Stardust

STARDUST

Two centuries of work put your first yards in orbit. Three hours later, deep-space tracking flags an object that wasn't there yesterday — decelerating hard, aimed inward, not answering. Reaching the stars is what got you noticed. Now there's a clock.

Build as much of a spacefaring civilization as you can before it arrives. Every world you open is its own kind of place: Mars is shafts sunk into a buried archive, the Belt is swarms strip-mining the rubble, Jupiter's skimmers make everything you produce run hotter, Titan is the farthest city anyone ever stood up. Output raises it all; Research — a web of real discoveries, not a list of upgrades — reaches the next world and changes how the last ones work. At the system's edge sits a dormant Gate. Reach it, power it, jump through.

You won't, the first time. When the clock runs out, the system map becomes a battle: the Gate throws fleets inward, hammering one world at a time, and you move ships to hold the line as long as you can. You don't win it. But everything you're still holding when you fall salts Stardust into the rubble — and between cycles you spend it on a tree of things you recover once and keep: an old foundry relit, precursor alloy, one of their own hulls salvaged to fight for you, the knowledge to see them coming. Each cycle begins further along and reaches further out. Meanwhile the thing that keeps killing you keeps a file on you — dismissive at first, less so every time you come back.

How to play: Tap FUND to get moving. Build each world's industry, research your way outward, and use the quiet before contact to dig in. When they arrive, switch to the fight — hold your worlds, feed the one under the heaviest attack, and bank what you can. Get wiped, spend your Stardust in the drydock on what to recover, and begin the next cycle ahead. The LOG keeps the record: what you found, and what they wrote about you.

Plays in your browser, desktop or mobile. Progress saves automatically.

An early build; what's on the far side of the Gate is still on the way. Made with the help of AI tools.