Shackleton Crater · Lunar south pole · Sol 1
Two Starships are on the regolith. Neither has the propellant to get home.
The dirt under your boots is 43% oxygen, and oxygen is 78% of a propellant load by mass. Cook it out of the rock, fill the tanks, and beat a sunset that lasts 354 hours.
Twelve people, two hundred Optimus units and forty tonnes of equipment came down in the crates. Everything after that is arithmetic you do out loud, on a clock that does not stop.
01 · Propellant
A Raptor burns methane and oxygen at 1 to 3.6, so 78% of a propellant load is oxygen by mass and 22% is carbon Earth has to fly up. Oxygen is 43% of the dirt outside: cook it out of regolith at 1600 C, or haul ice 260 metres up out of a 40 K cold trap and crack it.
02 · The clock
Sunset takes solar output to zero, not low. Whatever is not banked does not come back until dawn. You reorder the shed list by hand: grow-lights or cryocoolers, crops or propellant.
A battery bank holds eight kilowatt-hours. Nobody has ever had enough banks.
Walk the night03 · The grid
Power lines carry 260 kW per run; push more through and the whole grid derates, so a base with enough generation still browns out. Sever a pressurised tube and everything downstream is islanded.
Road, tube and power line reach 26, 30 and 46 metres per span, and cable joints are real vertices — a run that almost reaches does not reach at all. Roads make rovers 60% faster.
04 · Labour
Bots mine, haul, build, tend crops and patch breaches. A factory prints one more every ninety seconds from local metal. At 100 K, an unheated depot is a row of machines that will not move again.
A mature colony holds 61 building sites and 159 moving agents at once: 118 bots, 14 crew, and 27 rovers, trucks and sedans.
05 · The story
Outpost. Colony. Gateway. Commonwealth. Or Monument. Four acts, a rival consortium on the far rim, and a night in Act III where somebody always has to lose.
210 authored transmissions across four acts — 56, 73, 38 and 43 — five speakers, five recorded endings.
Shackleton Crater, lunar south pole, Sol 1. Two Starships put forty tonnes of equipment, twelve people and two hundred Optimus units on the ground, and had nothing left to leave with.
The rim catches sun ninety per cent of the year and is the most valuable real estate on the map. The floor never sees it at all, sits at 40 K, and is the only place with water ice in it. Everything you site is an argument about which of those two you can afford to be near.
Earth hangs fixed in the sky, 1.28 seconds away each way, so every transmission lands after you have already dealt with it. Across the rim the Selene Consortium is drilling the same trap. They will offer you forty kilowatts with no invoice attached, and later ask, politely, what your claim is.
The Apollo memorial is a replica plaza three hundred metres out, a tourist-rover stop with a thousand-metre no-build radius drawn round it. Shepard’s golf ball is on the map exactly once, at 42.67 mm, unscaled.
The flag is rigid, because it has to be.
Five speakers, 210 authored transmissions, four acts. Every one of them arrives 1.28 seconds after the thing it is about.
Four acts, and a night in Act III where somebody always has to lose. Deciding who is the game.
“Everyone left. The lights are still on. It is still running itself.” Ending 05 · Monument
Eight crops on real cycles under fifty-eight square metres of lattice, drinking the crew’s exhaled CO2 and handing oxygen back. A dark dome loses its crop in two thirds of a sol and needs 1.8 sols of light to bring it back.
Earth will never fly you more than 0.95 tonnes of food a sol, at any standing, forever. One dome feeds seventeen.
Morale runs on variety, not calories. The strawberries are a terrible use of water, volume and light, and the only thing on the base a human will cross a room to look at.
Sunset does not take solar output low. It takes it to zero, and holds it there for 354 hours. Whatever is not banked does not come back until dawn.
“Storage is a promise you make to yourself at noon.”
Sol 0 · dawn Noon Sunset · 354 h Sol 708 · dawn
Solar output Banked reserve Night — 354 h at zero Drag the clock. Reorder the list.
Every structure carries a shed priority from 3 to 96. The list decides things while you sleep.
The game ships a default order. It protects life support and drops the oxygen plant at position five — so a director who never opens this screen survives the night, and never ships anything.
Dark: depot heating. On this order the bank does not make dawn.
Schematic of one cycle. The 354 hours, the zero output, the eight kilowatt-hours per bank and the 3-to-96 shed priorities are the game’s own numbers; how far your bank actually stretches is the thing you play for.
Captured in the running game at ultra quality on world seed 20260813. Every load builds the identical world.
Almost every trick a renderer uses to sell distance and softness is a trick about atmosphere, and there is none here. Take the air away and the numbers have to come from somewhere else: the size of the sun, the gravity, the reflectance of the dirt.
scene.fog
null
Banned outright, and guarded in two separate files so it cannot creep back in. Distant hills hold full contrast right up to a knife-edge horizon. Depth is bought with silhouette layering, lighting contrast and detail falloff instead of haze — which is harder, and is the only honest way to do it.
Sun angular diameter
0.53°
The shadow filter radius is derived rather than picked by eye: occluder height × tan(0.53°). A 20 m dome throws a shadow edge 18 cm wide. Interiors floor at #0e1522, and the sky stays black at noon with the stars still in it.
Opposition surge
0.55
albedo *= 1.0 + 0.55 * pow(dot(V, L), 8.0)
Real regolith backscatters toward the light, so the ground brightens as
your view vector swings onto the sun vector. It is the single term that
separates a lunar surface from grey sand.
Lunar gravity
1.62 m/s²
Every particle integrates against it. Dust thrown by a wheel or a boot leaves on a parabola and lands. Nothing billows, swirls, curls or hangs, because there is nothing to suspend it in.
Shadow cascades
20 / 70 / 240 / 900 m
Four texel-snapped cascades, 2048 square each. The 900 m rung is not optional: at 11 degrees of sun elevation a 50 m Starship throws a 257 m shadow, and the crater rim throws kilometres of it.
Starfield
36,000 stars
Instanced points with log-normal magnitudes and blackbody colour, 9,000 of them on Low. The sky itself is dithered in the shader, because a near-black gradient bands on 8-bit output and this sky is almost entirely near-black.
A document, one JavaScript bundle, one CSS bundle. Nothing else is ever fetched: no images, no models, no fonts, no audio. Every texture in the scene is written in code at boot, and the only binary the tree would have needed was a favicon, so that is an inline SVG data URI too.
Sixty-six TypeScript files and 94,586 lines, and not one image, mesh, font or audio file among them. Every texture, hull, walk cycle and sound is generated in code at load. The terrain under it all is a 1009 × 1009 sample field over a 2,016 m square, with a far field carried 5,760 m past the mesh edge.
Shipped payload, gzipped
733,317 bytes on the wire. 2,047,491 raw.
Controls
Right-drag orbits, wheel zooms, WASD pans. TAB opens the build menu and left-click sites the ghost. SPACE pauses, 1/2/3 set speed, P is photo mode, F1 rebinds any of the 24 actions. On touch it is drag, pinch and tap.
?seed=off restores native randomness.Real-time lunar colony strategy. Opens in the tab you already have open.