Worlds

All 29 bodies in the system — one star, eleven worlds around it and seventeen moons — each with a page of its own holding its size, its pull, its air, its biomes and what it costs to get there.

Read a row like this. Orbits is the body whose pull holds it. Radius and Gravity are what the map's card shows when you hold your finger on that world. Air is the height the atmosphere reaches and the pressure at the surface, or "none" for a world with no air at all, which is most of them. Every figure on this page is the one the game uses, in the units the game prints, and every world's name is a link to its own page.

The system at a glance

In order outward from the star, each planet followed by its own moons.

Stationary orbits

A stationary orbit is a circle round a world at the one height where a trip round takes exactly as long as the world takes to turn once, flown the same way the world turns. A ship there keeps pace with the ground and hangs over the same spot below it for as long as it coasts. Round Earth it is called a geostationary orbit. Height is the altitude the map and the altimeter show; Speed is how fast a ship on that circle is moving. Stationary orbits explains why most worlds have none.

Where you can launch from

Earth, and only Earth. The one Launch Pad in the game stands there, built before your first flight. Every other world, the Moon and Mars included, can be orbited, landed on and left again, but never launched from. See the Launch Pad's levels for what the pad will carry.

What each destination costs to reach

How much you can change your ship's speed over a whole flight is its Δv. These are what a ship leaving Earth's pad needs in total, whatever it is built from. A ship whose total sits under the line for a destination does not get there, however it is flown.

Two things are worth reading off that table. Landing somewhere is dearer than orbiting it, by exactly what it takes to stop at the ground and, if you are coming back, to leave it again. And past the belt the figures stop climbing: everything from Meeseeks Prime outward sits within a thousand metres a second of everything else, because the burn that throws a ship out of Earth's orbit does most of the work whichever way it is aimed. What separates the outer worlds is time and radio reach, not fuel.

What is on a world's page

Every one of the 29 bodies has a page of its own, and they all carry the same sections in the same order, so a figure sits in the same place on Pluto's page as on Earth's.

A biome is a band of the surface with its own colour, height and roughness — desert, ice, crater floor, methane sea. Which one you land in is recorded, and the first reading taken in each one earns discovery, so the biome tables are a to-do list as much as a description. Science and readings explains the earning.

The worlds, one by one

Outward from the star, each planet followed by its moons.