The player designs, builds and maintains a space station, and must keep its inhabitants happy while fending off alien threats.

In addition, they promised to release the game's Lua source code to allow the community to develop new content and features independently.

[11] After the release of v1.0 on November 21, 2014, twelve employees were laid off including the programmer and project lead JP LeBreton.

[12] On December 16, 2014 Greg Rice posted on the official technical support forums stating that there were no further plans for patches and there was no team assigned to the project.

[18] IGN gave the game a 6.8/10 score and commented: "Spacebase DF-9 is charming, and its random events give you more to do and worry about than something like Banished.