FAQ
Questions, answered
Platform, release, controls, and what you can do in the game today.
01 // The basics
The basics
- What is Pax Abyssi?
- A first-person space simulation for Windows PC on Unreal Engine 5, set in 2538. You fly a walkable ship on true Newtonian physics through a sky of 119,626 real stars at true scale, land on procedural worlds, skim gas giants with their own weather, fly to black holes and neutron stars drawn from their physics, and fight on the ground.
- What platform?
- Windows PC. The game is tuned on a laptop with an RTX 4060; minimum and recommended specifications are published with the first public build.
- When does it release, and what does it cost?
- The first public build, the wiki and the forum open together. The follow list at the foot of the page carries the notice, and the weekly devlog tracks the build until then. A price is set at release.
- Is it multiplayer?
- Pax Abyssi is single player.
- Can I play it now?
- It is playable in the studio at pre-alpha 0.1.0. The first public build is the next milestone.
02 // Flying
Flying
- Does it support HOTAS?
- Yes. The CONTROLS tab has KEYBOARD, GAMEPAD, JOYSTICK, THROTTLE and PEDALS pages: click a control, press a button, and it binds. A Thrustmaster Warthog throttle profile is in the game, hand-bound, with the left lever driving the port engine and the right the starboard; Warthog stick and T.16000M presets load when the stick is plugged in. Rudder pedals as a second device are planned. Details on the game page.In the game
- Is the flight really Newtonian?
- Yes. Six degrees of freedom on a fixed 60 Hz physics tick, thrust over the ship's catalogue mass, and nothing stops the ship but you. Four flight modes sit on the selector, from full fly-by-wire to full Newtonian, and the drift dampers let a stick pilot fly the pure physics without fighting it: the ship keeps its speed along the nose and bleeds the rest.In the game
- Can I walk around the ship while it flies?
- Yes. The ship is the anchor of the simulation, so you can stand up mid-cruise and walk aft while the sky keeps moving. The Calliope has two decks and ten rooms; the Aporia, a frigate, is walkable too and flies from any of her four bridge seats.In the game
- Can I use a gamepad?
- Yes: a full layout with analogue thrust and retro on the triggers, dampers on the D-pad and rumble on landing. The remote helm hands the pad to the ship so you can fly her from anywhere aboard.In the game
03 // What is in it
What is in it
- Is the star catalogue real?
- Yes. 119,626 stars from the HYG database, corrected against Gaia DR3, Hipparcos, XHIP and the Washington Double Star Catalog, with every correction kept as its own column. Every known pulsar and black hole is on the galaxy map, and so are 7,304 real star clusters. Details are on the science page.In the game
- Can I visit every star in the Milky Way?
- We began with the stars that have the best data: the 119,626 measured stars, each with a generated system. The rest of the Milky Way, 111 billion stars from a published model of our galaxy, is generated by the same science and arrives next: first on the galaxy map, then as places to fly to.In development
- Can I land on planets?
- Yes. Eight whole procedural worlds are in the game, generated while you play and walkable from the landing site to the horizon: a cold brine world, an ocean world with a ship of the line at anchor, a Mars-sized desert with a fortified town, a snow world, an airless moon built to the Moon's own numbers, and the first world made from a galaxy-map body. Every barren world type in the galaxy already has its procedural look designed, and the flat planet pictures on the map are becoming worlds you walk on, a few at a time. See the game page.In the game
- Are the black holes real physics?
- Yes. The Schwarzschild case uses precomputed beam tracing after Bruneton 2020; spinning holes use the closed-form Kerr ray of Gralla and Lupsasca 2020, per pixel, within 0.013 pixels of an offline oracle. The disk carries gravitational and Doppler shift from one formula, and the hole bends the real star field behind it. Twelve stops are flyable, from Cygnus X-1 to the Crab Pulsar.In the game
- What is there to do on foot?
- Hold a fortified company town at Vennik Flat against droid assaults with six tanks at the wire and a gatling in your hands, then read the After-action Report. Explore nineteen hero levels, neon cities and ancient ruins among them, and fight the monster wave ladders on three of them. Walk Nereid Station's market. A furnished moonbase on Halden Mare is being fitted out now.In the game
- What about stations?
- 2,457 stations are placed across the galaxy by rule, six are stops in the fast-travel menu, and Nereid Station at Neptune is walkable with a market aboard. The economy runs live over 1,068 markets, and the PEOPLE tab pages through 51,338 station crew with names and faces. Docking and the approach ritual are planned.In the game
04 // The site
The site
- Who writes the wiki?
- The Pax Abyssi team and the community. Every page carries a science status, observed, model, sim, speculative or fiction, and cites its sources. Edits from new accounts go through pending changes. Wiki text is CC BY-SA 4.0.
- Who writes the articles?
- The Pax Abyssi team. Science features carry the byline Pax Abyssi Science Desk and cite the papers they stand on; devlogs and news are by the team.
- Is the imagery real game footage?
- Every image on this site was rendered by the game, and each carries its source, whether the HUD was on, and the build. None is colour-graded beyond the engine's output. See the media page.
- Can I use the data?
- The star catalogue is derived from HYG under CC BY-SA 4.0, so derived star data is share-alike. The API and machine-readable pages are described on the developers page.