From download to first win.

Install and run

Downloads are on the download page. The playtest is closed, so the page asks for a password — it is posted in the Discord, and asking for it is the whole process. One build is published per platform.

There is no installer. Unzip the archive somewhere you can write to and run the executable inside. Everything the game saves — settings, which tutorials you have finished — goes to your user profile, not the game folder, so you can delete and replace the folder on each new build without losing anything.

Per-platform notes

• Windows — unzip and run stars-reborn.exe. Keep the .pck file next to it; the executable will not start without it. SmartScreen may warn about an unknown publisher: the build is not code-signed.
• Linux — unzip, chmod +x stars-reborn.x86_64, run it. The .pck file must stay beside it.
• macOS — the zip contains a .app bundle. It is not notarised, so Gatekeeper refuses it on the first double-click: right-click the app, choose Open, then confirm. Once per build.

What it needs

It is a 2D game built in Godot 4.6 and it is not demanding. Any machine from the last decade with working OpenGL/Vulkan drivers will run it. Both players want a stable connection more than a fast computer — the simulation runs at a fixed 20 ticks per second and the host is authoritative, so latency shows up as delayed orders rather than stutter.

The shape of a match

Time runs continuously and fast. Two game years pass every real second, and the economy — population growth, mining, production — ticks over once per year. Combat, bombing and build queues advance every simulation tick, which is ten times faster still.

Press Space to pause. Do this often. You can select ships, read planets, queue buildings and issue every order while paused; it costs you nothing and it is how the game is meant to be played. In multiplayer only the host can pause, and pausing stops the match for both players.

A galaxy is generated from a seed you can see and type in on the main menu, so the same seed always produces the same galaxy. Three sizes are available.

Stars are never generated closer than 720 units apart, and are drawn from a pool of 30 names. Each system holds two to six planets.

Start with the tutorials

There are four, in the main menu, and they are the fastest route in. Each runs on a fixed seed with the AI switched off, so nothing is racing you while you read. Finishing one puts a tick on its tile.

After those, play a single-player match against Settler, the gentlest opponent. It expands slowly and skips half the actions it could take, which gives you room to make mistakes and notice them.

The core loop

Everything in the game runs through one chain, and understanding it is most of understanding the game:

population → workers → mines and factories → minerals and production → ships and buildings → more planets → more population

Population is the bottleneck at the top of that chain, and it is the slowest thing in the game to move. Minerals accumulate, factories can be built in seconds, but people take years to grow. Most losing positions in Stars Reborn are population positions that were already lost several minutes earlier.

Running an economy

Every planet is its own economy — not every system. A five-planet system is five separate populations, five build queues and five sets of caps. Click a star to see the system, click a planet to open it.

Workers

Only half your population works; the rest are dependants. Each mine and each factory wants ten workers to run at full efficiency, and below that it runs proportionally slower. The mining focus slider on the planet panel splits your workers between the two, and surplus on one side automatically spills over to the other, so you are never wasting people on a side that is already full.

The distinction that matters: understaffed and out of buildings look similar and call for opposite responses. If workers are idle, build more mines or factories. If buildings are running under capacity, you need population, not construction. The planet panel spells this out if you hover the idle-worker count.

Minerals run out

A planet's concentration falls as you extract from it, and the total a world will ever yield is fixed: 2 × size × concentration. Mining harder does not mine more — it just gets you there sooner. A big rich world is genuinely a prize; a small one is a temporary income.

What to build first

On your home world you start with five mines, five factories and a starbase. The usual opening is to keep both counts climbing while population can staff them, get a scout out immediately, and have a colonizer moving before the first minute is out. Factories make everything after that cheaper in time; mines make it cheaper in minerals. Which you need depends on which number is stalling.

Expanding

Colonizers cost minerals and population, and they are consumed on arrival, delivering fifty people and a hundred minerals to the new world. That population cost is why expansion has a real price: every colony ship is fifty workers taken off a planet that was using them.

Reading a world before you take it

• Habitability sets your population ceiling, and with it how many buildings you can ever staff. A world at low habitability is a world you cannot work, whatever else is true about it.
• Size sets both the mine and factory caps and, together with habitability, the maximum population. Two worlds in the same system can differ by nearly three times.
• Concentration is how fast minerals come out, and combined with size, how much is in there in total.

A high-habitability world of moderate size will out-produce a huge hostile one, because it can actually staff what it builds. The huge hostile one is still worth having — but as a mining site, not a colony (see miners and freighters).

Rally points

Select a star with no ships selected and right-click somewhere: everything built at that star from then on flies there automatically. Shift-right-click extends it into a multi-leg route. This is how you keep reinforcements flowing to a front without babysitting each hull as it rolls off the queue.

Scouting and fog of war

You see almost nothing at the start, and what you learn you can also lose again. Every sensor has two ranges, and confusing them is a common early mistake.

• Movement scan — how far you detect that an enemy ship exists. You get a contact, not an identification.
• Detail scan — how close you must be to read a planet's real numbers and to tell what an enemy hull actually is. Only scouts and star-mounted scanners give you this at any useful range.

Systems you can see report live values. Systems you have visited but left behind show their last known state, greyed out and stamped with the year you saw it — useful, and sometimes badly out of date. Systems you have never reached show nothing at all.

Scouts are the cheapest thing in the game and the best sensor in it. Build them early, build more than feels necessary, and keep them moving. A scout parked in an enemy system is a permanent intelligence feed until somebody kills it.

Reading the map

Zoomed out, every system is a dot, and a galaxy of identical dots tells you nothing about where to go next. The map overlays fix that by painting the numbers onto the map itself.

• O Ownership — on by default. Each system washed in its owner's colour, with a hard edge marking the border.
• M Minerals — three bars per world: concentration, remaining lifetime reserve, and minerals sitting on the surface right now.
• G or L Settlement — habitability, maximum population, current population. This is the layer that answers "is this worth colonising".
• Y Ship count — on by default. How many identifiable combat ships are in orbit, red if any of them are not yours.
• E Scan rings — on by default. Shows how far your sensors actually reach, which is usually less than you think.

Zoom past the planet threshold and each world in a system reports separately rather than the system reporting one combined figure. Overlays only ever show what you have scouted — live where you have vision, dimmed where you are working from an old reading, blank where you have never been.

Fighting

Ships within range of each other form a battle automatically, and by default every ship engages anything hostile it detects. Press A to turn that off on a selection when you want to walk a fleet past a fight instead of into it.

The counter triangle

• Fighter beats cruiser — closes inside the cruiser's 60-unit minimum range, where missiles cannot fire.
• Cruiser beats frigate — outranges the frigate's 100-unit reach by 3.6x and kites it.
• Frigate beats fighter — armour and damage per shot beat the fighter's evasion in a close brawl.

The cruiser's blind spot is the most important detail in the game's combat. It outranges everything by a wide margin, but it cannot fire at anything closer than sixty units, and fighters actively push inside that gap where the cruiser cannot answer at all. A cruiser without escorts loses to ships it should beat.

Fleets fly together

Ships you send with one order travel as one fleet: everyone flies at the speed of the slowest ship, so your fighters do not race ahead of the frigates and cruisers and fight alone. The fleet breaks formation the moment the enemy comes within gun range of its shortest-ranged ships, and from then on every ship fights on its own. Order a ship by itself and it flies at its own speed again. Fights are won by numbers in one place, so a fleet that arrives together is worth far more than the same ships arriving one class at a time.

Supply

Your fleet has a size limit. Every ship takes supply: one for most hulls, two for a frigate or a bomber, three for a cruiser. The top bar shows how much you use and how much you may hold, and so does the Ships column of a planet. A ship takes its supply the moment you order it and gives it back when it is destroyed, when a colonizer settles, or when you cancel the order. A ship that no longer fits is greyed out in the build list. Starbases take none. The exact numbers are on the reference page.

At the limit, more minerals do not buy a bigger fleet, only a different one. Three fighters or one cruiser is a choice you now have to make, and miners, freighters and scouts come out of the same total as your warships.

Warping

Travel between systems is four times normal speed, but every warp starts with a stationary spinup — a second and a half for a scout, six for a cruiser. Taking damage during spinup cancels the warp. A fleet caught mid-spinup is a fleet that is not going anywhere. Ships always arrive on the rim of the destination system, never on top of the star.

Bombing

Bombers do not fight ships at all. They orbit an enemy world and kill population. Strip a planet to zero and it goes neutral: the owner loses it along with every mine, factory and queued build on it, and any starbase based there is destroyed. What survives is the ground itself — concentration and surface minerals stay, so a bombed world is immediately re-colonisable by whoever gets a colonizer there first. Often that is you.

Miners and freighters

Some of the best worlds in the galaxy cannot be colonised — enormous, mineral-rich, and uninhabitable. Miners are how you take them anyway.

Miners

A miner parks in orbit and extracts into that planet's surface stockpile at the rate of one fully-staffed land mine. It works on any world you own or nobody owns — never an enemy's. Each planet holds a limited number of them, floor(size / 10), so a small world takes one or two and extra miners sent there contribute nothing.

Freighters and trade routes

Minerals mined at a neutral world sit there until something moves them. A freighter carries 150 minerals or 50 colonists per run, and rather than steering it by hand you give it a standing route: press Ctrl + R, click the source planet, click the destination. A freighter can hold several routes and cycles between them.

Each route has a pickup rule and a delivery rule, which is where the system earns its keep:

• Minerals — take everything, or keep a percentage at the source. Deliver up to the destination's maximum, or cap it at a number.
• Colonists — max productivity keeps enough people at the source to staff every building it has; max growth holds a world at the half-full point where population climbs fastest. Set the destination to max growth and you are deliberately feeding a young colony through its slow phase.

A loaded freighter is unarmed and slow, and a mining operation at a neutral world is an obvious, static, valuable thing sitting in open space. Escort them. If you find your opponent running one, that convoy is the softest target on the map.

Winning

1. Elimination — a player with no systems and no colonizer left is out. The last one standing wins.
2. Domination — hold 60% of the systems in the galaxy for 2 minutes. Both players see the count at the top of the screen; lose a system and drop below the share, and it starts again.
3. Timeout — at 30 minutes, whoever holds the most systems wins. A tie is a draw. If a domination hold is still running then, the match goes into overtime (up to 2 minutes): it ends when the hold completes or is broken.

Elimination needs both conditions: a player with no systems but a colonizer still in flight is alive, and can come back from it. Domination counts a system as yours if any planet in it is — which means two players can both hold a share of a multi-planet system, and neither gets full credit for it.

The timeout is worth planning around rather than treating as a failure state. At around the twenty-minute mark, if neither side has broken through, the question stops being "can I win the war" and becomes "do I hold more systems than they do right now" — and a cheap colonizer sent to an empty corner can be worth more than a battle. The clock does not save you from a hold already under way: if the enemy is holding 60% when time runs out, the match goes into overtime, and taking one system back ends it on the system count.

Multiplayer

Matches are 1v1, peer to peer, with no servers in the middle. One player hosts and the other joins. The host is authoritative: it runs the real simulation, and it is the only one who can pause.

On the same network

Over the internet

LAN discovery does not cross the internet, so the joiner types the host's public IP address into the manual join field instead. For that to work the host has to be reachable:

• Forward the game port on the host's router to the host machine. This is the step that actually matters; the discovery port is LAN-only and irrelevant here.
• Allow the game through the host's firewall. On Windows the first run usually prompts for this — if you dismissed that prompt, add the rule by hand.
• The joiner needs nothing. No forwarding, no firewall changes. Only the host is listening.
• If you would rather not touch a router at all, any VPN that puts both machines on one virtual network turns this back into the LAN case, discovery included.

Things new players get wrong

None of these are obvious from inside a match, and all of them cost real games.

• Forgetting the starbase. A colony without one cannot build ships, no matter how rich it gets. If a planet is stockpiling minerals and never producing anything, this is why.
• Not pausing. Space is free. Every order works while paused. Playing without it is playing with a handicap.
• Panning with A while ships are selected. It also toggles engage-on-sight. Fleets have walked past enemies for this reason. Use the arrow keys if you tend to pan with your left hand on a selection.
• Sending cruisers out alone. They cannot see far enough to use their own range. Give them a frigate or a scout.
• Warping under fire. Damage during spinup cancels the warp outright. Break contact first, then leave.
• Over-mining a small world. The per-planet miner cap is floor(size / 10). Miners beyond it do nothing at all.
• Colonising on size alone. Habitability decides how much of a world you can actually staff. A huge world you cannot populate is a mining site, not a colony.
• Ignoring the build shortcuts. Shift-click a build button to queue five at once; shift-click a queued item to cancel all of that type. Nothing in the interface tells you this.
• Leaving freighters unescorted. They are unarmed, slow, and carry the whole point of your mining operation.
• Treating the 30-minute cap as a draw. It is not — most systems wins. Count them before the clock runs down.

The complete key list is on the reference page, and it is worth one read-through: several of the things that feel missing from the game are bound to a key nobody mentions.