In active development · playable internal builds
Build a world · then a civilization

Astral PolityAstral Polity

Land on a planet. Build a ship cell by cell. Watch physics take it apart.

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94 km planet Destructible hulls Newtonian flight One shared universe
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Five systems, opened up

Each one is live below — point at it — and each opens its own page.

an earlier bake, 31 Aug 2026 · point to move the sun
Planet

A world shaped by its own laws

Not painted: simulated. Mountains rise, rivers cut their valleys, ice grinds the peaks, and the climate decides what grows where.

94 km across27,800 km² surface
Explore the planet →
illustration of the rule · click the plate
Damage

Nothing here has a hit-point bar

An impact arrives with an energy budget and spends it on folding metal, tearing it, heat and the crater it digs. When the energy is gone, the damage stops.

0 hit-point bars12.5 cm cells it removes
Read the damage model →
the game's plant data, 19 Oct 2026 · point to pick a climate
Scatter

Every plant has a climate

Every plant family has its own tolerance for heat, water, light and soil, so a forest grows only where the climate allows one.

12 plant families shown3 climate axes shown
See how it grows →
Engineered to scale

A whole planet, built to run smoothly

A planet you can dig into and ships you can break are expensive to draw. A large share of the work on this game goes into making them cheap.

Nanite-style geometry

Our own cluster-based detail system, built for meshes you edit: every small piece of a mesh gets its own level of detail on the graphics card.

rolling out to ship hulls

GPU-driven rendering

BatchRendererGroup and indirect draws: the graphics card decides what gets drawn, not the processor.

GPU culling

A depth pyramid on the graphics card throws away whatever you cannot see before it costs anything.

Instanced plants and rocks

Plants, rocks and grass are placed and drawn on the graphics card, in instanced batches.

Burst and the Job System

Unity’s DOTS compiler and job system spread the heavy work — meshing, terrain, streaming — across every processor core.

Streamed planet terrain

A whole-planet heightfield in the distance, detailed voxel rings close up, meshed off the main thread.

Tree impostors

Distant trees become octahedral cards that look right from every angle.

Baked, then streamed

Heights, ground colour, rivers and plant placement are worked out once, offline, and paged in as you move.

Cached shadows

A lamp that is not moving draws its shadow once, and redraws it only when something moves in its light.

Floating origin

The world re-centres around you, so precision holds everywhere on the planet.

One budget for background work

Every rebuild shares one time allowance, by priority, so streaming never stalls a frame.

Background collision meshes

Physics geometry is built off the main thread, so building and damage never wait for it.

How it is engineered →
Running today

A planet you can land on,
and take apart

What is in the build today, and what is still being finished.

● Playable

Build from the voxel up

Place, carve, paint, mirror and reshape — fine enough that a hull curves instead of stepping.

9 build tools · blueprints · symmetry · material palette
◐ In progress

Fly it, land it, crash it

Mass, inertia and centre of gravity come from what you built: put the engines in the wrong place and you will feel it. The flight physics are in; the full flying loop is not finished.

Custom rigid-body solver · aerodynamics · thrust from placed engines
● Playable

One continuous world

A round planet 94 km across, with rivers in the valleys the water carved, oceans and a real day-night cycle.

No zones · no loading walls
● Playable

Damage that means something

A ductile hull folds where a brittle one shatters, because the material decides.

Voxel crumple · terrain craters · debris · heat
● Playable

Landscapes with a reason

Karst plateaus, dunes, mangroves where rivers meet the sea, and oases where the desert dips below the water table.

Karst · dunes · oases · canyons · 43 surface types
● Playable

Atmosphere you can feel

Volumetric cloud, fog and morning mist under a real day-night sky.

Volumetric cloud · morning mist · day-night cycle
◐ In progress

Survive the place

Air, temperature, injury and supply, with sealed rooms judged from the geometry you built. Written; not yet switched on in a playable build.

Vitals · consumables · airtightness from real geometry
● Playable

Water that goes somewhere

Rivers run unbroken from the highlands to the sea, with lakes in the basins between.

River network · lakes · oceans · shoreline
● Playable

Ground you can walk into

Caves run through the rock itself, lit only by what you bring.

Cave volumes · carried light · debris when you dig
● Playable

The same boulder, every session

Rocks, trees and ground clutter are placed by a rule, so the same spot holds the same boulder on every machine.

Deterministic placement · streamed catalogue · GPU instancing

Most games in this genre ask you to accept the world.
This one lets you argue with it.

Design principle · no. 1

The scale of it

One planet, ninety-four kilometres across —
and every metre of it the same voxel

The ground you stand on, the hull you fly, and the hole you leave in both are the same material, resolved the same way. Nothing here is a backdrop.

Where it is going

The whole build, on one axis of time

Every system in the game on one field: what runs today below, what is being built at the waist, what is planned above. Drag it, and tap a point to read it.

  • Planet bake — Playable now — in the build today — Offline generation of the whole world — erosion, rivers, biomes, climate — baked to a blob the runtime streams.
  • Baked field sampling — Playable now — in the build today — The seam every consumer reads the world through: height, biome and river lookups against the baked blob.
  • Erosion solvers — Playable now — in the build today — Five coupled erosion models — fluvial, thermal, hillslope and glacial — run over the heightfield before anything is drawn.
  • Flow routing — Playable now — in the build today — Where water goes: drainage accumulation and depression filling over the whole sphere.
  • Rivers — Playable now — in the build today — Meander carving, the river field artifact and the ribbon surfaces drawn on top of it.
  • Lakes — Playable now — in the build today — Standing water in basins the flow solver could not drain, and the surfaces that render them.
  • Ocean — In progress — works, still being finished — The curved ocean surface, the sea-level datum, and the submersion query every other system asks.
  • Coasts & reefs — In progress — works, still being finished — Beach profiles, wave energy along the shore, and coral growth in the shallows.
  • Tectonics & landforms — Playable now — in the build today — The large structures under everything else: terranes, volcanoes, impact craters and island arcs.
  • Karst & dissolution — Playable now — in the build today — Limestone dissolution: karst plateaus, tower karst and the provinces that decide where they occur.
  • Caves — Early — started, not yet playable — Cave networks carved into the voxel field.
  • Ore bodies — Early — started, not yet playable — Deterministic ore placement through the crust, keyed to lithology rather than sprinkled.
  • Biomes & ground materials — Playable now — in the build today — What each surface is made of, and the single authority every other system derives its answer from.
  • Climate & weather — In progress — works, still being finished — Temperature, rainfall and wind — the fields the biome classifier reads, and the weather a player feels.
  • Voxel terrain — Playable now — in the build today — The near-tier terrain a player stands on, digs and builds into. Streams chunks around the observer.
  • Meshing & CSG — Playable now — in the build today — Turning a signed-distance field into triangles, and the brushes that cut it.
  • Terrain edits & persistence — In progress — works, still being finished — Every change a player makes to the ground, stored as a sparse delta over generated content.
  • Far terrain LOD — Playable now — in the build today — Everything beyond voxel reach: the planet seen from orbit, and the seam where it hands over to voxels.
  • Colour bake & streaming — Playable now — in the build today — The baked surface colour the far tier paints from, streamed by face and mip.
  • Scatter & vegetation — Playable now — in the build today — Placement bake, streaming, instancing and culling for every plant, rock and prop on the surface.
  • Impostors & billboards — Playable now — in the build today — The far-distance stand-ins that let a forest cost almost nothing.
  • GPU grass — Playable now — in the build today — Ground cover drawn entirely on the GPU, on its own path from the scatter engine.
  • Day / night & sky — Playable now — in the build today — Sun and moon motion, the night sky, and the lighting cycle everything else keys off.
  • Fog & mist — Playable now — in the build today — Valley fog and the morning mist that sits in low ground after a cold night.
  • Volumetric water — In progress — works, still being finished — Cellular-automata water you can dig a canal into, plus the underwater optics and screen-space fluid.
  • Construct grid — Playable now — in the build today — The voxel hull of every ship and station: what it is made of, what it weighs, where its centre of mass is.
  • Build & edit tools — Playable now — in the build today — Placing and removing voxels and elements, mirroring, symmetry, the deploy wheel.
  • Damage model — Playable now — in the build today — An impact arrives with an energy budget and spends it: bending, tearing, heat and the hole it digs.
  • Fracture & crumple — Playable now — in the build today — Voronoi fracture of a real mesh, crumple at the rim, and the crater left in the ground.
  • Debris field — In progress — works, still being finished — GPU-simulated chunks thrown off by an impact, promoted to real physics bodies when they matter.
  • Reentry & ablation — In progress — works, still being finished — Skin heating from speed and air density, and the hull material burning off above its tolerance.
  • Aerodynamics — Playable now — in the build today — Drag, lift and centre of pressure computed from the shape actually built.
  • Elements & engines — Playable now — in the build today — The placeable parts — engines, wings, containers, seats — and the power they draw.
  • RCS & attitude — Playable now — in the build today — Physical attitude control: adjuster elements fire real thrusters instead of applying magic torque.
  • Blueprints & import — Playable now — in the build today — Saving a construct, loading it back, and importing hulls from outside.
  • Collision meshing — Playable now — in the build today — Cooking collision geometry for a construct off the main thread, so building does not hitch.
  • Contact & collision — In progress — works, still being finished — Detecting that a hull has touched the world and resolving it without tunnelling or floating.
  • Inventory & containers — Playable now — in the build today — Volume- and mass-constrained containers with fixed-point quantities.
  • Flight model — Playable now — in the build today — Newtonian ship flight under radial gravity — thrust, inertia, atmosphere and orbital motion.
  • Avatar & camera — Playable now — in the build today — Walking, jumping, foot placement and the camera on a curved world.
  • World map — Playable now — in the build today — The full-planet map with drag-spin, waypoints, bookmarks and points of interest.
  • Minimap & HUD readouts — Playable now — in the build today — The round minimap with velocity zoom, and the flight readouts around it.
  • HUD shell & menus — In progress — works, still being finished — The AR-HUD shell every menu is drawn into, and the input guard that stops typing firing hotkeys.
  • Hand-held weapons — Early — started, not yet playable — Hand-held weapons, aiming and firing on foot.
  • Survival & vitals — In progress — works, still being finished — Vitals, injury, conditions that chain into each other, and the air you are breathing.
  • Under-planet rescue — Playable now — in the build today — The guard that puts a player back on the surface when they end up beneath the world.
  • Inspect & torch — Playable now — in the build today — Pointing at something and being told what it is, plus the light you carry.
  • Asset gallery — Playable now — in the build today — The in-engine browser for every scatter asset, biome and material — the tool the art is judged in.
  • Industry & machines — Early — started, not yet playable — Refineries, assemblers and the production tick that moves material through them.
  • Recipes & crafting — Early — started, not yet playable — What turns into what, at what cost, and the jobs that track it.
  • Harvesting — Early — started, not yet playable — Turning the world into materials: trees to wood, rock to stone, ore to metal.
  • AI & agents — Early — started, not yet playable — Utility brains, perception, spatial indexing and the deterministic tick underneath anything that acts.
  • Creatures — Early — started, not yet playable — Fish, herds and the flocking that makes a world feel inhabited.
  • Rights & territory — In progress — works, still being finished — Who may build, fly, take or destroy what — the permission layer over every shared object.
  • Programmable elements — Early — started, not yet playable — The scripting surface a player will program their ship through, and that NPC brains already fly through.
  • Wire protocol — Early — started, not yet playable — Commands, serialisation and the transport interface — engine-agnostic, with no Unity types on the wire.
  • Server host — Early — started, not yet playable — The authoritative host process, its pump and the UDP transport underneath it.
  • Interest & bandwidth — Early — started, not yet playable — Deciding what each player needs to be told about, and staying inside a byte budget while telling them.
  • Rewind & reconciliation — Early — started, not yet playable — Replaying the recent past so a shot fired on a laggy client can be judged fairly on the server.
  • Render pipeline — Playable now — in the build today — HDRP configuration, the submission paths, and the settings a player actually changes.
  • VFX — In progress — works, still being finished — Tree bursts, grind sparks, butterflies, fireflies and impact effects.
  • Engine plumes — In progress — works, still being finished — Exhaust: flipbook cores, outwash against the ground, and throttle response.
  • Audio engine — In progress — works, still being finished — Mix buses, biome ambience, ship and impact sound, and the loudness standard over all of it.
  • Voice & chat — Early — started, not yet playable — Proximity voice, radio channels and text chat with coordinate sharing.
  • Solar system — In progress — works, still being finished — Vacuum flight, the n-body sun/planet/moon system, and the maps that navigate it.
  • Gas giant & rings — Playable now — in the build today — The layered gas giant and a physical ring you can fly into and crash on.
  • Warp & travel — Early — started, not yet playable — Moving between systems, and generating the ones you have not visited.
  • Materials & texturing — Playable now — in the build today — Build surfaces with real density, strength and heat limits, and the texture banks that draw them.
  • One shared universe — Planned — designed, not yet built — One persistent universe every player shares, rather than instances, hosted by us across several servers of hundreds to thousands of players each, with hopping between them.
  • World persistence — Planned — designed, not yet built — Storing what players changed so the world survives a restart, as deltas rather than a world dump.
  • Player identity — Planned — designed, not yet built — Accounts, ownership of a character, and who a given input belongs to.
  • Economy — Planned — designed, not yet built — Scarcity, pricing and the consequences of specialising.
  • Markets & trade — Planned — designed, not yet built — Player-to-player trade, contracts, and the routes that emerge between them.
  • Missions & contracts — Planned — designed, not yet built — Reasons to go somewhere, given by factions or by other players.
  • Factions & reputation — Planned — designed, not yet built — Standing with the groups that hold territory, and what it unlocks or closes.
  • Player scripting — Planned — designed, not yet built — A programming layer for players — autopilots, factory controllers, custom HUDs.
  • Playable now — in the build today
  • In progress — works, still being finished
  • Early — started, not yet playable
  • Planned — designed, not yet built
One universe

One shared universe.
Hosted across many servers.

Everyone plays in the same persistent universe — but no single server can hold every player, so it is hosted across several servers, each built for hundreds to thousands of players, and you can hop between them. We host them through our own providers; players do not run servers. No subscription, and no “premium server tier” later.

What follows from how the world is run

Turn the field: every point on it follows from one shared universe with no publisher in the way.

  • You own what you build — your ships and blueprints are yours
  • No subscription
  • No season pass
  • No pre-orders
  • No founder packs
  • No ads
  • No NFTs
  • No blockchain
  • No publisher
  • No shareholders
  • No launch date I cannot keep

Honest status: multiplayer is the least finished part of the project — written, but not yet tested with real players.

Straight answers

The questions you were going to ask

When can I play it?

There is no date, and we will not invent one. Each piece ships when it genuinely works; the development log says what shipped and what broke.

Is this multiplayer?

Yes. The aim is one persistent universe that everyone shares, hosted by us across several servers that each hold hundreds to thousands of players, with hopping between them. It is also the least finished system today, and the player count will be published as a measured number before anyone is asked to pay for anything.

Can I pre-order or buy early access?

No. There is nothing to buy, no founder pack and no countdown.

What is it built on?

Unity 6 with HDRP, and a lot of custom work underneath: the voxel construct system, the planet generator, the rigid-body solver and the damage model are all purpose-built.

Will it run on my machine?

Too early to promise specific hardware, with one exception: the processor needs AVX2 — any Intel Core i3, i5 or i7 from the 4th generation (2013) on, or any AMD Ryzen. Performance is engineered in from the start rather than bolted on at the end — see Engineered to scale.

What makes it different?

Hull cells of 12.5 cm with corners you can shape, damage computed from an energy budget instead of hit points, terrain shaped by simulated erosion, and life support that reads the geometry you actually built. Fewer places where the world stops being real.

Help it exist

Back it on Patreon

One developer, no publisher. Patreon pays for the time that turns designs into builds; supporters get the work-in-progress posts, the technical write-ups and a private corner of the Discord.

Support on Patreon
Astral Polity key art: a laurel emblem over a distant city, with ships above it
Key art — an illustration, not gameplay.

A 3D artist, sound designer or visual artist looking for a project like this? Your help is genuinely wanted, and it will be credited: show the email address or the Discord.