Stellar Nursery

Stellar Nursery is an idle game about relighting a cold star and restoring its nine empty worlds. You click the star to earn stardust, then spend it to bring the worlds back one at a time, from Mercury to the cold worlds past Saturn. Choose from four star colors and sweep falling stars out of the dark. As Earth’s brown continents turn green, its population grows from thousands to billions.

P.O.R.T.I.A. and the past

The system’s people are gone, and the star is cold. P.O.R.T.I.A., the caretaker who maintained the system through a hundred thousand dark years, is its only remaining voice. She was built from a woman’s mind, and the woman is still in her; when a settlement on a flood plain sends up flares, P.O.R.T.I.A. brings you the call and three answers, none of them right. Her voice was recorded by the developer for the game.

Worlds and their records

When a star has given all it can, you can let it go. Each spent star leaves a faint ring in the sky, and by the sixth, the sky reflects the system’s history. At three billion people, lights appear along a dark coast and P.O.R.T.I.A. asks you to name the city. From then on, the world keeps a written record. Its first vote comes a season later, when nobody has a family name; P.O.R.T.I.A. offers the only names she has, those carried by the dead.

On Mars, you place domes in a canyon, by the ice or on the open plain, each with its own weather. Rocks fall and storms come. A world can be damaged but never emptied, and losses remain in the record. Each city also prints an Almanac with the tides, Moon phases and its best week to plant beans, which it admits is a guess.

Idle play and discoveries

The game can make up to a day of progress while you are away. When you return, P.O.R.T.I.A. gives you a Watch Report; you can also close the game and find out what happened while you were gone. Relaxed mode and a calm sky are available in Settings.

A direct run to the ending takes about ten hours if you know where to go, but much of the game lies off that route. Optional content includes puzzles that can be missed if you move on before solving them, rogue satellites, meteors, real astronomical events and events that happen only once per playthrough.

Optional activities and collections

• World themes: 57 themes, including watercolor, noir, stained glass and cats, earned through play.
• Glass tones: 34 tones, all earned through play.
• Other looks: 15 looks each for the beam and the vacuum, earned through play.
• Achievements: 59 achievements, including 11 secret ones.
• Activities and stories: P.O.R.T.I.A.’s piano, a harmonograph, a double pendulum, a prime spiral, her tap, sealed ciphers, a word search, constellations to chart and a novella in nine chapters. These are optional.