Silica leaves Early Access with a Centauri story campaign

Silica reached version 1.0 on November 3, adding a single-player Centauri campaign and new ways to direct armies or find competitive opponents. Existing Early Access owners receive the full update without an additional purchase, while the game’s announced full-release price is $24.99 or €24.99.

Developed by Martin Melichárek through Bohemia Incubator, Silica combines real-time strategy with direct first-person control. Its release announcement places two human factions, Sol and Centauri, and the native alien population in a three-sided war over the desert planet Baltarus.

Commanders gather resources, construct bases and produce units from above. Players can also take direct control of soldiers, vehicles or alien creatures in the same conflict. The distinction is one of responsibility and viewpoint: managing the army and operating an individual unit expose different parts of the battle.

A campaign with mid-mission saving

The Centauri campaign begins with a cinematic introduction and includes voiced briefings and dialogue. A three-dimensional planetary globe shows changes in territorial control between missions. Manual saving is available during missions, with automatic checkpoints alongside it.

Those save options are significant for a strategy game in which a battle may develop over an extended session. Players can stop partway through a mission rather than needing to finish its entire sequence before preserving progress. The campaign also adds a Centauri Jet Bike for traversing the terrain.

Orders and unit behavior receive specific fixes

The full 1.0 changelog adds patrol orders and formations, changes attack-move so units fight along their route and makes same-type unit selection faster. Structures can no longer block factory exits or refineries, while harvesters avoid resource fields near enemy bases.

These are concrete changes to how an intended plan becomes movement on the map. A commander still chooses the route and composition, but fewer orders should depend on manually recovering a vehicle from an obstructed exit or an idle harvesting state. The patch explicitly addresses stuck harvesters and vehicles caught on rocks.

Other additions include boarding and unloading transports as a unit, a revised tactical map, a gamepad RTS interface and PlayStation button prompts. The changelog also removes Arena from the game-mode menu, making the current selection different from older descriptions of the Early Access build.

Competitive 1v1 matchmaking lets players choose a faction and exclude maps before being matched, while cooperative Strategy retains adjustable difficulty. Expanded sandbox tools and Steam Workshop support provide another route through custom scenarios instead of the campaign or a standard competitive match.

The current Steam listing confirms Windows PC, online PvP, online co-op and Workshop support. It lists 48 GB of storage, a 16 GB memory minimum and 32 GB recommended. Steam records the original Early Access launch as May 3, 2023, so 1.0 arrives after roughly three and a half years of public development, with the new campaign joining the existing battlefield systems.