Star Rocks

How to play Star Rocks

Star Rocks is a fast, original take on the classic vector space shooter. You pilot a small triangular ship adrift in a starfield, surrounded by slow, tumbling space rocks. Every rock you shoot breaks apart into smaller, faster pieces, so the screen gets busier before it clears. There is no floor and no walls: fly off any edge and you reappear on the opposite side. The controls are simple — rotate, thrust and fire — but the ship obeys momentum, so learning to glide, brake and line up your shots is the whole game. Clear every rock to jump to the next wave, and keep your score climbing before your lives run out.

The goal

Destroy every rock on the screen to clear a wave, then survive the next one, which starts with more rocks moving a little faster. There is no finish line — Star Rocks is an endurance run for the highest score you can reach before you lose your last life. Shooting the smaller fragments is worth more than shooting the big ones, so a tidy player who finishes off every splinter will out-score a reckless one who only smashes the large rocks. Your final score and the wave you reached are shown on the game-over screen and submitted to the leaderboard.

Controls

You can play with the keyboard on a computer or with the on-screen buttons on a phone or tablet. Both control the same three actions — rotate, thrust and fire — and both are available at once, so a laptop with a touchscreen works either way.

• Rotate: press Left/Right arrow keys (or A / D) to spin the ship counter-clockwise or clockwise. On touch, hold the ⟲ and ⟳ buttons.
• Thrust: press the Up arrow (or W) to fire your engine and accelerate in the direction the nose is pointing. On touch, hold the ▲ button. A small flame shows when the engine is on.
• Fire: press the Space bar to shoot a bullet from the nose. On touch, tap or hold the ● button. Only a few bullets can be in the air at once, so time your shots.
• Pause: press P (or the Pause button) at any time. Use New Game or the difficulty menu to restart with a fresh field of rocks.

Newtonian flight — mastering the drift

Your ship does not stop when you let go of the controls. It obeys momentum, the same way a real spacecraft does. Thrusting adds speed in whatever direction the nose is pointing at that moment, and once you are moving you keep moving until you thrust the other way to cancel it. There is a very light drag that slowly bleeds off speed so the ship never becomes uncontrollable, and a top speed cap so you cannot rocket across the screen faster than you can react. The key skill is that rotating does not change where you are going — it only changes where you are aiming. You can spin to face a rock and shoot it while still drifting sideways. Good pilots thrust in short taps, coast most of the time, and use a quick burst in the opposite direction to slow down rather than relying on drag alone.

Splitting the rocks

Every rock has one of three sizes, and shooting it does something different depending on how big it is. Bullets travel a fixed distance and then fade, so you have to be reasonably close to connect.

• A large rock, when hit, breaks into two medium rocks that fly apart from the point of impact and move faster than the parent did.
• A medium rock, when hit, breaks into two small rocks — faster still and harder to track.
• A small rock is the smallest piece: a single hit destroys it completely with no fragments, and awards the most points.

Scoring

Points are awarded on every hit, and smaller rocks are worth more because they are faster and harder to catch: a large-rock hit scores 20 points, a medium-rock hit scores 50, and a small-rock hit scores 100. Those base values are multiplied by the difficulty: Easy pays the base amount (×1), Normal pays ×1.5, and Hard pays ×2. Because one big rock eventually becomes two mediums and then four smalls, fully clearing a single large rock and all of its children is worth far more than blasting the big rock and letting the pieces drift away. Your running total is capped at 99,999, which is the leaderboard maximum, and higher scores are always better.

Waves, lives and survival

A wave is cleared the instant the last rock is gone; a short banner shows the new wave number and a fresh, slightly larger field appears. You begin with several lives (more on Easy), and you lose one whenever a rock touches your ship. After a hit the ship briefly disappears, then reappears in the centre of the screen with a few seconds of invulnerability, shown as a blinking ship, so you are not destroyed again the moment you return. When your last life is gone the game ends and your score is submitted. Because the difficulty rises every wave, the run is always a trade-off between grabbing points and staying alive.

Survival strategy

• Keep moving, but slowly. A ship parked in one spot is easy to hit from a rock you did not see wrap around the edge. A gentle drift lets you dodge without building up dangerous speed.
• Deal with big rocks one at a time. Shooting several large rocks at once floods the screen with fast fragments. Break one down completely, clear its splinters, then move to the next.
• Use the wrap. A rock leaving the right edge returns on the left, and so do your bullets. You can shoot across an edge to hit a rock that looks out of range, or escape a crowd by slipping through a corner.
• Mind your ammo. Only a few bullets exist at once, so a wild spray leaves you unable to fire when a rock is bearing down. Aim, fire, and let the shots clear before the next volley.
• Respect momentum near the end of a wave. When only fast little rocks remain, stop thrusting, let yourself coast, and turn to pick them off — chasing them at full speed usually ends in a collision.

Frequently asked questions