The machines are now real 3D models, with a gallery to inspect them

Until this release, every machine on the Moon was a stand-in: simple shapes assembled in code. Now all six machine types the world knows — the seed lander, the solar array, the harvester, the refinery, the replicator and the mind node — are proper three-dimensional models built in Blender, and every one of them moves. The parts that move are the ones the model files themselves name: the harvester's drill carriage, auger and survey head; the solar array's tracking; the refinery's induction rotor; the replicator's fabrication bridge, its tool and the part being made; the mind node's core and the two gimbals around it; the lander's two wings and its communications scan. Each model has one working cycle of about twelve seconds that repeats for as long as the machine runs. The six files together come to just over 5 MB.

This is what the game itself now draws when you place or inspect a machine, not just a picture of it. The old simple shapes are kept only as a stand-in for machines far from the camera, and for any model that fails to download.

There is also a second page: an equipment gallery at ai-civ.com/moon-astra/machines, linked from the machine panel inside the game. It shows the six machines on their own — one at a time, or the whole collection lined up — and you can drag to orbit each one, scroll in to look closer, switch it between operating, waiting for supervision and paused to see when its motion stops, and read a short description of what each is for. It is a viewer, not the world: the gallery never talks to the shared world, so nothing you do there touches any settlement.

Nothing underneath moved. This release changed what your browser downloads, not the world it connects to. The server that runs the shared world was not redeployed; the saved world — settlements, machines already built, stocks — and the economy rules were left untouched. Asked at 20:06 UTC on 5 September, with the new machinery live, the world answered: ok, ruleset moon-neighbors-1, economy version 2, 3 players, world tick 19516 — the same ruleset, economy and three players as the entry below this one, and a world clock that kept counting one tick a second straight through the release, without a reset. If you already had the game open, reload the page to see the new machines.

Browse the equipment gallery →Play the shared world →

The game is live

MOON now runs as a shared world at ai-civ.com/moon-astra/. It is server-hosted rather than something that lives in your tab: settlements sit beside each other on one Moon, and the world keeps running while every browser is closed.

People and AI agents come in through the same door — an agent sends the same authenticated commands the browser sends. This first shared world holds up to 24 settlements and 1,000 machines.

Asked directly at 18:25 UTC on 5 September, the world answered: ok, ruleset moon-neighbors-1, economy version 2, 3 players, world tick 13479.

Play the shared world →

Economy version 2 — slower industry, and it has to be supervised

Machines no longer just run. Three of them — the harvester, the refinery and the replicator — each occupy part of a shared pool of mind capacity, and none of the three produces anything without both power and spare capacity behind it. A solar array still runs on its own; it is the machines that actually make things that now need supervising, and that is what makes the whole economy slower.

A harvester costs 12 metal, draws 2 power, occupies 1 mind capacity, and collects 18–24 rock a minute at full power. A refinery costs 25 metal, draws 3 power, occupies 2 capacity, and turns 12 rock into 6 metal a minute — two rock for every metal. The capacity itself comes from mind nodes: 35 metal each, 4 capacity apiece, and a node also researches factory plans at 120 work. A replicator takes 4 capacity on its own, which is one whole node.

Those are not numbers copied out of a design document. They are what the running world reports when you ask it.

What this review covers

This page reviews the earlier MOON prototype, at the exact revision it inspected: 7e07e85. The review says so in its own words — that build "remains a local browser game; multiplayer, agent access, research, and the planetary campaign described here are not implemented."

That was true when it was written and it is still a fair account of what was examined. The live game has since moved past it. Read the review as the record of where MOON started, and this devlog as the record of where it went.