Documentation

Getting started

You begin weaponless on Planet 1, the tutorial world. An NPC called The Keeper stands near your landing site — walk up and press F to open the onboarding guide. From there the shape of every run is the same:

1. Gather wood, stone and fiber from nearby nodes (F near a node, or click it).
2. Build a campfire and a forge, then craft your first weapon — a wooden spear is pre-researched and free.
3. Fight the wandering creatures to level your weapon line and bank Research Points.
4. Manage Wrath — the more you gather and kill, the angrier the planet gets, until its bosses wake.
5. Clear the bosses, step through the portal the final kill opens, and land on Planet 2.

Controls

Planetspite plays on desktop with keyboard & mouse and on touch devices with an on-screen layout. The keyboard bindings:

Movement & combat

Panels & screens

In Voxel planet mode, G digs the ground and B raises it. A System Menu icon bar (top-right) opens the same screens by click, plus the Mesh Viewer and Customize-HUD editor.

Touch controls

On coarse-pointer devices a full touch layout appears: a floating move stick (left), a right-hand look/attack stick that drags to turn and taps to strike, a clustered action hotbar with Strike/Heavy, a TARGET button for lock-on, and HP / Stamina / Target / Wrath bars. A battery-saver profile caps the frame rate and throttles when idle.

The core loop

Planetspite is built on four beats that feed each other, with the planet's temper riding on top:

Two independent axes govern how a run scales. Planet number (deeper = harder) sets creature level, armor, boss strength, gear power and what content unlocks. Planet size (radius) sets only spawn counts — bigger worlds are more populous, not deadlier. A third, faster axis — Wrath — rides on top within a single planet.

Combat & weapon lines

There are eight weapon lines, each owning one combat verb and scaling three passives additively as you level it from Novice to Grandmaster. Proficiency is use-based: you earn it by landing hits, striking weak points and killing — you never spend it.

The eight lines

The XP curve & ranks

Each level costs round(8 · L^1.5) XP — a back-loaded curve. You reach Adept in a session; the Grandmaster capstone is a long haul. XP is earned per event and challenge-scaled:

An anti-grind multiplier — clamp(1 + 0.1·(threat − skill), 0.1, 2) — floors XP at ×0.1 against foes 10+ levels below you, and pays ×2 against a fight 10+ above. Ranks band the 1–100 track: Novice 1–20 · Adept 21–40 · Expert 41–60 · Master 61–80 · Grandmaster 81–100. Level 100 grants the line's Mastery passive.

Offensive stats. Strength adds +1% swing damage per point; Dexterity adds +1% attack speed per point (cooldown never drops below 40% of the base swing). Both come from gear and tonics — you start at 0.

Techniques & Insight

Each line has 4 purchasable Techniques — one per rank above Novice — bought with Insight, a milestone currency earned the first time you accomplish a feat, never by grinding. You must reach the rank and afford the cost; Insight banks freely but the rank gate is a hard wall.

One full line's 4 Techniques cost 29 Insight; all 8 lines, 232. Insight comes only from one-time feats — first kill of a species (minor, +1), first charge-counter or weak-point kill (major, +3), first pack hunt survived or apex felled (landmark, +5).

Targeting

On desktop, Tab cycles a lock-on through the nearest creatures. The locked target gets a gold ring and a Target panel, and thrown weapons (Hurling) auto-aim within a cone onto it. Lock-on is gated off on touch by default, replaced by a TARGET button. Reach to acquire a target is tuneable (default 45 world units); the hurl auto-aim cone is a 55° half-angle.

Crafting & research

Recipes are unlocked in the research tree (press R): a flat, branching graph with one node per recipe. Spend Research Points (earned from kills — tier-scaled, big bonus on bosses) plus a one-time material sample to research a node, once its prerequisites are researched and the planet can supply its materials. Starter recipes are pre-researched and free.

The material ladder

The tree flows left→right along the metal spine, with weapon, armor, jewelry and consumable branches hanging off each ingot node. A node costs Research Points by the depth of its deepest material, plus one unit of that material as a sample:

Forging & salvage

The craft panel (C) groups recipes by output category (Cooking Smelting Weapons Armor Carpentry) and its station. You must stand within crafting range of the right station. A recipe forged deeper yields stronger gear: power = 1 + 0.12·(planet − 1) — a copper sword forged on Planet 25 is 3.9× the Planet-1 version. Salvaging owned gear at its making station refunds ~half its recipe inputs (always lossy).

Gear & equipment

Open the character sheet with V for a WoW-style paperdoll. Equipped gear is hidden from the inventory grid, and item tooltips append a vs-equipped comparison so you can see an upgrade at a glance.

• Weapon — one of the eight lines. Owned weapons cycle on the action bar.
• Armor — multi-slot plate/chain/leather/cloth sets (head, chest, hands, legs, feet…).
• Accessories — Amulet, Ring, Earring, Bracelet slots, enum-driven and expandable.

Weapons can hold a bone-attached shield or off-hand. Each weapon type has its own range (tuneable), and Hurling weapons throw with unlimited ammo — stones are flavor, not a resource.

Homestead & building

Craft placeable buildings to turn a patch of planet into a base. Select a placed building to drag it, wheel-rotate it, upgrade it, or demolish it (demolish refunds half). The whole camp is run-scoped: it survives reloads in place, and stepping through the portal re-plants it near your next landing with its layout intact.

Upgrades. Select a placed building → Upgrade to rebuild it in place as a better tier, keeping its spot & contents: Campfire→Hearth (wider safe zone), Forge→Great Forge, Wall→Reinforced Wall, Torch→Brazier, Bed→Fine Bed, Chest→Large Chest. Decorative pieces — gateposts, banners, scarecrows, stone wells — dress a camp with no gameplay effect.

Planets & progression

Planet N has N bosses and is +5 radius larger than N−1 (start radius 100). All combat difficulty scales on the planet number; the numbers below assume a calm planet (Wrath 0).

steps = PlanetIndex − 1. The deepest ambient creature lands at level ~99 on planet 50 — right at the weapon-skill cap of 100 — so the final ambient fight is fair. Bosses grow +15%/planet, a shade above your gear's +12%/planet, so a boss always stays a step ahead without ballooning into a damage sponge. Per-instance "vigor" jitters each creature's HP/DMG/size by ±(15% + 3%·steps), capped at ±50%. Combat tactics (circling, pouncing, flanking) switch on at planet 5 and sharpen each planet deeper.

Regions

Themed sub-planet regions — cemetery, highlands, ruins — carve sphere-circles that override the local biome's creature pool, giving each world distinct pockets of danger.

Wrath — the planet's temper

"Combat with nature itself." Gathering (+1.5) and killing (+4) raise Wrath 0→100; idle time decays it. Decay scales with the planet number — planet 1 never calms, ramping linearly to the full rate by planet 50. Every escalation knob reads the normalized 0–1 fraction.

At full fury a creature reaches 2.6× HP, 2.2× damage, 1.5× speed and 1.8× aggro range, on top of planet-number scaling. Wrath is what wakes the bosses: each takes form the first time the fraction crosses its schedule threshold, spread evenly from 0.35 (first) to 0.9 (last), one at a time. Fell a planet's final boss and its Wrath collapses — hostile waves and resource spawns stop (livestock still wander in), and a portal opens where the boss died. Walk up and press F to travel when you've gathered what's left.

Survival

There is no hunger bar — food heals and buffs instead. You manage two pools and a small defensive stat block:

Buffs from food and tonics show on a HUD buff bar with countdowns. On death, creatures play a death clip and leave a corpse that fades over ~10s, dropping loot gems that auto-pickup.

Map & waypoints

• Minimap & compass — a local-radar minimap (azimuthal-equidistant) with rim-clamped locators for nearby points of interest.
• World map (M) — a 3D globe you can drag to spin and wheel to zoom, reusing the planet mesh.
• Waypoints (P to plant, O for the panel) — up to ten named gold beacons. Select one and it lays a guide trail on the ground and marks the minimap.
• Planet resources (L) — a census dropdown listing every gatherable node type on the planet with counts.

Interface & panels

Most screens are modeless tool windows with a unified title bar (maximize, close, double-click to maximize) that you can drag, scale and hide. Esc closes the newest-opened panel first, then pauses. A Customize HUD editor lets you drag, scale and hide ten HUD widgets, saved to local storage.

• System Menu — a top-right icon bar mirroring every screen, always topmost.
• Mesh Viewer — inspect every model in the game (orbit / pan / zoom, clip player).
• Console (J) — a non-combat activity log; Combat log (H) is its combat twin.
• Statistics (N) — lifetime play metrics: kills by species, resources gathered, bosses, deaths, planets cleared.

Saves

Planetspite keeps 5 named save slots in browser local storage. A reload (F5) restores the exact planet — resources, creatures, bosses and your position — from the save blob, so you never lose a world-in-progress. Your homestead, waypoints, research, Insight and progression all travel in the blob.

Tuneables

Planetspite is heavily data-driven. Server-authored content catalogs (items, buildings, recipes, gear, research) download and cache at startup, and a settings screen exposes the player-facing knobs from GameConfig. World-gen knobs (marked ⟳) rebuild the planet only on Apply; everything else applies live. A selection:

The complete field manual — with interactive charts of every curve — ships in the game at /manual/. It's the authoritative reference for exact values.

Metrics server

Planetspite ships with an optional self-hosted telemetry backend (ASP.NET Core + LiteDB, packaged as a Synology .spk). The game fires one fire-and-forget check-in on load; the server aggregates anonymous progression and play metrics into an admin dashboard and leaderboard. It's entirely opt-in and never blocks play — a blank server URL silently disables it. The same server is the authority for all content catalogs and default tuneables, which clients download and cache at startup.