Stellar Forge

Everything starts as cold gas. There is no "build a star" button in Stellar Forge, and there is no menu of stars to pick from. A proto-mass always exists, dark and cold at the centre of the screen, and the only verb is feed. Stream hydrogen into it and you get hydrogen's outcomes. Stream in oxygen, iron, uranium — whatever you have found and unlocked — and the mass, the density and the heat curve all move, and something else ignites instead. You find out what you made when it lights. Twenty-eight elements: four from the forge, the rest found on the adventure or won in the ring. The forge itself makes hydrogen, helium, carbon and oxygen, and the nova cores a supernova of your own mints buy carbon and oxygen and nothing heavier. Every other element is found out there, by each stellar for itself - on a leg of the adventure, or in a rival's body it beats in battle - and only then can it be fed. A second stellar has to find an element on its own journey too, but the codex remembers every element you have ever discovered, shows what the find takes, and makes it easier the second time. Or send it on an adventure. Any body you are growing can be sent on a journey instead. It starts in the Oort cloud and falls inward - past Pluto and the Kuiper belt, Neptune, Uranus, Saturn, Jupiter, through the asteroid belt, past Mars, the Earth and the Moon, Venus and Mercury - swings round the Sun and climbs back out past the same worlds to the heliopause, twenty-four legs and nearly a week of travel, and then on into the galaxy: nebulae, other star systems, and now and then something rare - a white dwarf, a neutron star, a black hole. It keeps forging the whole way, at the same slow pace as a forge left alone, and each leg pays in the matter and the elements of the place it passes. Pass a named moon or asteroid while your body is the right size and make-up, and it can become an Io-class or a Ceres-class body. Sixteen real probes wait on the road to be found - Pioneer, Cassini, Juno, New Horizons, Parker Solar Probe and more, each with its story - and Voyager 1, out at the heliopause, can be absorbed by the body that reaches it. Relics of our own spaceflight drift there too: Sputnik 1, the Apollo 11 descent stage and the flag on the Moon, Hubble, the ISS - nine in all, and a meteor shower to cross. Twenty-one bodies, and size is physical. A brown dwarf and a blue giant are not the same sprite in two colours. Mass drives a real diameter, the diameter drives what you see, and the ladder from asteroid to protostar spans nine measured rungs before the stars begin. Protostars, red supergiants, Wolf-Rayet stars, neutron stars, pulsars, magnetars, strange quark stars, Thorne-Żytkow objects, quasar cores, black holes and stranger things past that — each with its own size band, stat spread and abilities. Every size is a number you can read your way. Tap any size readout — on a card, on the forge, in the battle picker — and it steps through four unit systems: the game's own ledger, solar masses and radii, Earths (Jupiters, once a body is big enough), and SI in kilograms, kilometres, kelvin and grams per cubic centimetre. The pick sticks. And every size says what it is next to. Under every size readout — the back of a card, the roster, the forge, the battle picker — one line says what the body is next to in the real sky: about 1.9x Vega's width, about 1.2x Vega's mass. The anchors are the Moon, Earth, Jupiter, the Sun, Proxima Centauri, Sirius A, Vega, Betelgeuse and Sagittarius A*, at NASA, ESA and IAU fact-sheet values. A body with no observed example in the sky gets no comparison, because there is nothing honest to compare it to. Every star grows inside a nebula, and the nebula is part of the recipe. A proto-mass is grown inside an incubator, and there are twenty-four of them: each carries its own make-up and its own conditions, so where you grow a body changes what you are likely to get. Thirteen are the real named nebulae — Orion, the Lagoon, Carina, the Horsehead, the Crab, Cassiopeia A, the Veil — and they open by discovery and by detonation: an epic or heavier supernova of your own leaves a remnant whose make-up is that body's, and it becomes an incubator too. The strip above the forge sheet names the rung your body is on, the rung it is climbing to, and counts down to it. Your roster is a hand of trading cards. Every body you have made is a card: nameplate, rarity and type chips, a stat block, its ability slots, and a gold corner chip that says it flips. Tap it or drag it sideways and the back turns up a DID YOU KNOW line from that type's own trivia — every one of the twenty-one has seven or more, and every space fact in the game credits the people behind it: 259 scientists, each with a link to read more and, for most, a portrait. Drag a card up and that body is at the forge; drag it down to close it. MAKE ACTIVE and DETAILS sit under the roster for the card you picked, and the forge sheet opens with a strip of your roster under AT THE FORGE, so which body is at the forge is one tap from either screen. Everything a body carries is on its card. DETAILS opens the card hub: the title it wears, its equipment, its ability slots (four to start, up to six as it grows), its cosmetic, its launch upgrades and its God, each a section under the card. Forty-eight titles, earned by what a body has done and worn by one body at a time — each with its own visual effect and a small stat bonus. Eighteen cosmetic effects — veils, discs, burns — that change how a body looks and nothing else. Five launch tracks per body, bought in SP and built around the launch meter: the opening release, the top of the mid-battle thrust, cheaper thrust with a slower meter, an entry burn, and a field coil that steadies shots through gravity and charge. Take a title or a cosmetic off one body and put it on another; nothing is spent. Seventy-seven gods, and the sky already knows their names. Bodies can carry a God: 77 deities drawn from 25 traditions — Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Hindu, Buddhist, Norse, Aztec, Hawaiian, Inuit, Rapa Nui, Tongva, Japanese, Chinese, Yoruba, Slavic, Celtic, Persian, Mesopotamian, Finnish, Wayuu, San, Arrernte, Haudenosaunee, Etruscan and Māori. Each brings one to three abilities of its own, on its own cooldowns, separate from the ones you equip yourself. Sixty-seven of them share a name with something real in the sky — Jupiter and Saturn on their planets, Sedna and Quaoar out past Neptune, Amaterasu and Sekhmet and Quetzalcóatl on their asteroids — and those gods hit harder for it. Every one is a rare find: won off a defeated rival, surfaced in a forge, thrown by a supernova, or waiting at a shrine on a passing rock. Until you find one, the codex shows a silhouette and nothing else. Then you fight with it. Battles are Beyblade rules on a cosmic scale. Aim, hold to fill the launch meter, let go, and watch your body carom around a ring for up to three minutes. Before and after the launch, WASD, the arrow keys or a stick nudge it slowly - these are colossal bodies, and the launch is the big push. Mass decides who moves whom. Density decides who sheds matter on impact. Spin — from tidal crawl to breakup edge — decides how hard the grind goes. Chunks knocked loose become debris you can re-absorb, and the ice rings, captured moons, binary companions and mini systems in your orbit block hits and land their own. And every body, protostar to black hole, can hurl mass — the one attack all twenty-one share. The sim is deterministic. Same body, same opponent, same seed, same fight — down to the byte. That is why a result can carry a share code, and why replays play back exactly, not approximately. Grow three ways. Win, and absorb your opponent's matter, elements and sometimes an ability. Or push an existing body back into the forge with more mass behind it. Or mix two of your own and see what the pair produces. What a body earns is its own. Abilities and elements belong to the stellar that found them. Another of your stellars has to earn the same one on its own journey - easier the second time, with what it takes shown up front. Mix two of your own, and the child keeps the abilities of both parents. Mixing is a collision you watch. Push two of your own bodies together and the merge raises clouds tinted by both. How much gravity is in the room decides what else happens: a giant or supergiant, or a heavy enough pair, snaps a lens shut over the merged body; a neutron star, a magnetar, a black hole — any compact body, or two ordinary stars grown heavier still — rings space-time across the whole screen, three fronts from wherever the body sits, and the frame lights at its edge. Some rivals belong to no star. Rogue planets drift dark and dense with no sun to hold them; runaway stars were thrown out of their systems and still move fast. They turn up among the day's challengers, on the adventure road and on the Galactic Front, masked until you meet one - and the four you can meet are real objects, Zeta Ophiuchi and S5-HVS1 among them. Online, if you want it. In the full game, Battle > Online signs you in with Steam and puts your stellars against other players' - fights rank once our server re-plays them. If you never open it, nothing is sent; if our server can't be reached, the game carries on with simulated rivals. Tell us what broke. Send feedback, in Settings and the pause menu, takes a bug report or an idea straight to us. The panel shows exactly what goes with it before you press Send. Weekly seasons. The arena rotates a mutator every week — Binary Suns drags every body and every loose rock toward two orbiting gravity wells; Debris Storm fills the ring with rock to trip over. Boards track peak power, absorption, kill speed and streaks. It sounds like what it is. An original theme opens the game, and music plays through every battle. Gas hisses when it lands on the proto-mass. Unlock something — an element, an ability, a first discovery — and a fanfare says so. Nothing grinds: two bodies that stay in contact make one sound on the hit, not a loop. Built to be left alone — two days at a time. The forge keeps growing for two days while you are away. After that it stops growing, but the SP keeps coming for the rest of your absence. Come back to a heavier proto-mass, a flyby that wandered past, and a decision about what to feed next. Discover five kinds of body and you can buy a third day with SP; discover ten and a fourth. Nothing you can buy changes the game. The full game plays by the same rules on every platform: a roster you start with 5 bodies and grow to 10 through achievements and SP, battle energy that comes back with time, and every element unlocked by play. Cosmetics never reach the battle. [hr][/hr] Stellar Forge plays offline. Online PvP and Send feedback are optional and reach our server only when you use them. No ads and no in-app purchases.