each note naming the next by its key number, so the players have a route to follow.

A free derelict every day

The generator makes one dead ship or station a day: PNG, .dd2vtt with walls, doors and lights, and a GM key with hazards, log fragments and salvage. All CC0. RSS.

Five ready-made derelicts

Each has its own page with the PNG, the .dd2vtt, a print PDF and the room key. Free, CC0, open any of them in the editor to change it.

MSV Cassandra: a breached hull with a cold reactor, eight rooms.
MSV Tamarind: a freighter over two decks, seventeen rooms, breaches on both.
ISV Osprey: a corvette with a cold reactor.
Lantern shuttle: a tiny shuttle. Something got in.
Corvid Station: two decks, breached and half-lit.

Run it

In the full version, export Universal VTT and import into Foundry, Roll20 or Owlbear Rodeo — walls, doors, windows and the surviving lights come with it. Tick Player map to export a version without key numbers or notes for handouts. Print the PDF at 1″ per square for the table.

In the free demo, Save the map on the card under a generated ship saves each deck as one image with the story, the hook and every numbered room’s notes beside the map: one file to drop into a chat before the session, or to print for the GM.

A generated derelict freighter's upper deck saved from the demo: the deck plan on the left with breached, numbered rooms, and on the right the ship's name, its story, last log entry, hook, and a numbered list of all twelve rooms with their hazards, salvage and trail clues.

Works with

Mothership, Alien RPG, Death in Space, Traveller, Stars Without Number, Starfinder — any grid-based sci-fi game.

Open the free demo Guide

The full version

The demo is the whole editor and generator, free, and saves a PNG with a small watermark. The full version, $12, is one HTML file that works offline, with no watermark. It exports the .dd2vtt with walls, doors and lights and the print PDF for ships you make yourself, and it makes 5, 10 or 20 ships at once in one zip, each with its own story. Every derelict it generates also turns into a one-shot adventure PDF, ready to run: here is one.

Here is one, five derelict freighters from a single press of the button. These are the first lines of FLEET.md as the generator wrote them, nothing edited:

ISV Sparrowhawk was carrying something alive in a crate marked as ore. It got out between one watch and the next.

FTV Merlin Drift jumped with a bad plot and arrived nowhere. The stars outside match no chart.

ICV Tallow Reach split down the middle and stayed split. Six of the crew wanted to turn back, three wanted to press on, and the ship drifted while the argument went from words to doors to worse.

ISV Palisade went dark on a long haul when the main bus dropped and would not come back. The crew pulled every blanket aboard into the galley and ran one heater off the battery.

MSV Larkspur Dawn is still warm aft. The reactor tripped, the coolant loop failed a day later, and the engineer sealed the drive section with herself inside it.

Each of the five also comes with two decks, fifteen or sixteen keyed rooms, and hazards, logs and salvage that belong to its own story.

Get the full version — $12 What else is in it

Bulkhead is made by Bananafest Destiny. Foundry VTT, Roll20 and Owlbear Rodeo are their owners' trademarks; game names are mentioned only to say what the maps work with. The code and this page were written by an AI assistant under human direction.