Orbital ships and stations

What is an orbital ship?

A ship is your base in orbit, looking down on the planet it circles. It is a 64 m cube you can build in, in a world of its own with no ground: blocks, prefabs, chests, machines and the OVM work as everywhere else. It never lands. You commute by rocket, with friends if you like: there is no captain and no crew, everyone can enter and build, and locks protect what you want kept.

• 64 mthe buildable cube
• 10docks at most (1 central + 9)
• 2 kmdocking range
• 8ships within 5 km, at most

How do I create a ship and dock?

1. 1

   Craft a central space dock

   It is the dearest thing in the game: 96 aluminium sheets, 32 titanium sheets, 32 padding against the cold (wool, feathers or fur; half as much lunar dust felt), circuit boards, small pipes for the life support and springs.

2. 2

   Reach a stable orbit

   Fly a rocket to orbit and cut the engine. The ship keeps the orbit your rocket had.

3. 3

   Right-click with the dock in hand

   No map and no button. If it fails, an orange message says why: for instance “Cut the engine first” or too many ships here (8 at most within 5 km, never closer than 200 m).

4. 4

   Dock

   From the cockpit, open the ship list: within 2 km you see its name, its distance and “Speed OK” or “Too fast: slow down” (20 m/s relative at most). Click a dock, or use J and K. The rocket manoeuvres alone, nose-in. “Leave” backs it off by 100 m.

5. 5

   Step inside

   Docked, press F to leave the seat and float in the cabin. The top door leads to the dock's airlock, then to the ship, never through the outside.

How do I live and build up there?

• Where it is: on a calculated orbit. By default it faces the planet, like the ISS; you can set it to stay still among the stars, flip it (8 s) or spin it. Seen from outside within 12 km.
• Docks: the central dock cannot be broken. Place up to 9 secondary docks by right-clicking the hull with one; empty hands, right-click one to remove it. The airlock to space is the central dock's way out to the void.
• No gravity: you float, and so do items. Sand, liquids and fresh concrete neither fall nor flow. A gravity generator on a power cable gives the ship gravity: 0, 30, 70, 100 or 200 %, at 2 kW per 100 %. The first one in the ship decides.
• Suit and jetpack: the space suit lets you breathe outside; the jetpack moves you (W A S D, Space up, Shift down). Without a jetpack in zero gravity no key moves your body: you only keep your drift, and “Respawn” in the pause menu is the way out. B shows the cube's bounds.
• Dismantle: the central dock's screen can dismantle the ship; everything aboard is lost, rockets stay on the orbit, loose and the dock returns to whoever dismantled it.

How do I move a ship?

A new ship has no engine: it sits on its orbit. Three voxel parts change that, crafted in the Space tab.

• Fuel: the same dewars as rockets (1 dewar = 1 m³; LOX with methane, kerosene or hydrogen). Right-click an engine, a tank or the console's Fuel button; drop a stack, Shift-click for all of a kind. Each dewar poured returns an empty one. Rockets bring dewars in their cargo module.
• Orders of magnitude with methane: a full engine alone is about 0.7 km/s (change orbit, turn, not the Moon); one more tank about 2.5 km/s (the Moon, one way); two more about 3.5 km/s (and back). Low orbit to the Moon is about 1.4 km/s.
• The console: seated, big 3D buttons: Autopilot (P), Destination (N), Manual, Fuel, Stand up (F). The screen shows the orbit, the delta-v with a light, and the state (“Burn in 0:42”). One pilot per ship; V shows the whole ship from outside.
• Autopilot: a destination is always an orbit, Earth or Moon: Low, Medium, Geostationary (the equator at 3 500 km, the highest orbit the game keeps) or an altitude and an inclination. It refuses before leaving if you lack fuel. Earth to Moon: it waits for the right point, a transfer of 2 to 8 minutes, then captures the orbit.
• Manual: W A S D, Space, Shift push along the console's axes (about 4 m/s each second); arrows, Q and E turn the ship at 10 degrees a second.
• Shuttle and asteroids: pick your ship as a rocket's destination and the rendezvous autopilot brings the rocket nose-in to a dock. From the console, a ship can also voyage to a community asteroid in 30 to 120 s.

/ship list
/ship tp <name>
/ship name <name>
/ship face planet|stars
/ship turn pitch|yaw|roll <degrees>
/ship flip
/ship gravity <0|30|70|100|200>

Updated 2026-10-22