Build a civilization from the code you already explore.

The whole game is one loop, run at whatever pace you like: worlds produce, production buys the next investment, the investment makes the worlds produce more. It runs from a fresh repository to a star that has climbed as far as it can, and then past that, because a finished star is a decision, not an ending. Here it is end to end; every step has its own section below.

Every public repository is represented by one deterministic star system. Repository size, age, and language mix shape the scene, but the visual is generated from aggregate statistics only.

Use a system's scene to inspect planets, follow an orbit, establish a homeworld, evolve a star, or build Dyson structures when their research and materials are ready. Resyncing a public system updates its generated snapshot while retaining purchased world upgrades.

Your sky. The sky over your systems is painted from your whole public universe. Every planet adds its language's colour to the gas in proportion to its size, so the languages you build the most with fill the most sky, while grey languages mute it. Evolved stars tint the starlight, from warm red dwarfs to blue giants, and your karma sets the mood, calm and clear when you are trusted, torn and smoky when you are feared. Each of your systems lays the same sky out differently, and it carries your story: the shells of stars you sent supernova, a pulsar once you harness a neutron star, and a lensed galaxy if a black hole of yours is on public display. Private repositories never colour it. About one player in fifty gets a rare sky: a giant spiral galaxy overhead, or gas in every colour.

A public planet produces the material associated with its generated language identity once it has an atmosphere and living settlement. Production accumulates per planet, can be collected as soon as a whole unit is ready, and pauses after 24 hours until you collect.

Inventory: sell minerals at the Dockside Trader for Credits, keep them for recipes, or buy raw materials when a blueprint is short. Credits pay for early planetary work, research protocols, and major construction.

Meteorites: loose rock drifts through every system scene and can be cracked from the cockpit in pilot mode. Your hull's sensor rating widens the collection radius, and a flight's whole haul is banked when you return to the Hangar rather than piece by piece.

Player Market: list surplus materials for other captains, or buy what a recipe is short of without waiting on your own production. Market Negotiation research improves your cut, and Listing Capacity research raises how many offers you can keep open at once.

Every planet has a deterministic species dossier: a named people, lineage, ethos, and cultural focus. These identities are world flavor, not repository data, and stay stable as the planet develops.

Growing a settlement. A settled world grows on its own, over real time: left alone, a mild world takes about a month to grow from its first habitats to a stellar culture, quickly at first (two days to its first frontier colonies) and slower at each stage after (two weeks from a planetary culture to a stellar one). A harsher world (Rough, Harsh or Brutal, from its climate and features such as a supervolcano, a superstorm or tidal lock) grows slower still, less so for a people at home in it, and its survivors yield up to 20% more once they reach the stars. Supplies speed it up. Each shipment from the planet card makes it grow four times as fast for a day, and a world holds up to three days of supplies; when they run out it simply goes back to its own pace. What a shipment needs depends on the stage it feeds and on the people: each people grows on one kind of goods (volatiles, metals, gems or minerals), and a shipment that carries them costs a third of the Credits. A world in a system on one of your supply routes takes its shipments by convoy, which grow it six times as fast instead. At each new stage growth pauses until you choose one of three traits for its people, and they learn a trait of their own as well, shaped by how you answered their world's events. Every people is born with two traits, and every trait has a pro and a con: Productivity (which multiplies both output and growth), output, growth, supply prices, hazard losses, windfalls, civic project costs. Districts founded before traits keep their effect; worlds that grew before districts existed owe a choice for each stage they reached.

Peoples shaped by their worlds. A newly discovered world's people come from the world itself: ocean worlds raise tidal peoples, a supervolcano forges them, a superstorm makes storm-riders, river country delta builders, ice and geysers frost clans, a world locked to its star twilight dwellers, and great worlds or small ones their own kind. Each family has names in its own sound, values of its own, and the settlement style its cities follow on the globe. A people living on the kind of world they suit is at home there, a world trait worth up to +8% output, so a Gene Seed is a real choice: the picker shows how at home each species would be, next to the people the world would raise on its own. Worlds you already have keep their people.

Choose one developed planet as your account-wide homeworld. Its owning system becomes your Home system and appears at the top of that galaxy's Navigation console for quick return travel.

World traits: every generated planet also carries a climate band (frozen, cold, temperate, or scorched) that shapes its surface and adds a trait of its own. Rings and moons are separate traits now rather than one shared roll, and a world can have both; moon count keeps mattering as it grows.

Precursor legacies: an ancient world carries the legacy of the precursor race that came before it. Each race grants a different boon, since one discounts Credits and another amplifies refinement, so a dossier is worth reading before you commit a terraform.

A single planet tops out at Stellar culture. Eras carry the whole system further, and each stage asks for more of its worlds fully developed, so the ladder rewards settling every planet rather than perfecting one.

Each era is unlocked by its own research protocol plus Credits and materials, and adds a system-wide production share on top of whatever your star, Dyson layers, and refinement bonuses already give. The shares deliberately shrink as you climb, so the ladder stays worth finishing without compounding out of control. An advanced system wears a visible era ring in its scene.

The Crafting Bench converts raw minerals into components such as Alloy Plates, Quantum Cores, Stellar Catalysts, Singularity Cells, and Dyson Lattices. Upgrade the bench to reveal later blueprints.

Quick craft builds a recipe and everything it is missing in one click. Research Fabrication Scheduling (Quality of life) and it will chain through components made from other crafted parts instead of stopping at the first gap. It counts shared intermediates once, and never plans around a Credits shortfall or a recipe you haven't unlocked.

Research is a sequence of persistent protocols. Requirements show what you need, what you already hold, and whether you can craft or purchase the missing materials. The Research Lab groups everything into six sectors:

Public stars climb from smaller stellar stages toward a Blue Giant. Private black holes evolve through color tiers using Void Essence components. A Blue Giant can support a three-layer Dyson development path: build a frame layer, install its panels, then unlock the next layer.

Reforging. A world you have taken all the way (an atmosphere, 100% settlement, all four civic projects) can be reforged once you have researched Planetary reforging: it comes apart in its orbit, and what re-forms is a larger, barren world. Everything built there is gone and nothing is refunded; the ground is permanently worth more once it is settled again. A world can be reforged three times, each time a quarter larger, and its moons grow with it.

World events. A settled world has a life of its own, and what happens to it depends on what it is: its climate, its rings and moons, what it yields, who lives there and what they value, and whether it is your homeworld, has a hangar, or was surveyed or found ancient. Every couple of days it may roll a windfall that multiplies its output for anywhere from half a day to a day and a half, or a decision that asks something of you, a few of them with a third, middle answer. Each answer moves your karma one way or the other and is written into the world's dated chronicle, shown when you Focus on it, and some answers come back about six days later. A world rarely rolls the same event twice running. An unanswered decision simply passes; nothing is lost by being away.

Civilizations from orbit. A settled world's night side shows its people. A cradle is a few lights round the first landing, which becomes the capital. A frontier spreads toward what its lineage likes: tidal peoples hug the coasts, rooted peoples follow the rivers, forge and aerial peoples take the high ground, crystal minds build fewer, larger cities. Networked worlds join their major cities with routes of light, faint sea lanes where a route crosses water, and planetary cultures light whole continents. The civic projects leave landmarks: the frontier charter founds a second colony on another landmass, the transit grid brightens the routes, the planetary exchange turns the capital into a hub, and the launch authority puts a blinking beacon on the coast nearest the equator that sends rockets up. A stellar culture keeps a ring of stations in orbit.

Natural features. Every world has features of its own, tagged on its card and derived from what it is: volcanic rifts and the odd supervolcano, river country, ocean worlds, ice caps, aurorae on worlds with a strong magnetic field, impact basins on airless rocks, tidal lock close to the star, rift valleys on a single great landmass, geyser fields on cold worlds with a moon, and on about one world in six with air a superstorm, a hurricane the size of a continent with a wide open eye that never stops. Each sky is alive too: its cloud slowly turns from one kind to another through the day, among cirrus wisps, mackerel cirrocumulus, cirrostratus veils, altocumulus rolls, altostratus sheets, dark nimbostratus, lumpy stratocumulus, stratus blankets, cumulus heaps and cumulonimbus towers, with the mix set by the climate. Features feed the world's events: an aurora bloom or a geyser surge is a windfall, while an eruption, melting caps, a drought or a storm surge is a hazard that costs output until you deal with it, kindly at a price or harshly for a bargain and a karma hit, and left unanswered it simply costs. Six Planetary engineering protocols, after the last civic project, pay by feature strength: Geothermal energy on volcanic worlds, Hydro power on river country, Tidal generators on ocean worlds with a moon, Cryo mining on ice, Magnetospheric harvest where the aurorae are, and a Solar array that pays by the star's light at the world's orbit.

Remnant roles. A neutron star, the remnant of a supernova or a scouted pulsar, can be harnessed once Pulsar harnessing is researched. Choose a role and the star itself produces: a Beacon yields Credits, a Forge Alloy Plate, an Observatory Quantum Cores, a Refinery Singularity Cells, collected with everything else. The rate rises with every settled world in the system, so rebuilding is what makes a role pay. Roles can be changed at the full price.

Role perks and supply routes. Owning a Pulsar Beacon makes scout expeditions launch for 25% less; owning a Deep Observatory makes research protocols cost 15% fewer Credits. And a harnessed remnant with a finished warp gate can supply one other system in the same galaxy whose gate is finished, and every world there yields 15% more while the route stands. Set routes from the galaxy card on Manage.

The remnant ladder. A harnessed neutron star can be spun up in three researched stages (Recycled Pulsar, Magnetar, Millisecond Pulsar), each multiplying its role's output, up to double, and each changing how it looks and sweeps. Fusion is over for a remnant, so this is accretion: matter falling onto the star is what drives it.

Raids. Your reputation decides who comes calling. Above the neutral karma band nobody does. In the band, the occasional raiding party arrives; below it, warbands come often, hit harder and pay far more for repelling them. You get eight hours' warning and a day-long siege to fly to that system, press Engage, and clear every wave in the combat arena. A siege nobody answers plunders the system: half output for two days, with nothing standing in for you. Raids are announced wherever you are and listed on Manage.

Supernova. A Blue Giant is a short-lived star, and once the Core-collapse protocol is researched its owner can let it go. The star implodes and detonates, leaving a neutron star; every world in the system is stripped back to bare rock, the Dyson sphere and era ladder are destroyed, and half the sphere's materials come back as salvage. In exchange, every world you own, now and in future, yields +8% permanently, stacking up to five collapses. The warp gate and reserved orbits survive, and the remnant system can be settled again from scratch. It cannot be undone.

Galaxies are named collections of systems. Mark a galaxy public to share its public-facing systems through Explore. Private systems remain visually and textually scrubbed even when their owner visits a private collection.

Inside a galaxy scene, Navigation lets you warp between member systems. Your Home system receives its own top row; the Orbital Market handles local purchasing and closes when Navigation opens so the scene stays readable.

The Hangar is where a flyable ship actually comes together: pick a hull, mount weapons, load ammunition and a fuel cell, paint it, and launch. Annexing further systems costs progressively more as you expand, so growth is a deliberate choice rather than a sweep.

The Shipyard runs two pulls from one Stardust balance: a hull gacha for ships you fly and a weapon gacha for the hardware you mount on them. Pull singly for a full 3D reveal, or take a ten-pull for a summary grid.

Tiers and pity: everything rolls across Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary, and Mythic. Counters guarantee an Epic or better within 20 pulls and a Legendary or better within 50, so a cold streak still ends somewhere.

Duplicates aren't wasted: a repeat hull becomes an upgrade instead of a second copy, stacking about +1.5% per copy up to +25%, and rare-tier hulls upgrade harder than that baseline. A repeat weapon lands in your inventory as a spare copy: feed spares to any weapon from the Inventory to fill its Level bar (up to +25% at Level 18), or switch on Prioritize leveling and that weapon's duplicates feed it straight from the pull. The hold has 100 slots: one for each kind of material, part or module you hold, however many of it (all your Ion Shards share one slot), and one for each spare weapon copy, since every weapon carries its own level. Hold expansion research adds 5 slots a level, endlessly. When it's full, Collect All leaves new kinds on your planets, and a pull, craft or purchase that would need a new slot is refused.

Hulls no pull can roll: ten ships, two at every tier from Common through Legendary, are not in the gacha at any odds and cannot be rented. The only way to get one is to recover its hull schematic in the field and claim it from Artifacts, which hands the ship straight over: no materials, no build step. A schematic you already hold never drops twice, and rarer hulls are far rarer finds.

Other routes to a ship: rent one. Common and Rare hulls are rentable for a fixed window, and a rental flies with fixed cosmetics since there's no equity in painting a hull you don't own. Loadouts are remembered per ship, so switching hulls restores that hull's own setup rather than one shared configuration.

Paint bay: pick any hex tint, then layer a finish over it: Matte, Gloss, Gunmetal, Chromatic, or Pearlescent. A finish is bought once and free to toggle forever after. Your Profile's Collection view tracks the whole hull and weapon roster, including what you haven't pulled yet.

Manage keeps two standing formations of five hulls each: an assault squadron and a defense squadron. Where you put a hull decides the lane it holds — the front line takes the fire and hits softer, artillery at the back hits hardest and only takes the leak once the line in front of it falls.

Each squadron shows its power broken down by lane, and each hull shows what it is worth in the slot you put it in, so moving one hull between lanes tells you immediately whether it helped. A hull can only appear once in a squadron, but the same hull can sit in both. Your five also fly as an actual formation on the page, front line ahead and artillery behind, with Assault and Defense on separate tabs.

Squadrons fight on the Battles page. Matchmaking lists captains whose defence squadron sits in a fair range of your assault squadron; attack one and the fight resolves on the spot, five against five in their lanes, with a round-by-round report both of you can read. Win and you take a share of their stored, uncollected production; lose and any bounty on your head goes to them. Who you hit decides your karma: putting down a marked captain earns it, robbing a protected one costs a lot and pays the most. A captain is off the table for a day after being attacked, and the same captain cannot be hit twice in three days. Nobody in range? Fight a mirror match of your own two squadrons, for the report alone.

A hull fights with what is bolted to it. Every weapon card now shows a combat power: its sustained damage per second, counting how many shots it fires, how often, and its Level. Mount better weapons and the hull's squadron power rises; the number on the Squadrons page is the number a battle uses. Autofill strongest fills a squadron with your five best hulls, each in its best lane, and every battle report plays the fight back in 3D.

A fight opens with the two fleets apart, and they close on each other round by round. Every weapon has a range and a rule, shown on its card. Scatterguns and flak are short range and splash onto the ship behind their target, so they belong in the front line. Autoguns and repeaters are medium range and fire straight at the enemy line. Railguns and lances are long range and ignore half their target's armour. Missiles, mortars and torpedoes are long range and arc over the line onto the rearmost ship they can reach. A shot past its range still lands, but weaker. The side that is outranged closes the distance, and the faster fleet decides how quickly, so a quick brawling squadron is on a slow gun line in a couple of rounds. A slot on the Squadrons page turns amber when a gun there spends too much of the fight out of reach.

You need a defence squadron of at least three hulls to be matched at all, attacking or defending. Your squadrons are filled with your strongest hulls the first time you open Squadrons or Battles. Your win and loss record is on your profile, where you can hide it from other captains.

Launch from the Hangar and you fly the ship yourself, in the system scene, from the cockpit or a chase camera, so toggle whichever reads better. The in-flight Controls panel lists the same bindings:

On a phone or tablet the cockpit shows touch controls instead: a left-thumb stick (push up to thrust, sideways to turn, proportional to how far you push) and right-thumb pads: Fire, which also locks rockets while held, plus Climb and Dive for altitude. There is no boost or strafe on a phone; the turrets do the aiming, so flying is steering, height and shooting. The right-hand icon rail folds behind a menu button so your thumb has the edge. Hold the phone sideways: the cockpit rearranges for landscape, with the gauges between your thumbs and the whole screen given to the scene. A paired keyboard still works alongside them.

Guns follow the mouse: turret mounts track your aim point in flight while fixed guns stay bore-sighted, and every shot leaves the muzzle it is actually modeled on. Hull speed, handling, and sensors all come from the hull you chose plus whatever is equipped, so a faster hull genuinely flies faster.

Returning to the Hangar settles the flight in one pass and shows a flight report: the haul you cracked, ammunition spent, and what the sortie cost you. Meteorites, ammo, and fuel are all banked at that moment rather than per event.

Mounts are yours to place. Each hull has a number of weapon sockets, and ascending a ship earns it one more (up to six). Any weapon fits any socket, and the Hangar's Ship designer lets you drag each gun to where you want it on the hull, turn and tilt it, resize it and mirror it to the other side, saved per ship. Multi-socket hulls fire each mount on its own cadence and pattern rather than every socket copying the first. A few hulls also carry a built-in weapon baked into the hull itself: always armed, never removable, and firing alongside whatever you mount.

Ammunition is a single active load, crafted like any other resource and unlocked through the sequential Ordnance Refinement line. Four kinetic tiers step up a real engineering ladder (Ballistic Slug, Sabot Cartridge, Railgun Slug, Plasma-Jacketed Penetrator), each carrying a larger firepower bonus than the last.

Rockets are a dedicated load for launcher frames. Homing Rocket I, II, and III fly a real profile: an unguided moment off the rail, a boost, then a coast where a late hard turn costs range. Hold T to acquire a lock, and guidance leads a moving target instead of chasing where it was, aiming too far off the nose breaks the lock for good, and a rival drifting through your cone can't steal it. Higher tiers reach a lock sooner and turn harder in flight.

Heavy guns trade cadence for weight. The heavy slug weapons (Tack Driver, Ion Lance, Marksman Railgun, Brass Driver, Siege Lance and Breach Driver) fire one round at a time and slower than anything else, but each slug lands several bolts' worth of damage, the slower the gun the bigger the hit, and a quarter of it goes straight through an enemy's shield to the hull. Land your shots and they keep pace with the spread guns of their tier; duplicates make the slugs heavier rather than more numerous. Their card shows the multiplier.

Lasers don't use rounds at all. A beam weapon burns your ship's own fuel as its ammunition while you hold the trigger, at a rate each laser sets for itself, so it fires on whatever ammo is loaded, or none, and holding a beam down eats into the same tank that gets you home.

The Training Range is the safe place to learn: your current loadout, live targets, no stakes. Nothing there can strand or destroy your ship.

Combat warp sectors are the real thing. Four destinations escalate in difficulty, each deploying a squadron of hostile hulls with their own health bars that has to be cleared:

Staying alive: incoming fire hits your shield first, then spills into hull. Every hull carries a shield of its own, larger on higher tiers, and it slowly recharges. An Aegis Shield Generator in the shield slot adds to it, and the Shield Field Theory, Harmonics, and Recirculation protocols raise what it adds. Armor reduces what reaches the hull but never makes an encounter harmless. Pilot Training research adds flat stat boosts that apply to every hull you fly.

The Scout deck extends your fleetline into unmanned work. Fabricate Command, Reactor, Drive, Defense, and High-Resolution Sensor components, then commission the drone to reveal its animated hangar view.

Eight darkzones, Cinder Veil perimeter through Sable Choir graveyard, run as dispatched missions tracked in a mission table. Hazards out there include debris impact, static discharge, thermal stress, and navigation shear, and they cost the drone hull. It repairs passively while docked; Scout Field Repair and Scout Autonomous Repair research make that recovery faster, and hull fittings reduce hazards without ever making the drone immune.

What comes back: salvage caches, repair modules, and recovered blueprints: thruster patterns, sensor masts, autonomy cores, lattice frames, and schematics for gear like the Twin Autocannon Pod, Auxiliary Fusion Generator, and Aegis Shield Generator. A recovered blueprint fits the drone it came back to, and a deeper run gives back more. Rarest of all is a hull schematic: claim it in Artifacts and the ship it describes is yours, and it is the only way those hulls ever appear.

Your Profile tracks exploration, collection, settlement, construction, and research milestones, plus a Collection view of every hull and weapon you've pulled. Earned achievements can be claimed once for Credits, with a transmission appearing when a new milestone unlocks.

Leaderboards are public and rank every captain on five counters the server owns rather than anything a client can claim: best wave reached in The Tide, hostiles destroyed, meteorites cracked, stars collapsed, and karma. Each board shows the top ten and where you sit.

Daily check-in: Events & Rewards pays 100 Stardust every day you check in, plus Credits or materials, and thirty days in a row earns a free hull.

Nothing here is a trap. A casual captain who logs in when they feel like it will still climb the whole ladder. The difference is pace, not access. These are the places where deliberate play actually compounds, so you can decide which ones you care about.