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Browser space strategy MMO · dark forest + exploration · open, and free to play

The universe is dark.
And it's watching you.

Nobody announces themselves here. The map is not given to you — you earn it, one probe and one buoy at a time, and every ship you move is a light somebody else can see. A homeworld is waiting. It takes an email and a name — the rest you have to earn.

Claim a homeworld → Look around first — no account

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spherical 3D surface espionage positional battles exploration wary alliances moons & debris

The premise

Two ideas, in tension

A cosmos that stays silent out of fear, and the irresistible urge to go see what's out there in the dark. Silent Expanse lives exactly on that edge.

The dark forest of The Three-Body Problem: every civilization stays silent, because being noticed is a deadly risk. And Star Trek–style exploration: discovery as adventure, the thrill of pushing past the edge of the map.

Here information is the real resource. You know nothing about other worlds until you send a probe — and sending it exposes you. Attack blind? You lose the fleet. Grow too fast? You become visible. The map isn't given: you uncover it, one sector at a time.

There are no heroes or villains. Only the dark, what you manage to learn, and how much you're willing to risk to learn more.

— exposing yourself is dangerous; silence is survival.

A world in the dark

How to play

A deep empire economy, on real geography

Where you build and where you land decide the outcome. Here are the pillars.

Scout, then strike

The APIs are blind: you send probes, and what they report depends on the tech gap. Without intel you don't even know where the defenses are — and you shoot down enemy probes.

Positional battles

Defenses are fixed on points (lat, lon) of the globe. Land in an uncovered zone and the batteries never touch you; pick the wrong spot and you're torn apart.

Explore the dark

Sensors open the map, survey buoys uncover unknown sectors. What you see — and can colonize — grows with the square of your technology.

Debris and moons

Every battle leaves wreckage in orbit; reclaimers recover it, and sometimes a moon condenses from the debris — a brand-new base to arm.

Where to live is a choice

Close to the star: solar power and little ichor. Far out, in the cold: the fusion core and fuel in abundance. Your orbit decides your economy.

Fleets & rapid fire

Stationed ships defend wherever the enemy lands. In battle, rapid fire rewards composition: Centurions against fighters, everyone against probes.

Alliances share the map, not each other

An alliance pools what its members have explored — the one thing worth staying together for. It never reveals where they live: that is a switch each of them decides alone. And nothing prevents betrayal; it is only recorded, and the victim can light you up for everyone to see.

Every fleet leaves a signature

Cross a sector somebody watches and your callsign is logged there — anonymous until they earn your name, and permanent once they have. Changing your name changes nothing. Moving is how you get anywhere, and how you are found.

What you know goes stale

A scouting report is a photograph, not a feed. Fleets move, defences go up, and the picture you paid a probe for quietly stops being true. You can still strike a world you scouted last month — you just strike blind.

Peace held by a threat

No treaty stops anybody here. What stops them is the Beacon: aim it at a world you have scouted, and if you ever fire, that world becomes visible to the entire universe — and so does yours. Deterrence exactly as the dark forest describes it.

A living universe

Real physics, not a backdrop

Every system has its own star and orbital band. Planets trace ellipses in real time, and how far out a world sits sets its temperature, its solar power and what its ground yields.

scorching

arid

temperate

ocean

tundra

frozen

A universe that breathes

It starts small and grows with the people in it — outer worlds first, then whole sectors, then galaxies — and it can be drawn back in when it empties. Nothing already settled ever moves.

Four zoom levels

From a planet's surface, out to the system with its live orbits, to the ring-galaxy of stars coloured by their temperature, and out again to the galaxies themselves — where what you see is mostly how little you know.

The leaderboard is blind

You see how strong a rival is, but their name only if you've scouted them — and their fleet never. It's not a target catalog.

Time really passes

Production, construction and fleets advance even offline: you return to a world that time has moved.

Where you play

In your browser, in your language, on the thing in your pocket

Nothing to download, and nothing to install unless you want to. The same game everywhere, and the same account.

Five languages

The game and this site are in English, Italian, German, French and Spanish. Ship names are deliberately not translated: alliances form across languages, and two people planning a strike have to say Praetor and mean the same object.

It installs on a phone

Add it to your home screen and it opens like an app — the same pages, laid out for a thumb, with the 3D view under your finger. It can tell you that something is inbound, and the notification never says where: a lock screen is not the place to learn somebody's coordinates.

No trackers, no banner

The game carries no analytics and no third-party script of any kind — enforced by its content security policy rather than merely intended — so you are never asked to accept anything in order to play. This public site is the only place any measurement happens, and there you are asked first.

While it is being built

Free until the end of 2026

The game is free to play until 31 December 2026, and new worlds open in waves as the universe grows. Anyone who claims a homeworld before that date keeps one more month after it — arrive later and that same month runs from your own start instead. The clock runs to 23:59 CET on 31 December 2026, wherever you are reading it.

—hours

—min

—sec

Why it is free

Because the useful thing you can give right now is not money. It is a crash nobody else has hit, a rule that reads badly, a battle that resolved in a way you did not expect. There is a bug report and a suggestion button inside the game, both one click from anywhere, and both land on the same desk.

What happens after

You buy the complete game — one thing, sold once, with discounts for longer terms. Nothing else is ever for sale: no cosmetics, no boosts, no premium universe, no way to pay for information or for power. In a game about what nobody knows about you, selling an advantage would be selling the point. The prices are already published, long before there is anything to pay.

Two rules

Everything else follows from these

Information is the resource

Not metal. What you know — and what nobody knows about you. There is no player list, no map of who lives where, no population counter. You find a world by sending something to look at it, and what you learn goes out of date while you decide what to do with it.

Acting reveals you

Every fleet that moves leaves a signature for anyone whose sensors cover the route. Spying is detectable. Firing tells the target where the shot came from. There is no move that costs you nothing, which is why the hardest decision is usually whether to move at all.

And against them, the other half: the dark is worth going into. Sectors nobody has charted, worlds nobody has named, and something out there the game never explains and never will. Exploring is how you get anywhere — and it is also how you get noticed. That tension is the whole game.

Dispatches

News from the dark

The game is open — you do not need this to play. This is for what comes next: what is being built, what changed, the occasional story from out there. Nothing else, and leaving takes seconds — every email carries the way out.

You are subscribing to a mailing list, not creating a game account — to play, claim a homeworld instead. We will send one email to confirm it is really you; until you click it, nothing else is sent.

The forest is out there. The doors are open.

A homeworld, the dark all around, and everything to discover. Free to play, and nobody will tell you where anyone else is.

Claim a homeworld →