Stellurgy is still in development. There is no public build yet.
Stellurgy is my continuation and large-scale rework of Advanced Rocketry for Minecraft 1.12.2.
It originally started as an attempt to fix and modernize Advanced Rocketry. At some point that stopped being an accurate description of the project. A lot of the old mod is still there, and rockets, planets, stations and the rest of the AR progression are not going away, but there is now a second layer being built on top of it.
The main difference is that I want space to actually exist as a place.
In most of the old AR gameplay, a rocket takes you from one destination to another. Stellurgy keeps that kind of rocket for early spaceflight, but later ships are supposed to work very differently: large block-built vessels that physically exist, can be flown, and remain usable while travelling. You should be able to get out of the pilot seat, walk through the ship, use its machines, work on it and live on it while it is going somewhere.
Stellurgy has a procedurally generated universe rather than a fixed catalogue of planets.
Stars and planetary systems are generated deterministically and exist whether the player knows about them or not. Finding them is a separate part of the game. Telescopes and ship sensors reveal information gradually, and that information can then be used for navigation.
The basic idea is that these are different questions:
- Does something exist there?
- Do you know that it exists?
- Do you know what is there?
- Can your ship reach it?
- Can you survive there?
- Is going there actually worth it?
I don't want research to work as a simple unlock tree where discovering a planet makes it available in a menu. If you know the coordinates, you can try to go there. Having better information just makes that decision less stupid.
The universe is laid out at more than one scale. Galaxies are real objects with a centre, a type, a radius and a disc — spirals, ellipticals and the far more numerous dwarfs — and stars are distributed by that galaxy's own profile rather than as uniform fog, so the star field thins outwards, thins away from the plane, and stops at the edge. Inside a galaxy, star clusters are genuinely denser than the field around them, and the molecular cloud a cluster condensed out of is derived from the cluster itself rather than sprinkled independently. Distances are honest: one astronomical unit is a real number of blocks, and every derived quantity — insolation, equilibrium temperature, orbital period, flight time — follows from it.
Planets are also generated from physical properties rather than choosing "desert planet" or "ice planet" first and filling in the numbers afterwards. Their orbit, star, mass, radius, temperature, atmosphere and other properties are used to determine what sort of planet they are.
The surface generator is deliberately extensible. Planet types can define weighted lists of terrain generators in XML — the built-in generator, a world type registered by another mod, or a pre-generated template — and an option whose mod is not installed is dropped before the draw instead of breaking the world. Modpack authors should be able to use the large number of existing Minecraft worldgen mods instead of every planet ultimately being another variation of the same Stellurgy terrain generator.
The later spacecraft are physical Valkyrien Skies ships.
Their capabilities come from what was actually built into them. Mass, engines, power generation, maneuvering hardware and other systems are properties of the vessel, not just values selected in a GUI.
A ship is also meant to remain a working base during travel. Long flights only make sense if there is still a Minecraft game happening aboard the ship.
This is why a lot of seemingly unrelated systems are part of the spacecraft design.
There is power generation and distribution, but also waste heat. Heat has to be moved and eventually rejected through radiators. Radiator performance uses radiative heat transfer rather than treating a radiator as an arbitrary number of "cooling units".
There is life support, and the longer-term progression goes beyond carrying tanks of oxygen. Water recovery, gas processing, food production and greenhouses are intended to make increasingly self-sufficient ships possible.
There are separate navigation, astronomical and tactical sensors because a telescope looking for a star and a sensor trying to calculate a firing solution are not doing the same job.
Combat is also being built around the ship itself: physical weapons, shields, damage to actual parts of the vessel and systems that can fail instead of one health bar representing an entire cruiser.
None of this is supposed to mean that every ship needs twenty people and a spreadsheet to leave orbit. Small ships should still be practical. Larger ships simply have enough things going on that multiple crew members can have useful jobs.
Quite a lot of it is still here.
Stellurgy is a derivative of Advanced Rocketry, not an unrelated mod using its name for nostalgia. The existing planetary and rocket gameplay is the starting point, and keeping compatibility with useful parts of the old ecosystem is important to me.
At the same time, I don't want to preserve old behaviour purely because that is how AR happened to work in 1.12.
The rough progression I am aiming for is:
rockets → orbital infrastructure → astronomy → discovered systems → large spacecraft → interstellar expeditions
Rockets get you into space. Eventually you start building things that can stay there.
There is no public Stellurgy release yet.
Some parts already have working implementations, some are prototypes, some exist as detailed designs, and some are still only planned. Development happens across several branches, so a system listed as working is not necessarily working on the same branch as the one next to it.
Working, in the development tree
- The inherited Advanced Rocketry layer: built rockets, planets with their own gravity, day length and weather, oxygen and sealing, suits, space stations, satellites, the ore-processing chain and terraforming.
- Tier-2 ships as real Valkyrien Skies vessels: assembly from a built craft, pilot seat, manual and automatic ascent, the crossing from a planet into its system's space, and terrain-aware descent back down.
- Interstellar transit itself: the ship parks in hyperspace while it travels, the crew can walk around aboard it, and a jump survives a server restart. A measured long leg — several hundred sectors — takes minutes, not an instant.
- The hyperdrive as machinery rather than a button: field generator, coils, hull emitters, capacitor, cell, heat sink and dampeners, with jump speed derived from drive power against ship mass, plus spool-up and abort.
- Navigation computer and memory crystals: addresses are data you carry, copy and trade, and the information a target reveals is tiered by how close you have been to it.
- Telescope region scans that cost time, survive an unload, and write a real address into a crystal.
- Shields, built on a vendored force-field system rather than a second parallel shield mechanic.
- The procedural universe layer: galaxies, clusters, nebulae, multi-star systems, planets derived from their physics, and XML-declared terrain options. This is the newest work and is not merged everywhere yet.
Being built now
- Closed-loop life support: sealed zones with real gas contents, crew that breathe them down, recirculators and separators on a shared ventilation network, with GregTech CEu supplying the chemistry where it fits. Isolation, breach venting and the fallback to suits are still outstanding.
Designed, not built
- Ship sensor suites — arrival scans that tell you what is actually in a system, and tactical fire control.
- Hyperspace hazards, misjumps and the computed safe exit point that makes an unscanned address dangerous.
- Ship block damage: losing a fight costing you parts of the vessel rather than a health bar.
- Turrets and the rest of the weapon layer.
- Ship heat rejection and radiators.
- Stations reconciled into the new universe grid.
- GregTech integration, the research economy and the quest interface that gates it.
Planned
- The closed food and biomass loop.
- The life-support console.
- Encounters — there is currently nothing out there to meet.
Everything above describes the direction of the project. It should not be read as a list of features already available in a downloadable build.
I don't currently have a release date. The first public version will appear when there is enough of the new gameplay working together for it to make sense as a release.
There is no download, so the only way to run Stellurgy today is to build it.
./gradlew build| Minecraft | 1.12.2 with Forge |
| Required at runtime | LibVulpes — this fork · MixinBooter |
| Bundled | Valkyrien Skies (vendored under valkyrienskies/, compiled in — no separate install) |
| Optional | JEI · TheOneProbe / Waila · GregTech CEu · Galacticraft Legacy and Matter Overdrive compat |
Important
Stellurgy is built against the forked LibVulpes linked above and will not run correctly on the upstream release. Installing stock LibVulpes is the most common way to get a broken setup.
Gradle runs on JDK 25 while the mod compiles against Java 8; ./gradlew runClient and runServer give you a
dev environment with the ship physics already present. Build details, the test layout and the branch map are
in CONTRIBUTING.md.
Caution
This line will not load worlds created by the 2.x Advanced Rocketry fork. The save format changed with
no migration path. Procedural-universe parameters are a milder story: they are inputs to a derived
universe, so changing one moves every system nobody has visited yet — the world therefore refuses to
open under a changed configuration, and /stellurgy universe upgrade is the deliberate way through,
freezing everything already explored. See the planetDefs reference before you touch them.
The mod brings its own dimensions, worldgen and ore-processing chain, so it takes up room in a pack. Each major system has a config switch, including worldgen, planet weather and the whole space subsystem.
Stars, planets, planet types, the procedural galaxy and ores are configured in XML, with references and
templates in docs/:
- planetDefs — reference · template — every element and attribute, its unit, and what wins when two of them disagree
- oreConfig — reference · template
Coming from an older 2.x build: commands moved into subcommands, so command scripts and quest-book command rewards need updating, and power and data cabling was replaced by a wireless system.
A pack built around the new ships is planned — Stellurgy, Valkyrien Skies for the physics, GregTech CEu for the tech tree, and a quest mod to guide the route. The older 2.x Advanced Rocketry line stays maintained separately for Towards Rocket Science.
Bugs and pull requests go through this repository's issue tracker. Since there is no release yet, the most useful reports are the ones that come with the branch and commit you built.
Built on the original Advanced Rocketry by
zmaster587, and on the forks maintained since. The mod is released under the GNU General Public License v3
with a linking exception (LICENSE + the full GPL text in COPYING): the mod
itself is copyleft — you may redistribute and modify it, and packs may bundle it, as long as source stays
available — while the linking exception lets dependent and addon mods build against the
advancedRocketry.api package without themselves becoming GPL. Portions derived from the original are
retained under the MIT licence (LICENSE-MIT); the bundled
Valkyrien Skies physics engine (valkyrienskies/) is
under Apache-2.0 (valkyrienskies/LICENSE).
Version history is in CHANGELOG.md. The older
community wiki covers the 2.x basics and predates everything described
above.
Minecraft: 1.12.2
Status: In development
Public build: Not available yet