The shared world and its clock

Everyone flies in one solar system on one clock, and that clock runs whether or not the game is open. This page is why a rocket you left in orbit is further along when you come back, and why one you left in the air is sometimes gone.

One clock, and nobody's hand on it

There is one shared world: the same sun, the same planets and moons, the same time of day on every phone playing. That time is the world clock, and it is the clock your orbits are worked out against. The map shows it in the top left as a T+ line, counting how long the world has been running.

No player can move it. There is no pause and no fast forward, because a minute you skipped would be a minute somebody else lived through. Waiting is therefore part of flying: an apoapsis four hours out arrives in four hours. What you can do about that is set a reminder and put the phone down, or turn sandbox on and fly a world of your own, where time warp lives.

The clock does not stop when the app does

Close the game, let the phone lock, or have the app killed behind your back, and the world keeps going without you. When you open it again the game works out how much time passed and puts your ship where that time took it, hands off. What it finds depends entirely on what the ship was doing when you left.

What the ship was doing	What you come back to
Parked still on the ground	It rode round with the turning world and is exactly where you set it down.
Coasting above the air	It followed its path for the whole gap, crossing into another world's pull if the path did, and is still flying.
Coasting on a path that ran into the air or the ground while you were away	Lost. Nobody was flying it when it got there.
In the air, under thrust, or tumbling	Flown on for you if the gap was 30 s or less. Longer than that and it is lost.

Careful

A rocket in the air is the one thing the world cannot look after. Thirty seconds is all the grace there is, so finish the ascent, get above the air, or land before you put the phone down.

Coming back to a flight

You do not have to leave a flight tidily for it to survive. The flight writes itself down every 10 s, and again the moment the app goes to the background, so opening the game hands you straight back to the ship rather than to the hangar.

What you land in says what happened. A gap the ship rode out ends with a line saying how long passed while you were away. A gap it did not survive ends with VESSEL LOST over the wreck, and a line naming what became of it and how long it took.

The flight screen showing VESSEL LOST over a wreck, with the line 'Old Faithful entered the atmosphere of Earth while you were away' under it and the flight menu open above. — The line under the wreck names what took the ship and how long the world ran without you.

The wreck is real. There is nothing to undo and no way back to the moment before it, because the shared world has no rewind. The menu offers two ways on: ◀ EDITOR, back to the hangar, and 🔔 REMINDERS, which is how you avoid the next one.

Ships you leave behind

A ship you stop flying does not vanish. It stays in the world on the path you left it on, listed on the map with the rest of your fleet, and you take it up again with the map's ▶ CONTROL chip. It ages exactly as the table above says: parked ships keep, coasting ships coast, and a coasting ship whose path dips back into the air is lost at the moment it gets there. If you happen to be flying something else when that moment arrives, a line on screen tells you that ship was lost.

So an orbit well clear of the air is a place a ship can be left for weeks, and a low one that grazes the air is a ship on a timer.

The world may be running fast

Note

The shared world is sometimes run at many times normal speed while the game is being tested. Your side of it changes nothing: your ships move as far as the world clock says they should, which may be much further than the wall clock you waited through. A rocket left in the air is lost by it exactly as it would be by the app being shut.