How the game works, written for someone holding the controller.
📖 Welcome to the Codex
The Codex is the game's encyclopedia. It has three parts: Guide — how Afterstars works, from your first building to the …
🌌 The story
The universe is dying. Its stars are burning out one by one, and yours is among them. You command a colony on a world ar…
🛬 Landfall: how a game starts
You pick the world where the exodus carrier falls. The story of the crossing plays while the world loads (click to skip)…
🏗 Building the colony
Build from the strip at the bottom of the Surface view: click a category (Infrastructure, Colony, Resources and so on) a…
🤖 Your machine army
Your ground army is machines: Wardens, Wasp Swarms, Moles, Lancers and Titan Walkers, built at the Robot Foundry. They s…
⚡ Power and charging
Every running building draws energy from the store. Its panel lists what it uses, and hovering the energy in the top bar…
☄ Disasters and the shield
Asteroids fall from deep space, volcanic vents throw lava bombs, storms throw ion bolts and quakes shake the ground. Eac…
⋯ The More menu
The More button in the top bar opens Politics ( 3 ), Comms ( 4 ), the Council ( K ) and Deep space ( J ), each with a li…
🫧 Air and life support
The Gluon Shield is a defence field: it holds no air. Colonists live and breathe inside the pressurised Habitat Domes an…
📡 Alert and Fortify
Every squad and air wing has a stance. Alert reacts to enemies that come within range, chases them, then returns to its …
🔭 Zoom and layers
One mouse wheel runs from the ground to the edge of the universe: Surface, Orbit, Star system, Galaxy, Universe. Each la…
🌞 The Kardashev road
The long game follows the Kardashev scale : from a planet, to a star, to sharing the last star with everyone. Dyson Swar…
🚀 Your fleet: small, medium and mega ships
Small strike craft from the start: Raider, Interceptor, Corvette, Bomber and Frigate. Medium warships as the Hadron Hang…
⚔ War and raids
Rivals raid you, and a raid has to get through three layers. Orbit : your ships at home and your orbital platforms meet …
✦ Six ways through the end
Path How 🚀 Escape Your government has the most Rift Engine charge and pilots it. 🤝 Cooperation Stand allied with the g…
📅 The shape of a universe: eras that always matter
Forty eras, and some of them always carry a moment. Era 5: first contact — your nearest neighbour sends terms (a pact, a…
🚚 The Convoy
From era 12, every three eras, a supply convoy crosses the star system under guard, visible on the Star-system map for m…
✴ The neighbourhood: several stars
The fifty commanders of a region do not all share one sun. The region is a small cluster: your home star and a few neigh…
◎ The command corner
Bottom left, a radar of your star system: your world at the centre, the dashed ring is the edge of your sensors, worlds …
⚔ Interceptions
A raid does not have to reach you. While it is on its way (the attack alert, or the raider's own sheet) you can send war…
🛰 Survey probes and the belt
Asteroids differ: three in ten are poor, a few are rich, and an uncharted rock hides what it holds. A survey probe (⚡40 …
🛡 The Gluon dome
The Gluon Shield raises a hemisphere over the whole colony. Raids must break it before anything lands; it keeps dust sto…
🏛 Legacy Evolution: the civilisation outlives the universe
The universe ends; your civilisation does not. Every universe you hold to the last era scores Legacy Points and advances…
📦 The Workshop: packs other people wrote
A pack is creator content as data: a cast (four named rivals with their own kinds and chat lines), an era script (events…
🧱 Making buildings: the Blender kit
Not built yet — this is the contract a model pack will have to meet. Both packs that ship today paint the standard kit; …
📱 The outer ring: Afterstars: Outpost
Not everyone in the universe is a commander. On the edge of every system there are outposts: one small colony each, hold…
🗳 Universal Resolutions
From the last stable era, every six eras (10, 16, 22, 28, 34), one resolution comes before every government, and it bind…
What is real today, what physics allows, and what we invented.
☀ How stars shine
A star is a giant ball of hot gas held together by its own gravity. In its core the pressure is so high that hydrogen at…
🔴 Star colours and lifetimes
A star's colour tells its temperature: blue-white stars are hottest, red stars coolest. Heavy stars burn fast and die yo…
📈 The Kardashev scale
In 1964 the astronomer Nikolai Kardashev ranked civilisations by how much energy they use: Type I — all the energy reach…
🌕 Dyson swarms and spheres
In 1960 the physicist Freeman Dyson suggested that an advanced civilisation would surround its star with collectors to c…
📏 Light-years
Space is so big we measure it with light. A light-year is the distance light travels in one year: about 9.46 trillion km…
⏱ Time dilation
Einstein's special relativity says that the faster you move, the slower your clock runs compared with someone standing s…
🛰 Orbits and escape velocity
An orbit is a never-ending fall: a satellite falls toward the planet but moves sideways so fast that it keeps missing it…
🛗 Space elevators
A space elevator is a cable from the equator to beyond geostationary orbit, kept tight by the planet's spin like a stone…
☢ Fusion power
Fusion is how stars shine: light atoms join into heavier ones and release energy. On Earth we try to hold a gas hotter t…
🛸 Generation ships and spin gravity
Even at 1% of light speed, the trip to the nearest star (4.2 light-years) takes about 420 years — around 17 generations.…
⚛ The particle zoo
Many building and technology names come from real particles: Particle Real? What it is Muon ✓ A heavy electron from cosm…
◈ Graphene
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms in a honeycomb pattern. It was first peeled off graphite with sticky tape in …
💧 Living off the land
Rockets are expensive, so colonies must use what they find — engineers call it ISRU, in-situ resource utilisation. Ice l…
🤖 Robots and drones
Robots already do jobs too dangerous, dull or distant for people: exploring Mars, defusing bombs, building cars. Humanoi…
👽 The Fermi paradox
The galaxy has hundreds of billions of stars and many planets — so where is everybody? The physicist Enrico Fermi asked …
❄ How the universe ends
The universe is expanding, and the expansion is speeding up, pushed by something we call dark energy — about 68% of ever…