You woke up somewhere with no idea where. The ship has instruments and fuel. It does not have a map, and nothing is going to give it one.
So you make your own. Declare where you are zero, pick some axes, and start measuring. Everything you ever see is in that private frame — it bears no relation to anyone else's coordinates, including Earth's.
The way home is the almanac: seven pulsars with exact positions relative to Earth. Useless on their own. Match three of them to stars you charted yourself and you can work out where your frame sits in the real universe, and therefore where Earth is.
Everything costs hours, and the clock is what the run is scored on. A range is 1.5 hours, a parallax 4, a light curve 18, stripping a derelict 30 — and flying is the big one at 0.35 hours per parsec, so a full 120 pc jump is nearly two days gone before you have measured anything. Fuel is the constraint that can end a run; time is the one you are judged by.
Nothing here is faked. Every uncertainty the game shows you is one it actually computed, and the difficulty comes from the geometry rather than from the game deciding to be hard.
Ranging a star tells you how far away it is — a sphere around you, somewhere on which it sits. One sphere is useless. Two intersect in a circle. Three intersect in exactly two points.
So a star needs 3 sightings from 3 different places before it can be solved at all, and the only way to get them is to fly somewhere and measure again. Wandering is not flavour around the mechanic — wandering is the mechanic.
Range all in reach measures everything within 150 pc,
at 1.5 hours each.On the chart, each charted star is a pin with a stalk down to the reference plane so depth is readable, and a wireframe sphere that is its genuine 1-sigma uncertainty — the star is inside it about two thirds of the time.
Three vantage points define a plane, and three spheres meet at two points mirrored through that plane. Both fit your measurements perfectly. The game cannot tell them apart and neither can you.
That is what a red pair on the chart means: two candidate positions, dash-linked, often hundreds of parsecs apart. Picking the wrong one is a real mistake, not a rounding concern.
The fix is the climb slider. Left at zero your flight path stays flat, every vantage point lands in the same plane, and nothing ever resolves. Move off that plane and the ambiguity collapses.
The star card's off-plane baseline is the number that governs it. If a solve cannot separate the two candidates, the game says so rather than guessing — you will never be shown a confident position that is secretly a coin flip.
This costs more than an untidy map. An ambiguous star is barred from position fixes — a reference that might be in either of two places cannot tell you where you are — so a chart full of red pairs is a chart you cannot navigate by. Flying flat does not just leave stars unresolved; it leaves you unable to find yourself.
A jump goes roughly where you aimed it, not exactly. Dead reckoning does not know about the error, so it accumulates: every jump you are a little more lost than you think, and Your position ± tracks how much.
This compounds into everything. A sighting taken while 8 pc adrift is an 8 pc wrong reference, permanently — you cannot chart a star better than you knew where you were standing.
Take a fix is the cure: range stars you have already charted and
solve backwards for yourself. It is only as good as the chart it is taken
against, so fixing against a poor chart tells you little, and the game will say
so rather than pretend.
It has two requirements worth knowing before you need them:
Errors add in quadrature, so ten jumps leave you about three times worse, not ten. The second half of a long run costs proportionally less certainty than the first — which is what makes "when do I stop and fix" a real decision.
The Sky tab draws your chart on top of what is actually out of the window: for every charted star, a green ring where your chart predicts it should appear, tethered to the dot where it really is. The tether is the error, and a star you have charted well hides its ring under itself.
The pattern of those tethers tells you which of your two problems you have, which no number on any panel will:
Take a fix.A red ring is an ambiguous star, and its mirror candidate is drawn with
no tether — there is nothing to tie it to, because the chart does
not know which of the two is the real one. Turn the whole overlay off with
show chart overlay on sky when you want to look at the sky itself.
They fail in different directions, so none of them replaces the others.
Time variable — watches a
variable star pulse and reads its distance off the period–luminosity
relation. It needs no baseline and no reach, only that the star is
bright enough to watch. Good to about 8% of the distance, and it
costs 18 hours, because you are waiting out a pulsation.That last one is the opening move. Before your first jump there is no baseline, so parallax has nothing to work with and the scanner is all you have — except that several dozen variables are already visible and will each tell you how far away they are without your going anywhere. After you have moved once, parallax measures the same stars three times better, and the light curve becomes a slow second opinion. Select a variable and the button prices itself; it declines, free of charge, when something better was already measured from where you are standing.
Turn on show parallax shift on sky to see the traces. The slider
hides stars that moved more than the threshold, which reads backwards
until you try it: near stars swing right across the sky and bury the small
shifts of the distant ones, and the distant ones are the whole point.
Instruments take damage from approaching hazardous stars unshielded. Damage
costs reach as well as precision, which is the sharper loss.
Repair sensors costs hours in proportion to how bad it is.
A jump costs 2.5 fuel to start plus 0.11 per parsec. The fixed part matters: a hundred small hops drift almost nowhere but cost a hundred start-ups, so precision by shuffling is available and expensive rather than free.
Approach & scoop flies to the selected star and refuels there
— if you arrive. You have to get within 12 pc of the real star, and
what you are flying at is your chart's guess at where it is, from a
position you are only fairly sure of. Both errors stand between you and
the tank.
You cannot refuel at a star you cannot find. That is the whole of the fuel system, and it runs the wrong way when you are in trouble: a ship low on fuel stops surveying and runs for a tank, which lets the chart rot, which makes the next approach miss, which costs the fuel anyway. Taking a fix before a final approach is worth the hours — a well-surveyed ship arrives almost every time, a badly adrift one is playing a coin flip.
Which stars give up fuel depends on your scoop grade; which you can survive depends on your shielding. Both are in the Survey panel, with their ceilings. At grade 0 that is red dwarfs and the occasional variable, and nothing else — 14 fuel over 26 hours from a dwarf, which is survivable and grim. Main sequence, giants and white dwarfs all need grade 1, and that single upgrade is what opens the field up. Diving into something hot without the shielding for it does not kill you; it blinds your instruments, which in this game is the worse punishment.
Ruins are derelicts scattered through the field, some beside stars and some in open space. They are cold and dark, so nothing passive will ever show you one — only the active scanner finds them, out to about 60 pc, and only along the path you actually fly. Route matters as much as destination.
Salvaging one is the only way the ship ever improves. Fly within 12 pc and spend 30 hours. A site is logged where your chart thought you were when you found it, so one discovered while badly adrift is written down in the wrong place — and that error sits on top of your current one. The salvage list shows both.
Four things are out there:
The tiers are ceilings, not a currency. A site holding something you have already maxed is marked already at ceiling in the list, so you can leave it where it is rather than spend thirty hours finding out.
You need three almanac pulsars, and each needs two separate things done to it:
Anomalous sources show as orange diamonds on the sky and in the Almanac panel. Most are not landmarks at all — variables and white dwarfs read as anomalous too — and you cannot tell without closing on them. The star card records which ones you have already ruled out.
Every landmark trip is a pure cost, and the star table was built to make it one. A pulsar yields no fuel at any scoop grade, and it is the most hazardous thing in the field — tier 3, so without full shielding the approach that identifies it also damages the instruments you identify it with. You will fly a long way, spend 20 hours reading the signature, and come away with less than you left with. That is the bet: three of those, and you know where Earth is.
With one match you know your distance from a known point. With two, the answer is determined up to a spin about the axis joining them. With three, well spread, it locks — and the Survey panel stops saying Earth: unknown.
After that it is a navigation problem like any other, and the same rule
applies: you have to actually arrive. Steer to Earth points
you at it, and the run ends when you are genuinely within 12 pc —
not when your chart believes you are.
steer button in the game aims and nothing more
— the trip stays your decision.The rail along the bottom holds the legend, the almanac, salvage sites, and everything currently in sensor reach. Each collapses on its own.
Generating a field abandons the current survey. Nothing is carried over — a new field is a new place, and a new chart.
The same seed and settings always build the same field. Leave it blank for a new one.
You woke up somewhere, with no idea where. There is no map — you have to draw one, by measuring stars from several places and solving for where they must be.
It needs a window at least 1100px wide. The chart, the instrument panel and the reference rail all have to be on screen at once, and below that the panel gets pushed off the side. Yours is ?px.
Try a desktop browser, or widen this window.
Parallax charts stars at any distance, and a distant one comes back with a large uncertainty sphere. A few hundred of those and the map turns to fog — right at the point it became worth reading.
Four controls in the sidebar deal with it. Nothing is deleted; they only change what gets drawn.
An anomalous source is in range. It is not an optical sighting — you are not seeing a star, you are reading an instrument — so it comes with a bearing and a range and nothing else. That is enough to fly toward and nowhere near enough to chart.
Open the Sky tab and look for it:
Most anomalies are not landmarks — variables and white dwarfs read as anomalous too — and the only way to tell is to close on one.
Ranked by hours under way when the ship reached Earth. Your run is submitted automatically when you arrive, if you have set a name.
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