Stars Reach Planets: Getting Around the Galaxy in Build 8.7.2

How the galaxy is laid out right now

There is no single overworld. You start on Haven, the tutorial planet. Sky Skiffs connect Haven and Crucible: 8.5.0 added a timer for the next Skiff departure on the Departures holopedestal at both. Once you hold the Starship Key you reach space. Space is split into sectors, each with a starbase, a bank, public vendors and a Tool Shop, and each sector has portals or wormholes to its planets and to neighbouring sectors.

The build notes name some of these places directly. The 8.4.3 hotfix (21 August 2026) mentions item loss on the Letiemopas sector starbase and an asteroid in Cohufotag sector 'growing grass'. The 8.4.5 hotfix (26 August) names Kai-III and Kai-IV as wild wormhole planets in the Kai sector. The Starside newsletter of 2 October held a trivia night 'at The Event Space on Cohufotag-2', which is a player town.

Planets come in roughly three kinds. How you treat each one matters more than how many there are:

Step by step: getting from one planet to another

Players who are new to space ask the same few questions ('Navigating the galaxy?', 'Travelling', 'So.. just 4 planets for now?' on the Steam forum). Here is the route that works in 8.7.2.

1. Finish Mayor Bob Howard's three Haven missions and use the Starship Key to go to space. Since 8.5.0 every character receives a one-time free Homesteader the first time they enter a Space zone, even with a full inventory.
2. Open the map in space. 8.5.0 added a full visible Space Map of the current space zones, because there is no surveying in space yet. It shows icons and labels for every portal and wormhole, with each one's destination.
3. For the bigger picture, open the Galactic Map, added in 8.6.0 Better Together. It shows the whole current galaxy, which sectors connect to each other, and basic information about each sector. Players say the mission terminal only lists planets in your own zone, so the maps are how you find the rest.
4. Fly into a portal or wormhole. 8.5.0 redesigned the Portal Travel screen and gave it basic information about the destination. Since 8.7.0 it also shows the destination's Mayor and Servitor edicts before you arrive. Read them, because they decide what you may mine there.
5. When you arrive, you appear at the planet's portal (the Landing Zone on the map since 8.3.0). The map also marks GovBots. Visit the GovBot first to see who the mayor is, the population, the edicts and any restrictions. 8.7.0 made that first screen the same for citizens and visitors.
6. Travelling with friends: create a party (8.6.0, /party invite). Party members in the same zone appear as waypoints in the world and on the map, and 8.7.0 added a roster of up to 10 members beside chat.
7. Missions: since 8.4.5, mission difficulty is labelled near / mid / far, because it really measures travel distance. 8.7.0 fixed a bug that limited mission selection to 4 planets, which is one reason the galaxy felt smaller in the first weeks.

Wild wormholes and adventure worlds: go in, don't move in

Wild wormholes are the frontier. The original Wild Wormholes Update described them as leading to procedurally generated planets 'outside of Servitor control', with their own resources, flora, creatures and geography, reached through a wormhole that 'can collapse at any moment, stranding you on the other side if you're not careful.' Raph Koster's 2024 announcement adds the long-term rule: if a planet is abandoned, its spacelanes suffer from neglect and the route can close.

Early Access has made this rule concrete, sometimes the hard way:

On day two of Early Access (Raph Koster's post of 20 August 2026) the studio shipped an update to rescue players stranded on wild wormhole planets. 8.4.3 (21 August) removed GovBots from adventure planets because 'Adventure Zones were not intended to have GovBots and allow for citizenship since they are not available all the time', and cleared the citizenships players had declared there. It also fixed missions that expired when a wild planet closed. 8.4.5 (26 August) temporarily turned off Kai-III and Kai-IV because players were being wrongly removed from them; a pinned Steam notice later marked this fixed. 8.5.1 (11 September) enlarged the trigger volume around wild wormholes so they are easier to enter, fixed incorrect wormhole behaviour, and repaired mission scheduling through them. 8.6.0 (15 September) stopped portals on Adventure Worlds from spawning in spots too hot to stand on, and portals that are super-heated, frozen or buried now clear the area around themselves.

The practical takeaway is simple. Wild worlds are where fresh resources are. A Steam reply in the 'placing homesteads' thread explains why you cannot build there: access is intermittent, the worlds are replaced over time, and players who built on them lost their homesteads. Carry back what you gather, and don't leave anything you can't afford to lose.

What changes from world to world

Resources come first. The official overview and Steam page say every planet has its own ecosystems, resources and challenges. Players' most common resource questions ('Where is all the iron?', where to find plant fibre) come down to the fact that a material plentiful on one world can be scarce on the next. Since 8.5.0 the Galactopedia has an entry for every resource type, sorted by tier, which helps you plan a trip. 8.3.0 also says claimed loot never repopulates, and new loot is meant to be found on new planets.

Servitor edicts come second. Some planets forbid mining certain minerals. Players on Reddit ('Mining ore and Servitor's Warnings') describe getting warnings for mining banned ores and checking the list at the GovBot. The list differs by planet and changes, so we don't reproduce any specific list. Since 8.7.0 the portal travel screen shows a world's Mayor and Servitor edicts before you travel, so you can check before you start digging.

Climate is third. Cold worlds had their own problems at launch. 8.4.5 and 8.4.6 fixed lag on frozen planets, which came from trees and flora. 8.5.0 made some flora more willing to grow on very cold worlds, and made Harvest Missions on cold worlds less likely to be cancelled. Water varies too: since 8.4.5 the Terraformer can extract Fresh Water and Salt Water, reliably from frozen material and with difficulty from the bottom of a body of water. Most water is currently Salt Water, and cactus and Mature Saguaro can also yield Fresh Water.

Generation itself is still changing. 8.4.0 announced a planet-generation rewrite in progress. Its aims are more realistic rock and gem distribution, more dramatic alien landscapes and better underground areas. Any planet guide written today has a short shelf life.

Who runs a planet, and what that means for you

Stable planets can be claimed and governed by players. The official FAQ (March 2025, written before Early Access) describes the process. A group places a ClaimBot, which starts a series of tasks; several groups can compete, and the first to finish wins. The planet then forms a government that unlocks city structures and public facilities, and can raise taxes. The same FAQ says a planet can be lost in two ways. Abandonment: without enough activity, the wormhole gate to it closes. Overthrow: if the government is a democracy, its leaders can be voted out. Any player may build on an unclaimed frontier planet, but if a government later claims it, it can make settlers relocate, with warning and without losing their assets.

In the live build, the GovBot is how all this shows up. 8.7.0 split farming and xyloslicing (tree-cutting) into separate planet-wide permissions. Once a GovBot reaches level 10, the mayor chooses whether each activity is open to everyone, citizens, licensed citizens or only the mayor, and can grant licences to individual citizens. If you can't chop or farm on a world, this is probably why.

More is coming. On 10 October 2026 (Pacific time), Raph Koster posted on Steam that GovBot elections are in internal testing. Elections would run every 14 days, there is one vote per account, and you would need to log in to that planet in the last two weeks for your vote to count. Rollout would clear out inactive mayors once. A town charter and a petition queue for permission requests are planned after that. None of it is live in 8.7.2.

Planets keep what you do to them

The Steam store page describes simulated worlds where water flows, forests burn and lava hardens into new land masses. The official mining post warns about cave-ins and gas. Changes persist for everyone on the one shared server, so a crater or a burned hillside stays.

That cuts both ways. Terrain that flows into other players' builds was the most argued-about problem of the first month (see our PvP page). 8.7.0 added a terrain shield at the edge of each homestead. 8.7.2 turned terrain shields on by default for every homestead and zoning lot, and added an extra shield around the starter portals on planets, so arrival points can no longer be buried. If you had switched your shield off before 8.7.2, check it again at the Homestead control unit.

Creatures are part of the world as well. 8.7.0 brought back basic creature melee attacks and taught creatures to jump out of holes and avoid cliffs. 8.7.2 capped how large creatures can spawn, because very large ones caused performance problems.

How many planets are there? What can and can't be said

Playable Worlds has not published a planet count or list. Its FAQ says the game generates 'as many worlds as we need', and the Steam page promises to 'expand the galaxy with new worlds' during Early Access. Players disagree about the count, and their numbers are a snapshot, not a fact.

In the Steam thread 'So.. just 4 planets for now?' (19 August 2026), one player listed seven starbase systems (Letiemopas, Cohufotag, Owlis, Nuheuno, Tapixene, Pavi and Kai), each with two stable and two unstable planets. In the 'placing homesteads' thread, another player described six systems, one of them (Pewazi) asteroid-only. GUNC's community Galaxy Map read '7 systems, 22 survey worlds, 6 system links' when we checked it on 11 October 2026. These sources don't agree with each other, and wild worlds rotate, so treat any number as a date-stamped reading.

The in-game Galactic Map (8.6.0) is the authority for your session. On 10 October Raph Koster listed cartography and waypoint work for the Ranger profession among the next updates. If you want the update history behind any of this, the patch notes page tracks each build.