Starskip is live — and every system is provably beatable
Playpit’s second original game is out today: Starskip, gravity trick-shot golf. Pull back on a star, let go, and watch it whip around planets toward a distant goal ring. Sink it in as few flicks as you can.
Every system is grown from a seed — a single number — and there’s a fresh today’s system every day: same sky for everyone, one par to beat.
The promise: you are never stuck
Procedural puzzle games have a dirty secret: sometimes the generator deals you a dud. A layout where the goal hides behind a sun, where every line clips a planet, where the “puzzle” is actually impossible and you can’t tell. One unbeatable level is how a player quietly closes the tab forever.
Starskip makes the opposite promise. Every system you will ever see has been beaten — by the game itself, before it let the system exist.
How the solver works
When a seed comes in, the generator rolls a candidate layout: a launch pad, a goal ring, and two to four planets with real gravity. Then, before showing it to you, it plays it:
- 512 candidate flicks — 64 launch angles × 8 speeds — swept from the pad.
- Each candidate flies through the exact same physics integrator your real shots use — the same fixed-tick steps, the same gravity, the same collision rules. Not an approximation of the game: the game.
- Every flick ends one of three ways: it sinks, it crashes into a planet, or it fizzles off into the void.
If zero of the 512 shots sink, the layout is rejected and the generator rolls the next variant of the same seed. It will walk through up to a dozen variants before falling back to a sparse last-resort layout that always has a clean line. Because the walk is deterministic, the same seed always settles on the same system — which is what makes the whole thing shareable (more on that below).
There’s a taste check on top of the correctness check: the generator prefers layouts where the winning lines actually bend — where gravity shaped the shot. If most of a layout’s solutions are straight pots from pad to goal, that’s darts, not golf, and the generator keeps rolling.
Par is measured, not guessed
A side effect of playing 512 shots at every layout: the game knows exactly how hard it is. If lots of candidate flicks sink, the solution windows are generous; if only a handful thread through, it’s a needle. That win density mints each system’s par — 2 for the generous ones down to 5 for the needles. So when the game says par 3, that isn’t a designer’s hunch. It’s a measurement.
The star chart
When you finally thread one, Starskip frames the whole story — every faded failed ribbon, plus the gold line that sank it — as a star chart with the dare written on it: “bet you can’t do it in N−1.” Next to the image is a challenge link. Because systems are deterministic, that link rebuilds your exact solar system on your friend’s device — same planets, same gravity, same par — with your flick count to beat. No server, no account, no upload. The whole puzzle travels as a number, same as Bloomstead’s postcards.
And the dare is honest both ways: the solver already proved their side of it is winnable.
Play Starskip → — today’s system is waiting, and everyone on Earth gets the same one. Send us your chart.