Planets

> ⚠️ Experimental, in testing. Planet surfaces are an early system and > currently run a fast testing wipe cadence (surfaces reset on the order of > minutes, not days), so deposits are short-lived. Treat this page as a preview; > timers and mechanics may change.

Planets are expedition zones, not bases. You fly a small ship down to a surface, mine mineral deposits you can't get anywhere else, and lift back off before the surface gets wiped. The minerals you bring back are the sole feedstock for the T4 fabrication web, so even though asteroids are easier, planets are where the higher tech tree actually opens.

There are two surface types, rocky (Mars-like) and frozen, and they carry completely different minerals. To stock the full T4 web you have to visit both.

What you can land

Only small ships can land. Landing is gated by hull class:

A Cruiser or larger holding the corridor gets a "too dense for this hull" notice. Capitals hold orbit and drop a small craft, so bring a Frigate or Destroyer if you intend to land.

Landing

Fly your Frigate or Destroyer toward a planet. As you cross into the landing corridor (the approach band just past the body's surface), a boss bar appears and a rising ping plays as you push deeper. There's no land command; landing is positional:

1. Enter the corridor: you get a prompt: "hold approach to land."
2. Keep flying inward. The boss bar fills as you descend.
3. Push past the commit point and the ship lands automatically.

On touchdown the ship parks on one of the surface's landing pads, you're teleported out onto the pad beside it, and you get the expedition warning. Your ship is hidden from space while it's grounded (it can't be in two places at once), so nobody can shoot it in orbit while you're digging.

There are four ship pads per planet, clustered around a central arrival pad as one spaceport. If every pad is occupied, you can't land until one frees up, so a busy planet is a contestable site.

Lifting off

To leave, right-click your grounded ship's hull (or the floating "Board ship" marker at its nose). That boards you, clears the parked hull off the pad, frees the pad, and puts your ship back in orbit just outside the corridor, facing open space. Any nearby crew the ship's access list accepts are scooped aboard with you; anyone it doesn't recognize stays on the dirt.

Mineral deposits: the reason to land

You mine the surface with a normal pickaxe (vendor mining tools are plain tool items, so vanilla mining speed applies). Most terrain blocks break into a matching cosmetic building block you can re-place on the surface, but the payoff is the scattered ore deposit veins.

Rocky and frozen palettes are disjoint: each planet type carries its own minerals. Mining one deposit block grants (this table is generated live from the deposit config, so it's always current):

Surface vs underground: the common ores (iron, carbon, oxidizer, titanium) and the crop seeds are SURFACE deposits you scrape off the top. The rare supplement minerals (rare earth, phosphate rock, potash salt, cryo salt, fluorspar) are UNDERGROUND — dig down into veins, deeper = rarer. Only a FRIGATE can land — it's the one hull that fits a planet landing pad; bigger ships hold orbit and drop a small craft.

Rocky (Mars-like) planets

Frozen planets

So Graphite, Oxidizer Salt, Phosphate Rock, Potash Salt are rocky-only; Cryo-Salt, Fluorspar are frozen-only. Rare Earth Metals drops on both. To gather the full set you visit both planet types.

Planetary Core samples

Every deposit block you crack also drops +2 Planetary Core samples on top of the ore. Cores are the durable reason to keep landing instead of just mining asteroids: a Refinery turns them into Refining Flux at a 2:3 ratio (2 cores in → 3 flux out), whereas asteroids only trickle flux at a ~5% pulse chance. If you go through flux faster than mining drops supply, planet cores are the bulk source.

Richer planets

Deposits are denser on higher-security-risk planets: a planet sitting in dangerous space carries more veins per chunk (and more blocks per vein) than one in safe space, on the same risk ladder as asteroid mining. Riskier planet, denser ore.

These minerals have no buy path

The planet-exclusive minerals are only obtainable from planet deposits. NPC vendors buy them from you but never sell them; there is no shortcut. They're the feedstock of the fabrication web (the T4 industrial components and the aquaponics crop supplements), so any build that needs them means going and getting them yourself. Current NPC buy-back prices:

See NPCs & Shops and Fabrication.

PvP and danger on the surface

Planet surfaces are always-contested ground: PvP is ON for everyone on the ground, regardless of the planet's space-side security zone. Even a planet sitting in safe space lets players fight each other once they're standing on it. Factions fight over the spaceport because pads are limited and the minerals are scarce. Land expecting company.

If you die on a planet, you respawn in your own grounded ship's medbay (or a crewmate's ship you're allowed aboard, or a station infirmary as a last resort), not back at the pad.

Surfaces get wiped

A planet surface is temporary. After it reaches its wipe age, an asteroid fall begins: a warning countdown, a meteor barrage, and then the surface turns lethal. Anything you built is destroyed and the world is regenerated. Your cargo and ship survive a normal liftoff, but structures don't, so mine and get out; don't try to live there.

• A ship still grounded on a pad when the fall lands is destroyed with it; there's no automatic orbit escape. Lift off before impact.
• After a fall, the devastated planet refuses re-entry for a lockout period before it regenerates.

Wipe cadence is set in game.yml. The shipped config is currently set short for testing (15-minute surfaces, a 2-minute fall, a 30-minute lockout); production pacing raises these. Treat any landing as a short expedition.

See also

• Mining: asteroid mining, refining, and flux
• Fabrication: what the T4 minerals build
• NPCs & Shops: who buys your minerals
• Crafting wiki: full bootstrap tree for every item