Thousands of planets and space zones, each persistent whether you are online or not, all connected into a single galactic game.
Wormholes, not warp drives
The ancient Old Ones tore holes in space and built an interstellar subway network of wormholes — complete with worms inside — when they terraformed the galaxy into their Garden.
Planets are simulated, not painted
Water flows, forests burn, lava hardens into new material and land masses, seasons change, creatures migrate and compete, and what you do to the environment persists.
Terrain is fully modifiable
You can sculpt terrain, harvest and replant bushes and trees, re-route water to irrigate a desert, carve underground mining complexes, or flatten a mountain.
Resources can run out
Every planet and space zone has unique resources with unique stats, and a planet can be mined out — at which point you need to find new worlds that still have what you need.
Extinction is permanent
Pave a place over and you can drive its creatures extinct; that species will never appear in the game again. One of the largest playtest guilds was an animal conservation union formed around exactly this.
Are Stars Reach planets voxel?
Playable Worlds has never used the word voxel as a marketing term, and the honest answer is that
the studio describes the behaviour rather than the data structure. What is documented is what the
terrain does: you can sculpt it, tunnel through it, re-route water across it, flatten a
mountain, drop a cliff face onto an enemy, and carve underground mining complexes — and all of it
persists for every other player on that world. Whether that is implemented as voxels or as
something else, the studio has not said, so anyone stating it flatly is guessing.
Named locations on record
These are the places official sources and launch-day footage actually name. The galaxy is far
larger; this is what can be sourced rather than what exists.
Location
Type
What it is
Haven
Starter area
The starting zone, and a moon rather than a planet — its parent world is Crucible. Update 8.4.0 replaced the old Haven map with a much more explorable one carrying hidden easter eggs, and swapped the old kill mission for a defence against a Corruption attack.
Crucible
Planet
The planet that Haven orbits.
The Garden of the Hub
Space station
A zero-gravity station reached after leaving Haven — the market, bank and galaxy map hub on the launch-day route.
Lepus 2
Planet
The first destination beyond Haven on the launch-day route, reached through a space portal after earning the Starship Key.
Note the detail most guides get wrong: Haven is a moon, and Crucible is the
planet it orbits.
Why some worlds feel empty — and some are gated
In a single-shard galaxy with thousands of persistent zones, population spread is a design
problem rather than a bug. Planets can be created and destroyed, and a world stripped to bedrock
with its flora and fauna wiped out becomes uninhabitable. If you want to know whether a world is
genuinely populated, the honest tells are settlement density and vendor activity — Stars Reach
exposes no per-planet population counter. For the game-wide picture, our
player count page keeps the Steam concurrent snapshot.
What is trying to kill the galaxy
The Corruption
A biological hive mind created by accident from the Old Ones' genetic experiments, which believes it is destined to absorb the entire Garden. Its spores drift through space, crash into planets, and start tentacle-and-spore colonies that spread across the biome.
Forms: Floating spores that grow, split and burst into deadly gas clouds; anchored types such as turret tentaclevines and puffball stalks; and Motherplants, which build rings of defences around themselves and seed more children across the landscape.
How it is handled: Clearing a planet's Corruption is a major cooperative task. The Servitors hunt and exterminate it wherever they find it.
Makers
The mechanical regulators of the environment that repopulate wildlife. Rangers track them down and reveal their locations, and they have to be dealt with before an area can be safely settled.
How it is handled: Maker Scanning moved into the Xenobiology tree in 8.4.0; loot caches began including Klaatu in the same patch.
The Corruption is the reason the Haven starter mission changed in 8.4.0 — the old generic kill
mission became a defence of Haven against a Corruption attack, using deliberately small spawns
rather than Motherplants. Clearing a real infestation off a settled world is a group project.