Your explorer signs colonies and chat messages. Colonizing needs level 20, chatting level 16.
Sign in with VisoYour Viso persona: its name, avatar and level come with it.
Create a new keyA key made in the game. Its level is built here (a few seconds of work). Back it up from the Atlas.
Import a keyA key you backed up before (64 hex characters).
Your explorer walks with ← → (or A / D), by holding ◀ ▶, or by dragging the landscape. Walking new ground by hand slowly fills your hyperdrive fuel ⚡. 🚶 Auto makes it walk on its own the way it faces and gather whatever comes within reach, even in a background tab, but it burns fuel (⚡1 a screen) and stops when the tank is empty. In the Atlas (Your explorer) you choose your suit colour, skin, headgear and backpack.
When something is close to your explorer (the middle of the screen), click it or press E: plants 🌿 are harvested, creatures 🐾 captured, ore deposits ⛏ mined, fuel cells (+10⚡), map fragments (your next jump costs half) and, online, time shards (your flag's time runs ×3 for 90 s) picked up. Flyers (birds, sky jellyfish, flying whales) are captured as they pass over you. Some worlds keep a page of 📜 Ilen's diary near where you land: each one is the next page of her story (read it in the Atlas). What you take grows back the next day. Your bag is shown under the world's name.
Turn on 🗡 Battles in the ☰ menu and wild creatures, drawn in red, wait on some stretches of each world (the same for everyone each day). Reach one and you fight it: each round you both strike, the faster first. Its parts make its strength: big ones live longer, horns hit harder, more legs are faster. Creatures at your side grow with every win (their level shows in the battle), and the ones best against the wild creature's element are the ones that come. The farther from where you land, the higher their level (and one more on dying worlds). Up to 3 creatures from your home (the strongest that walk) fight at your side, and once a battle your ✨ Special move hits twice as hard. Each creature has the element of its world's culture: 🔥 (desert, war, apocalyptic) burns 🌿 (jungle, temperate), which holds against 🌀 (japanese, western), which blows away ❄ (nordic, arctic), which puts out 🔥. A blow on the element it beats hits ×1.5, on the one that beats it ×0.75, so pick your home creatures well. 🌿 Heal eats 3 plants instead of striking; worn down to a quarter of its life, a creature can be 🐾 captured (6 times in 10). Every third round it gathers its strength and then hits twice as hard: that is the round to 🛡 Guard (no blow, half the damage). Some are ⭐ elite, two levels above the rest, and they get tougher as your battle level grows. Win and you take ore, and your battle level grows (more life, harder blows); lose and you escape leaving half your bag; or flee for ⚡5. Off by default.
The 🏗 Build dialog shows bars for what your home lacks: food stock (the plants in your bag), food, homes, defence against the biggest pirate raid, and stables (each holds 8 creatures, more when upgraded). The weakest one is named, with the cheapest way to mend it: a new building (marked ⭐ in the list) or, when it is not dearer, an upgrade of one you already have (⭐ in Your buildings). The dialog folds into sections (needs, fleet, breeding, crossing, build, your buildings): tap a title to open or close it.
In the ☰ menu, ▶ Sound plays or mutes the music (and the sounds of the place under it), and 🔊 Effects switches the little sounds (gathering, building, battles) on or off on their own. Both choices are kept.
A new explorer gets a short tour (walk, gather, jump, Atlas, Auto), each step done by doing it. Skip it, or run it again from the ☰ menu (🔁 Tutorial).
Some buildings on the nearest ground can be walked into: their front fades and you see a room. A chest waits inside, new every day (fuel, plants or ore): take it as you would anything else.
Rocks, logs, crates and ice lie in the way: they stop you until you jump over them with Space, ↑ (or W) the ⤴ button or, on a touch screen, a double tap on the landscape; on a world walked into, ↑ walks and Space jumps. A jump is lower on a heavy world. Auto jumps by itself.
About one world in six is walked into rather than across: a path runs towards the horizon, and ↑ ↓ (or ◀ ▶, or dragging) take you along it. What lies ahead grows as you approach; take it when it reaches your feet.
Every species, plant, relic and kind of world you see goes into the Atlas, with achievements and a daily mission. Point at (or tap) anything to see what it is. The 📜 Log in the ☰ menu keeps this session's last messages.
New world jumps to a random star (100⚡); the Map shows nearby stars (closer = cheaper, visited = free). World of the day and shared links are free.
Every 14 days a new expedition starts, the same for everyone: five stages to reach in order, each a kind of world to find. Each stage refuels you; the last one earns the season's badge. See it in the Atlas.
Each culture, and the aliens, speaks its own language. Every new inhabited world teaches you a word, every relic two. Buildings and relics carry inscriptions: point at them and the words you know are translated.
On a world you like, press 🏠 Settle here. From anywhere, 🏠 Go home brings you back for free. Creatures you captured are released there. With 🏗 Build you spend plants and ore on buildings where you stand (you can move them later from the same dialog): they produce while you are away (up to a day's worth), improve gathering, make jumps cheaper, and house and feed your people (huts and castles house them, mills and domes feed them; the more people, the more your home produces). Your people walk among your buildings, and they eat: each one 🌿0.1 an hour from your bag while you are away. With no plants to eat, some starve; once fed again, the empty homes slowly fill.
⬆ Upgrades: in 🏗 Build, under Your buildings, each building has an Upgrade button, up to 3 times. Every level adds half of what it gave at first (people housed and fed, things made an hour, defence, stable room) and costs its price once more for each level, so you can grow without building more. Fusing keeps the higher level; a damaged building must be repaired first.
🏙 Cities: on a planet you colonized (your flag is there) press 🏙 Found a city (🌿30 ⛏30, a little more for each one; up to 8). A city is built, upgraded, repaired and fed like your home, and produces while you are away (collected when you arrive there). Your creatures, garden, ships and breeding stay with the home planet. Pirates and sieges can come for a city too, it counts in the 🏆 leaderboard with your home, other explorers see it on that planet, and it exists only while the planet is still your colony.
Your civilization level grows with people, buildings (and their variety) and creatures: from a camp to a village, a town, a city, a capital.
☠ Pirates may attack your home every 8 hours (the same raids for everyone, three days after you settle), with bigger crews for bigger civilizations. Castles and towers defend it, and so do your people and creatures. Repelled pirates leave ore from their wreck; if they win, a building is damaged and does nothing until you repair it (half its cost), and they leave you alone for a day. You find out when you come home.
🚀 Fleet: each Stable or Workshop gives a ship (up to 3). From 🏗 Build send one to a world you have visited (fuel by distance, 1-4 hours): it gathers plants and ore there, sometimes a new plant, and brings them back even while the game is closed. Dying worlds give more, but may take the ship.
🧬 Breeding: each Stable at home lets two species living there have a young one a day (🌿10 ⛏5). It takes each part from one parent, sometimes something new, and joins your bestiary and your home; it can breed in turn, up to 3 generations from the wild. The same parents always give the same young.
🌸 Crossing: each Mill lets two wild plant species of your garden give a hybrid a day (🌿8 ⛏4): it grows in your garden and goes into your herbarium. 🔗 Fusing two buildings of different kinds (🌿10 ⛏10) makes one that does what both did; each new pair adds to your civilization's variety, but a raid damages both halves.
✎ Names (online): the first explorer to name a species or a plant from the Atlas gives it its common name, which everyone then sees.
⚔ Sieges (online): land on another explorer's home and press ⚔ Besiege (⚡20 ⛏10). Stay there: every 2 minutes another raider joins. When you attack, your raiders against their defence decide it: win and you bring back ore. Once a day per home. A besieged home fights it like a pirate raid. Homes marked 🕊 Peaceful neither besiege nor get besieged. You can besiege someone's city the same way, on its planet.
Worlds age (shown as age N/100) and collapse, then their star gives birth to a new one. After age 70 a world is unstable: tremors, a red sky, meteors, but richer ore. Gravity grows too (up to ×2): you walk slower, reach less, and building costs more. If it collapses while you are there you escape, leaving half your bag behind. If your home's world is dying, go to a young world and press 🚀 Move home here before it is too late.
A world born from a star where another one collapsed remembers it: the ruins of its buildings stand here and there, one of its species survives, and the homes explorers built there (yours too) are left as ruins. The Atlas keeps the chronicle of the star you are on: every world it held, who lived there and what survived.
The first time you harvest a plant species you also get its seeds. At home they are sown in your garden, so the plants you discover grow among your buildings.
Worlds have events on a clock everyone shares, lasting an hour or two: a ☄ meteor shower leaves meteorites full of ore, a 🐾 migration brings a herd from a nearby star to capture, a 🧳 trader swaps plants and ore for ore, fuel or a creature from another world. Dying worlds have more meteor showers. The map marks the worlds that have an event right now.
On the Freenet and web versions you sign in (on Freenet with your Viso persona or a key made in the game, on the web with a key made in the game) and share the galaxy with everyone: stay on a planet to plant your flag 🚩 (its time keeps counting in a background tab only while you auto-walk), your home is seen by everyone who visits it, and there is a leaderboard 🏆 and a galaxy chat 💬. Someone who stays on a planet longer than its colonist can take it, and the colonist can take it back. Your persona needs a level to take part (20 to plant flags and publish a home, 16 to chat); a key made in the game earns it in a few seconds, and you can back it up from the Atlas. The chat is live: only the last 15 minutes are shown.