Star address
Every address in this universe is a fixed place. The stars and planets you find are worked out from the address itself, so a friend who opens the same address sees the same world.
The universe
The arrow keys turn the view and plus and minus zoom. Pick a planet or a star from the lists under the scene to fly there.
This game draws its stars with WebGL 2, which this browser does not offer. The other games work without it.
This system
Nearby stars
Closest first. Pick one to fly there.
Rare finds
None found yet.
- Binary starTwo suns that circle each other. Nearby stars marks them as a pair.
- Blue giantThe brightest blue points in the sky.
- White dwarfA small, faint white star.
- Black holeA dark point that bends the starlight behind it.
- Ringed ocean worldAn ocean planet with rings. Only a visit shows one.
- Four moonsA planet with four or more moons.
Your log
The systems you visit are listed here.
How to play
Tap a star to fly to it, or pick one from Nearby stars. Tap a planet, or pick it from the list under This system, to fly in close; Back to the star returns to the whole system. Drag the scene to turn it. Pinch, or scroll once the scene is selected, to zoom. With the scene selected, the arrow keys turn it and plus and minus zoom.The name and address of the system you are in show at the top of the scene. Copy link gives a link to the system or planet in view, and anyone who opens it lands on the same one. Somewhere new jumps to a random address. Your log and rare finds stay in this browser, and there is no score and no way to lose.
About this game
The universe is a cube of 65,536 sectors along each side, more than 281 trillion in all, and its edges wrap, so flying far enough one way brings you back. A sector is ten light years across. Nothing is stored: the address of a sector goes through a hash function, which turns it into a number that looks random but is always the same for the same address. That number seeds a small random number generator, and every choice comes from it in a fixed order: how many stars, what kind, where, their names, then each planet's kind, size, rings and moons.The address has three groups of four hexadecimal digits, one for each axis; the number after the slash picks a star in the sector and a second number picks a planet. Planet surfaces are drawn by the graphics card from gradient noise seeded by the same number. Black holes bend the light of the stars behind them with the thin lens equation. Planets move on a clock everyone shares, so a planet is at the same point of its orbit for everyone at the same moment. Everything runs in your browser, with WebGL we wrote by hand, and nothing you do here is sent anywhere.