About Starsown
Starsown is a free browser game about sowing worlds into a shared sky, and then finding out what you grew.
What it is
Press SOW and a seed of light germinates into a world that has never existed before: a planet, a gas giant, a neutron star, a black hole. Its traits (its class, its rings, its moons, its chances of harboring life) are generated deterministically from a 32-character seed, and they are dealt out rarest-last, so the reveal has a heartbeat.
Every world that is sown is recorded. The seed becomes a permanent address: starsown.com/world/<seed>. Anyone can visit it, and the world will look exactly the same for them as it did for you, forever. That permanence is the whole point: a sown world is an object in a shared registry, not a local accident.
From there it becomes a small social universe: you can claim a world you discovered, stake a claim on an unclaimed one and let a draw decide, like the ones you want to remember, and browse what everyone else has found. The Observatory keeps the history: the first world ever sown, the rarest one known, and the lineage of every world that has ever worn the crown.
Exploring is endless and free. Sowing (minting a permanent new world into the registry) is limited to a handful per day, so the sky grows at a human pace.
Who makes it
Starsown is an independent project, built and operated by one person. It is not a company, and it has no investors, no advertising, and no tracking of any kind: the only measurement is our host's aggregate traffic and speed figures, described on the privacy page.
You can reach the operator at justin.l.black@gmail.com for anything at all: questions, bug reports, press, or security disclosures. (Account deletion is self-serve: sign in and use the delete section on your profile page, though email works too if you cannot sign in.)
How it is built
- The sky renders in your browser with WebGL (Three.js and React Three Fiber). Worlds are generated by a deterministic engine from their seed: the same seed always produces the same world, on every device.
- Every world is computed from real physics: how stars live and die, how planets hold together, how tides and magnetic fields work. The science library explains each formula, lets you try them, and credits and links every paper, data set and piece of code Starsown stands on (full license texts: third-party notices).
- The site is a static application hosted on Netlify, with a small set of serverless functions for the registry.
- Accounts and the world registry live in a Neon PostgreSQL database in the United States (AWS us-east-2).
Money
Starsown is free. There is nothing to buy, no payment system exists in the application, and worlds cannot be bought, sold, or exchanged for money or anything of value. If that ever changes, it will be announced clearly and this page will be updated first.
Reporting a problem
Found a bug, a broken world, a username that breaks the house rules, or a security issue? Email justin.l.black@gmail.com. Security researchers can also find contact details at /.well-known/security.txt.