System mechanic — not covered elsewhere

The Moon Base

It has a point, and it scales — the problem was always the price of finding that out

Press [B] while on the Moon to place base parts. There are four kits, each doing one specific, obvious job rather than any abstract "base level":

Three Moon-specific fixes worth knowing about

The Moon's own mountains once had no collision at all — you could walk straight through a 45-metre peak. Lunar terrain doesn't push you back sideways the way Earth's does; instead it only ever raises the ground under your feet, so a mountain's slope is something you climb rather than a wall you bump into. That's why the massifs feel climbable rather than solid-sided.

Mining an ore node on the Moon does nothing at all if you're holding a weapon — [F] fires whatever you're carrying rather than harvesting the node, the same combat-takes-priority rule that applies everywhere you might reasonably need to defend yourself with what's in your hands. This used to fail silently with no explanation; the prompt at a glowing node now says exactly what will happen, naming the specific tool needed if a weapon is what you're holding.

Dying on the Moon used to leave its physics behind at your own respawn. Waking up back at your habitat (or beside your rocket, if you never placed one) would say "you wake on the Moon" while the ground itself quietly kept using Earth's own terrain data — measured once at over 100 units of straight vertical disagreement between where the Moon floor actually was and where the game thought it was. The cause was a flag several unrelated systems all shared and cleared without restoring; it's now put back correctly the moment you actually wake up there.

Respawn and navigation: only the first one counts

Only the first Habitat Dome you ever place matters — it's your respawn point, and every Dome after that is, in the game's own words, "a spare room, not a second address." The same is true of the Comms Antenna: having one at all gives you a bearing home, and a second one adds nothing, since the check is simply whether you own at least one.

The base's resource production actually works two separate ways, added in two different versions, and both run at once on the same modules.

Always-on production: collected just by landing

A Solar Array and an Oxygen Tank produce as a matched pair — an unpowered tank is just a barrel, and a solar array with nowhere to store its output does nothing either. Each working pair produces 3 units an hour, measured in matched pairs (the smaller of your array count and your tank count), so three of each yields 9 units an hour rather than any single part scaling alone.

This runs entirely offline and needs no setup at all — it's paid out automatically, in one lump sum, the moment you next land on the Moon, capped at 12 hours of accrual so leaving the game closed for a week isn't a jackpot. What you collect splits roughly 50% Lunar Ore, 30% Lunar Ice, and 20% Helium-3.

The Lunar Relay: a second, optional income that ships to Earth

A separate, entirely optional system layered on top of the same base, unlocked through the Hollow Forge deep in the Hollow Moon's core:

1. Cast a Corelight Ingot at the forge — 4 Hollow-Core Crystal plus either 2 Iron Bar and 1 Gold Bar carried down from Earth, or, once available, 2 Sinter Plates as an all-lunar substitute that needs no trip to the surface at all.
2. Carry the ingot up to a Comms Antenna you've already built and use it there — this "lights" the relay, permanently, for that base.
3. The lit relay stockpiles by which module kinds you've planted — not by matched pairs — one line per module type: a Habitat Dome pays Lunar Ore, a Solar Array pays Helium-3, an Oxygen Tank pays Lunar Ice. An antenna-only base with no other modules pays nothing at all; a full base pays all three lines at once.
4. Charge a Downlink Beacon at the antenna for 2 Helium-3, then carry it anywhere on Earth and press [E] to call a supply pod down to your feet, carrying everything the relay has stockpiled — no trip back to the Moon required to collect it.

The same supply pod also carries anything The Ashfall Kiln on Vulcanis has shipped up from a third world entirely — both systems land their payoff through this one delivery chain rather than each building a separate one.

The relay's own stockpile is capped separately from the always-on system's 12-hour cap: a freshly lit relay holds 240 minutes of work before it's full. Up to 4 Sinter Plates — baked at The Regolith Sintery — can be seated into the dish as a permanent upgrade — each one adds 120 more minutes of holding capacity and raises the rate by another 50%, so a fully upgraded relay holds 720 minutes at 3x the base rate.

Every one of the Lunar Ice a working Oxygen Tank pays out can also be spent at The Meltwater Still, which thaws it into Fuel Cells — and can charge a Downlink Beacon on the spot, without a trip back to the antenna.

Version history

• The Hollow Forge and the Lunar Relay added, joining two unrelated dead ends at once: the four base modules had names that promised work and did none, and Hollow-Core Crystal was the only material in the game with no recipe, no buyer, and nowhere to go. This version gave the crystal a use (casting Corelight Ingots) and gave the base modules a job, tying the payoff to Earth via the Downlink Beacon.
• Sinter Plates and an all-lunar forge recipe added, as permanent ballast for the relay's holding capacity and rate, plus a way to cast a Corelight Ingot without ever carrying Earth bars up to the Hollow Forge — the original recipe still fires first and works exactly as before, and the lunar substitute only ever kicks in when the player can't afford it.
• A second, simpler production path added. The game's own development notes for this version state plainly that the standing complaint "building a moon base has no point" was still completely accurate at the time — which means the earlier Lunar Relay, despite existing, wasn't enough on its own to make building a base feel worthwhile. This version added the always-on, no-setup production described above as an additional, independent income on the same modules, paid out simply by landing rather than requiring the forge-and-beacon chain at all.
• The build menu stopped selling duplicates the game had already declared useless. [B] originally just cycled through all four kits in a fixed order, so scaling up to three working pairs of Solar Arrays and Oxygen Tanks meant twelve presses that also bought three redundant extra Habitat Domes and Comms Antennas along the way — measured directly: of 38 Lunar Ore, 8 Iron Bar and 4 Copper Bar spent over twelve presses, 58% bought parts the game's own respawn and bearing logic would never look at twice. Fixed by having the cycle drop a kit from its own rotation the moment one of it already exists, so the player is left cycling only the two parts that actually keep scaling.
• v1329 — the "what you need" readout for base parts had never shown a real number or item name. A coding mistake in how the cost list was read meant the build menu could show something like "Need 0/0 moon_ore,8" instead of a readable requirement — the held count, the amount needed, and the item's own name were all being read from the wrong place. The exact same mistake was found and fixed on four other cost readouts across the game that had been equally broken since they shipped: the gear shop, both of the Corelight's cost lines, and the Sintery.
• v1377 — fixed the Mining Drill silently refusing to mine a node you were aimed directly at. Pressing [F] at a glowing, mineable vein while holding a drill would sometimes just drill a hole downward and give you no ore at all, with nothing explaining why — the drill was considering whether to dig down before it ever checked whether you were aiming at something mineable. A node under your crosshair is now always mined first.
• v1378 — fixed your own landed rocket and the Sintery having no collision. You could walk straight through the very ship you flew to the Moon in. Both are now solid, with a wide enough clear ring left around the rocket that you can never accidentally get walled off from being able to board it again.

Don't expect Moon creatures — there aren't any

Unlike Earth, the Moon has no monster spawner of its own. As of the game's own development log, the function that decides what appears around the player has no off-world branch at all — standing on the Moon, it still checks Earth's own terrain height, biome, and city data at whatever coordinates you happen to be at, because nothing was ever written to ask which world you're actually in. In practice this means the Moon is largely lifeless: at most it might very rarely place an ordinary Earth creature that has no business being there, going entirely by what Earth's map would say about that same spot. This is a known, filed gap rather than an intended empty-Moon design, and applies to every off-world destination this way, not the Moon specifically. It's also not for lack of content — a creature like the Regolith Crawler already exists fully written in the game's own bestiary, just with no code path that ever actually places one on the Moon itself.

Trivia

• The two production systems genuinely run in parallel rather than replacing one another — a base with a lit relay still also gets the automatic landing payout on top of whatever the relay has stockpiled for Earth delivery.
• The always-on production fix changed no existing save field at all — its timestamp lives inside the existing part record that was already being saved, so an old save with no timestamp simply starts its clock fresh on next arrival rather than needing any migration.
• A lone Habitat Dome with no other modules and no lit relay is still a completely valid, deliberate build — it does its one job (setting your respawn point) perfectly well on its own; it just produces nothing on either system, which the game's own comment describes as "the difference between a house and a mine."
• The Hollow Forge's own two-way-trip design — materials only found on the ground are needed to reach a payoff in the sky — was reused directly for The Windward Mooring on the Floating Islands.
• Earth itself is visible from the Moon's sky, but only from here — it isn't a destination you can travel to a second time from off-world, just a view. It was added specifically so a place you can only ever see from elsewhere finally had a picture behind it, alongside finished artwork for the Sun and Moon replacing the placeholder images both had been using since being pulled a few versions earlier.