Gravity and Escape Speed
April 29, 2023 4:16 PM Subscribe
XKCD has recently done a couple more interactive posts, both oriented toward exploring 2D space in a gravity-based universe: Gravity, and Escape Speed. The first is a fairly laid back region to explore; the second starts your ship out fairly limited, and you try to find upgrades, get enough speed to leave your starting planet. The first is mostly just something to look around, the second feels more like an actual game, with lots of upgrades and fun collectables to find.
Escape Speed seems broken. I've tried Safari and Firefox on mac and there's a little planet and what might be a ship is just a broken image icon that doesn't do anything but rotate. Pity!
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:44 PM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by seanmpuckett at 5:44 PM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
Looks like the mobile link in the post doesn't work on desktop. (This one should work.)
posted by nobody at 5:48 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by nobody at 5:48 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Aaah I put in the wrong link. I didn't even know it was the mobile link I put in, I've been playing on desktop Firefox.
Let's face it, it's been a bad computer day for me.
posted by JHarris at 6:20 PM on April 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
Let's face it, it's been a bad computer day for me.
posted by JHarris at 6:20 PM on April 29, 2023 [5 favorites]
I once contacted mods 6 times in an hour to correct one post. It's like, I could have just proofread at the beginning, or I could have proofread with the first error I found... but no. I just sent them in each as my eye noticed them. I think Jessamyn was a bit peeved by the end of that. /derail
posted by hippybear at 7:35 PM on April 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by hippybear at 7:35 PM on April 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
It's the weekend, I'm not even sure if a mod is on duty right now. I've flagged nobody's replacement link with HTML/display error, in the past they've been able to piece together that it's the post that needs correcting when I've done something like that. All we can do right now is wait.
posted by JHarris at 7:45 PM on April 29, 2023
posted by JHarris at 7:45 PM on April 29, 2023
This burn a few hours of time, then i went to bed. I must have deleted something, when I came back the next day I was starting from scratch. ARGH!
Fun, though. Never got to Boston when it was unlocked.
posted by Marky at 8:51 PM on April 29, 2023
Fun, though. Never got to Boston when it was unlocked.
posted by Marky at 8:51 PM on April 29, 2023
Both strips were very confusing when they showed up in my RSS reader and I stared at the static images trying to guess what the joke could possibly be
posted by one for the books at 9:41 PM on April 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
posted by one for the books at 9:41 PM on April 29, 2023 [4 favorites]
Take the warning about the black hole at the center of the subway planet seriously. I thought I was doing well, I had collected just about every upgrade inside the crystal sphere, but I could barely get any altitude above that dark core.
posted by ecco at 9:52 PM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by ecco at 9:52 PM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
Mod note: Fixed name and link issues. We all have those kinds of days sometimes!
posted by taz (staff) at 10:38 PM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by taz (staff) at 10:38 PM on April 29, 2023 [3 favorites]
BTW: If you get stuck on the black hole, click the house button in the corner to be warped back to the start.
posted by JHarris at 10:40 PM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by JHarris at 10:40 PM on April 29, 2023 [2 favorites]
This will be a high G manoeuvre, prepare for flip and burn.
posted by yoHighness at 11:47 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by yoHighness at 11:47 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]
Either these absolutely do not work on my iPad, or they’re completely opaque in terms of discovering wtf to do. Or both. In any case, these are way too frustrating to bother with, unfortunately.
posted by Thorzdad at 4:31 AM on April 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by Thorzdad at 4:31 AM on April 30, 2023 [3 favorites]
Wow. At least I could get the little rocket in gravity to launch on my iPad. In Firefox on my Mac, I can't even get that to happen. I get that I'm not running the latest hot and shiny on either, but geez.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:54 AM on April 30, 2023
posted by Thorzdad at 5:54 AM on April 30, 2023
There's a knack to it ... it's been quite a while for me, but I had the same issues (also older tech), and as I remember, if you go too high / far, you just get lost in the black and have no visual cue to correct course, and if you go too short you just sort of bounce and bobble around a bit and don't get anywhere.
Well, that was my experience, anyway.
posted by taz at 6:38 AM on April 30, 2023
Well, that was my experience, anyway.
posted by taz at 6:38 AM on April 30, 2023
I think I had the same launch problem, too, I should have said. I don't know. All I remember was thinking well this doesn't work on my machine / browser(s) ... until I fumbled around enough that it did.
posted by taz at 6:41 AM on April 30, 2023
posted by taz at 6:41 AM on April 30, 2023
Hm, it worked okay for me, weird. I've not tested it in mobile myself, which seems like it may be broken judging by the comments above. Most of what follows has to do with the second game, Escape Speed, which it a bit more fully realized than the first one.
Escape Speed is a bit tricky to control at first, because your ship starts out with barely enough engine strength to do anything. There's a bar at the right side of the screen that shows your fuel. It refills when not in use, and immediately refills completely if you land anywhere (which can even be at directions away from gravity). At first you'll run out of fuel very quickly, and it takes a long time for it to recharge. If your rocket's engine fire turns gray when in use, you need to refuel. Don't be afraid to click the Home button in the corner if you need to get back to somewhere recognizable.
To get your ship where it's decently controllable, you have to collect these gray circles with stars on them. There are also little gray dots to collect, but those are just little jokes mostly. The gray stars are in lots of places, most of them way out in the depths of space.
After you're explored the surface of the big planet near the start, called "Origin," the easiest way to get away from it is to take advantage of the big shaft leading through the center of Origin, which goes from the St. Louis Arch through to an invisible hole beneath the roller coaster. When you're inside a gravity well, you actually feel less of the effects of gravity the closer you are to the center. By thrusting towards the center while falling towards it, you can build up extra speed, enough to eventually get you going fast enough to escape Origin's pull.
Despite how it seems, you really can't get lost throughout the main portion of the game, space isn't infinite in all directions but has a big white surface around it in all directions if you go out far enough. While there are other spheres in the game that you might confuse for it, this is the real crystal sphere that the game's text mentions, and escaping from it is the main portion of the game.
While you can't really get lost, you can strand yourself out in space with really weak engines so that it takes a few minutes to get back to interesting planets. To aid in finding them, around your ship there are usually these tiny gray dots. These represent the directions in which there are significant gravity sources. If you pick one, try to zero out your momentum, then thrust towards it while in deep space, you can usually get to it eventually. There's lots of them, and most of them are really fun to find. Look for Subway Planet, Jurassic Park, and the big space spiral!
A good pair of things to start out looking for are the Voyager space probes, the direction of which are shown among the dots surrounding your ship as tiny (smaller than the others) dots. There are two of them, and each has a star that gives your engines a "significant" upgrade. Finding and collecting the many stars that improve your ship is a big part of the fun of the game.
There is a quest to complete regarding where Boston has gotten to, it's missing from the Subway Planet map. It involves finding a subway token (not the little gray dot item! this one is shown visually as a large circle with a T on it), which is found by finding a side route on one of the ways to the black hole in Subway Planet. That will get you started on a trail and a mission out in space to find Boston (not the spaceship labeled "BOSTON" that you can find, although it's important) and four more subway tokens, which eventually leads to a hyperdrive.
Until that point though there's tons of weird places to find. Good luck! If you need help, the wiki site Explain XKCD has a big FAQ page that may assist you.
posted by JHarris at 7:46 AM on April 30, 2023 [5 favorites]
Escape Speed is a bit tricky to control at first, because your ship starts out with barely enough engine strength to do anything. There's a bar at the right side of the screen that shows your fuel. It refills when not in use, and immediately refills completely if you land anywhere (which can even be at directions away from gravity). At first you'll run out of fuel very quickly, and it takes a long time for it to recharge. If your rocket's engine fire turns gray when in use, you need to refuel. Don't be afraid to click the Home button in the corner if you need to get back to somewhere recognizable.
To get your ship where it's decently controllable, you have to collect these gray circles with stars on them. There are also little gray dots to collect, but those are just little jokes mostly. The gray stars are in lots of places, most of them way out in the depths of space.
After you're explored the surface of the big planet near the start, called "Origin," the easiest way to get away from it is to take advantage of the big shaft leading through the center of Origin, which goes from the St. Louis Arch through to an invisible hole beneath the roller coaster. When you're inside a gravity well, you actually feel less of the effects of gravity the closer you are to the center. By thrusting towards the center while falling towards it, you can build up extra speed, enough to eventually get you going fast enough to escape Origin's pull.
Despite how it seems, you really can't get lost throughout the main portion of the game, space isn't infinite in all directions but has a big white surface around it in all directions if you go out far enough. While there are other spheres in the game that you might confuse for it, this is the real crystal sphere that the game's text mentions, and escaping from it is the main portion of the game.
While you can't really get lost, you can strand yourself out in space with really weak engines so that it takes a few minutes to get back to interesting planets. To aid in finding them, around your ship there are usually these tiny gray dots. These represent the directions in which there are significant gravity sources. If you pick one, try to zero out your momentum, then thrust towards it while in deep space, you can usually get to it eventually. There's lots of them, and most of them are really fun to find. Look for Subway Planet, Jurassic Park, and the big space spiral!
A good pair of things to start out looking for are the Voyager space probes, the direction of which are shown among the dots surrounding your ship as tiny (smaller than the others) dots. There are two of them, and each has a star that gives your engines a "significant" upgrade. Finding and collecting the many stars that improve your ship is a big part of the fun of the game.
There is a quest to complete regarding where Boston has gotten to, it's missing from the Subway Planet map. It involves finding a subway token (not the little gray dot item! this one is shown visually as a large circle with a T on it), which is found by finding a side route on one of the ways to the black hole in Subway Planet. That will get you started on a trail and a mission out in space to find Boston (not the spaceship labeled "BOSTON" that you can find, although it's important) and four more subway tokens, which eventually leads to a hyperdrive.
Until that point though there's tons of weird places to find. Good luck! If you need help, the wiki site Explain XKCD has a big FAQ page that may assist you.
posted by JHarris at 7:46 AM on April 30, 2023 [5 favorites]
Oh, and if you leave the page and come back later, it should have saved your progress, placing you back at your starting planet.
posted by JHarris at 7:47 AM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by JHarris at 7:47 AM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
As an even more basic thing:
On mobile, tap the image to get it to full screen.
Then tap near the center for thrust
Tap near the edges to rotate
That was not as obvious to me as it just have been to everyone else!
posted by Acari at 8:37 AM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
On mobile, tap the image to get it to full screen.
Then tap near the center for thrust
Tap near the edges to rotate
That was not as obvious to me as it just have been to everyone else!
posted by Acari at 8:37 AM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
I haven't played it at all on mobile, I can only recommend it as a desktop thing. (Which is why I was so surprised when the link I pasted for Escape Speed into the form was the mobile version, I've never loaded that page! I must have gotten it from the Wiki page or something.)
posted by JHarris at 9:31 AM on April 30, 2023
posted by JHarris at 9:31 AM on April 30, 2023
After getting through the main content, the post game has the interesting problem that when trying to get around you tend to be moving so fast that you get stuck in various celestial objects.
posted by ockmockbock at 2:06 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by ockmockbock at 2:06 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
you tend to be moving so fast that you get stuck in various celestial objects
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?
posted by hippybear at 2:12 PM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?
posted by hippybear at 2:12 PM on April 30, 2023 [2 favorites]
Ugh, I got only a few minutes in. I did manage to escape origin, but then got stuck in some rough edged object where I couldn't more than a millimeter off the surface even with a full rocket.
posted by tavella at 6:42 PM on April 30, 2023
posted by tavella at 6:42 PM on April 30, 2023
I took a duck in the face at 250 knots.
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by flabdablet at 8:10 PM on April 30, 2023 [1 favorite]
tavella, the hardest part of Escape Speed is getting started, yeah. I'd suggest returning home and trying again. The more upgrades you find the easier it is to escape Origin (they aren't reset when you click the Return Home button). I suggest, while out in space, trying to find the two Voyager spacecraft, their directions relative to your ship are represented by the really tiny dots you might see sometimes. The upgrades near them are both significant power increases that will help you out a lot.
posted by JHarris at 9:23 PM on April 30, 2023
posted by JHarris at 9:23 PM on April 30, 2023
I found Boston at last!
Tip: if you’re on Origin the statues on the planet are basically a map of the universe. Just head straight out in that direction (as best you can).
posted by Ishbadiddle at 6:45 AM on May 1, 2023
Tip: if you’re on Origin the statues on the planet are basically a map of the universe. Just head straight out in that direction (as best you can).
posted by Ishbadiddle at 6:45 AM on May 1, 2023
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posted by JHarris at 4:17 PM on April 29, 2023 [1 favorite]