Explore a great variety of galaxies, star systems, stars, planets and moons!

Despite procedural generation a great variety can be achieved through AstraX’ unique planet generation system.

The best part? All explored planets remain plausible.

How are stars and planets generated?

Stars and planets are structured in categories and subcategories, e.g. the planet category “solid” has moon, oceanic or continental as subcategories, the latter being the same planet type as the Earth.

Each subcategory has it’s own tree of traits that you can explore and gather discovery points for. The tree allows AstraX to generate plausible planets with dependencies between traits, e.g. the trait “Rainfall” will only generate when “Atmosphere” was already generated.

Essentially, each planet has its own individual generated tech tree that can be discovered by the player. Traits currently can be examined in the star map and the Planepedia in the future.

Creation of star systems

On star system level, generated celestial bodies are placed into realistic orbits.

When generating planets, their category and/or subcategory is shuffled. It is possible to generate specific planet types, and even fully custom planets, or just generate a random planet where only its category is defined.

Generating a Galaxy

When creating a new game, you can pick from a list of realistic galaxy types, according to hubble de vaucouleurs.

On galaxy level, generation is image-based, where one pixel represents one star system and the pixel brightness of determines the density, which both affects the star system background and which star system is generated.

As of AstraX versions +0.5, there are also galaxy regions (e.g. nebulae) scattered across the galaxy that both affect background and generation. That way you may stumble upon large asteroid or nebula areas spanning across multiple sectors.