Game guide

Perihel is a browser space-sim. You fly a ship with six degrees of freedom through a hybrid Milky Way — roughly 110,000 real stars from the HYG catalogue, plus about 29 million procedurally generated systems filling the space between them — hyperspace-jump between systems, land on planets, mine them, and claim worlds as NFT deeds on Solana.

Nothing to install and nothing to download. It runs in the browser, and you can start without a wallet.

What is free, and what is not

The split is not arbitrary. Everything in the first list happens entirely in your browser. Everything in the second writes a result the rest of the galaxy can see, so the game has to know whose result it is.

• Free, no wallet — flight, supercruise, hyperspace jumps, the star map, the system map and the catalog of claimed worlds.
• Needs a wallet — surveying, landing, mining, selling, the marketplace, the hangar, claiming, comms and appearing to other players.

Your Solana wallet is your account. There is no email, no password and no separate signup. Connecting asks for one signature, which is a sign-in message — it moves no funds and costs no gas.

How long you stay signed in

• A refresh, a browser restart or a server deploy will not sign you out.
• Playing at all pushes the window out again, so an active player is never asked to sign twice.
• About 30 days away and you sign in again. 90 days is a hard ceiling regardless of activity.

Stay safe

Perihel only ever asks your wallet to sign a login message, or to approve a claim you started yourself. Nothing else. No part of the game will ever ask for your seed phrase — anything that does is not us.

Playing as a guest

Choose PLAY AS GUEST at the entry screen and you skip the wallet entirely. Guest surfaces that would not work are hidden rather than shown as buttons that fail, so the HUD you get is one where everything on it does something. Connect a wallet at any time from the top bar.

You start in Sol, at the helm, with the flight controls live. The in-game coach walks you through the first few one at a time; this is the same ground, written out.

Recommended first steps

• Click the view to take the stick, then fly. Nothing you do here can go wrong.
• Set some throttle and engage supercruise with SPACE — cross Sol and look at a planet up close.
• Open the system map with N to see what is around you, and the star map with TAB to see where you could go.
• Pick a star inside jump range and press J. That is the whole loop of getting somewhere.
• When you want to survey, mine or claim, connect a wallet — those are the parts that need one.

What to avoid early

• Do not go looking for a rare world on your first jump. Rarity is steeply weighted and most systems are ordinary; the interesting ones are found by covering ground.
• Do not fill your hold with stone. Cargo space is finite and the cheap resources fill it fastest.
• Do not treat a claim as an investment. A deed mints for real and is genuinely yours, but what it is worth is only what another player will pay — see Owning things safely.

The ship has six degrees of freedom: it pitches, yaws and rolls as well as translating on three axes. There is no up in space and the flight model does not invent one.

Steering

• Click the view to take the stick — the ship turns toward your pointer.
• C — toggle between mouse flight and a free cursor, for when you want to click panels instead of steer.
• Throttle is a dial, not a pedal: set it and the ship holds that speed.

Moving the ship

Reading the HUD

• Bottom-left — speed, throttle percentage and what the drive is doing (NORMAL, CHARGING, SUPERCRUISE).
• Top bar — the system you are in, whether it is claimed, and how many other explorers are here.
• Bottom centre — every key that currently does something. Bindings that would not work are filtered out rather than shown dead.

SPACE engages the fast in-system drive. Normal thrust is for manoeuvring around something; supercruise is for the distance between planets, which at normal thrust would take hours.

Dropping out

Approaching a large body drops you out automatically, with a proximity alert. That is the drive working, not failing — it is what stops you crossing an entire system and arriving inside a planet. Expect it every time you approach something you were aiming at.

J jumps to another star system. You need a destination selected first, and it has to be inside jump range — 15 light years by default.

How to jump

• Open the star map with TAB.
• Pick a destination from the in-range list — stars beyond range cannot be selected.
• Press J. The drive charges, then fires.
• Everything you are carrying comes with you.

Getting further

Long crossings are made of many jumps, not one big one. Chains of in-range stars are how you cover distance, which is why the star map lists what is reachable rather than what is nearby.

Star map (TAB)

The galaxy. This is where you choose where to go. Real catalogue stars carry their real names — Proxima Centauri, Barnard’s Star, Wolf 359 — because they are real stars; the procedural ones fill in around them.

System map (N)

The system you are in, up close: every body, how far away it is, and who owns it. Bodies nobody has scanned read as UNKNOWN WORLD, which is an invitation rather than an error.

A system is a star and the bodies around it. A body is anything you can select — a planet, a moon, or the star itself. Bodies are what get surveyed, landed on, mined and claimed.

Archetypes

The archetype is what kind of world it is — rocky, terra, oceanic, lava, toxic, ice, crystal, forge, marble and others. It decides the terrain, the palette and what grows there, and it is the same world whether you are looking from orbit or standing on it. What you see from space is what you land on.

Protected bodies

Stars, and landmark worlds such as Luna, are protected: they can be visited and in some cases landed on and walked, but they cannot be claimed. They are not for sale.

Every world has one of five rarity tiers. They are steeply weighted — this is the single most useful table in the guide, because it is what makes a find a find.

What rarity changes

• The look — exotics carry a glowing ring or debris belt, which is visible from orbit before you scan anything.
• What is claimable — better worlds are gated behind a higher lander rank.
• What it is worth — a deed is only as interesting as the world it names.

V sweeps the system and surveys whatever is in your sights. Surveying is what turns an UNKNOWN WORLD into a named world with a known archetype and rarity, and it is the first thing in the game that needs a wallet — the result is recorded against you.

As a guest

The scan control stays visible and explains that it needs a wallet, rather than silently doing nothing. That is deliberate: a control that looks alive and is not is worse than one that tells you why.

Approach a landable world and land. You drop into its surface — a top-down view built from that specific world’s own recipe, so the terrain, the water and the colours are the ones you saw from orbit rather than a generic planet.

On foot

Some worlds — Luna and the voxel worlds — let you leave the ship and walk in third person. The moonbase concourse on Luna is a built environment you can walk into, and on voxel worlds you can mine on foot with a blaster rather than from the ship.

R mines. Deposits sit on the surface as nodes; each node holds one resource, and mining it depletes it permanently. Nodes do not grow back, so a worked-over landing site stays worked over.

The thirteen resources, by family

Each family has its own baked silhouette, so you can tell what a node is from its shape before you are close enough to read a label.

Your hold has a fixed number of slots, and each slot holds one resource up to a cap that depends on its family. The scarcer the family, the smaller the stack.

Tips

• Travel light into somewhere new — you cannot pick up what you have no room for.
• Stone fills slots fastest and is worth least. It is the first thing to leave behind.
• Bank value, not volume: a quarter-stack of platinum beats a full stack of rock.

Scrip is the in-game currency. The vendor is the standing buyer for mined resources: it quotes a price, you sell, you get scrip. Scrip is held server-side and is entirely separate from anything on-chain — it is game money, not a token.

Why the price moves

Together these mean mining is worth doing and cannot be farmed flat in an afternoon.

• Quotes expire, so a price you were shown is not a price you hold indefinitely.
• There is a daily cap on how much new scrip the vendor will mint.
• There is a floor under the price, so the market cannot be driven to nothing.

The marketplace is a station service — dock at any Orbital Nexus and walk to its counter. It is player-to-player trading in resources and modules, priced in scrip.

Listings are escrowed

What you list leaves your hold the moment you list it, and comes back only if you cancel. That is what makes a listing trustworthy — nothing on the board can be sold out from under a buyer because the seller spent it elsewhere first.

The hangar is the station shipyard — dock and walk to it. Modules go on the ship there. Modules carry a rank, and rank maps one-to-one onto the five world rarity tiers.

Your lander rank is what gates which worlds you may claim, so fitting better modules is the path to the worlds worth claiming.

Claiming a body mints its deed to your wallet as a Metaplex Core NFT, with generated art of that specific world. This is the one action in the game that is a real transaction and asks your wallet to approve it.

What can be claimed

• The world has to be surveyed, and unclaimed.
• It must not be protected — stars and landmarks like Luna never are claimable.
• Better rarity tiers require a higher lander rank.
• Claim budgets and release windows can hold some worlds back at any given moment.

Deed art is permanent

Once a deed is minted its art is never regenerated. What you hold is what you saw when you claimed it, and no later change to the generator alters an existing deed.

The station registry indexes claimed worlds, browsable by rarity — yours and everyone else’s. It needs no wallet, so guests can read it, and it is the quickest way to see what has already been taken.

A claim mints for real. The deed is a Metaplex Core NFT that lands in your wallet and stays there — it is yours to hold or to sell, and it outlives your interest in the game.

What a deed is worth is only what another player will pay for it. Perihel promises nothing about that, and anyone guaranteeing you a return is running a scam. Claim and trade from perihel.xyz and nowhere else, and read what your wallet puts in front of you before you approve it.

The top bar counts the other explorers in your current system. Everyone in a system shares one room, so that count is who is actually there with you, not who is online globally.

Spectators

A system admits a bounded number of broadcasting ships. Arrive at a full one and you join as a spectator: you see everyone, they do not see you, and you are promoted to a normal slot as soon as one frees. Slots free when players jump away or go idle.

Ghost mode

Ghost mode hides you from other players while leaving them visible to you. It is a multiplayer setting, so it needs a signed-in wallet — for a guest it would toggle nothing, and it is hidden rather than shown.

ENTER opens comms — system chat with the explorers around you. Voice is separate: a self-hosted voice room, gated to holders.

Every binding in flight. H opens this same list in-game at any time — if you remember one key, make it that one. Bindings that need a wallet are marked.

On a phone

Flight is landscape-only; portrait shows a rotate prompt, and if your browser refuses to rotate (some in-app wallet browsers do) the same prompt can turn the view instead. The keyboard dock becomes SYSTEM and CREW drawers, and there is a one-thumb steering stick.

Five minutes without input pauses the game back to the menu, with a warning first that any input cancels. Resuming costs no signature — a short pause does not touch your session.

Why it exists

• It releases the GPU, so an idle tab stops working your machine.
• It frees your multiplayer slot for someone actually flying.
• Wallet players resume in the same system; guests, who have no saved position, resume at the start star.