The crew finds itself in unknown space somewhere in the Milky Way with a badly damaged ship and nearly depleted fuel reserves.

First objective is therefore finding resources for ship repairs and fuel while gathering intelligence about the surrounding space and also their own history.

Planets are randomly generated and numerous ship designs and crew selection allow for different playing styles.

Also, like many software at that time, a buggy CRT library included in Turbo Pascal was used, resulting in 'Runtime Error 200' messages on CPUs faster than approximately 200 MHz.

[2] Therefore, running the game on modern OSes and faster hardware needed emulation solutions like DOSBox.

The "Runtime error 200" bug was finally fixed with a fan patch in 2013, almost 20 years after the game's original release.

Ironseed received a Top Dog award from Home of the Underdogs,[11] who highlighted the game's replayability through the random planets and options, and allowance of different playing styles through the various ship designs and crews.