Creating Your Moon

In Lunacraft, each new moon you create will be unique. It used to be that the day time sky could be any color of the rainbow, but now it only seems that it can be blue or purple; however, the type of blue or purple can be different (such as light blue, blue-purple, blue-green, etc.). Terrain is created procedurally, but with a large degree of randomness. Unlike Minecraft, there is currently no option to input a ‘seed’ for the random generator, so it is not possible to start fresh with the same moon.

Physical Features
Despite the randomness, each moon will have some shared characteristics. The common materials (Topsoil, Dirt, Gravel, Ice, Rock, and Sand) will occur in predictable layers, giving each moon a common Geology. When creating your moon there are five world settings that will affect your moon’s features. None of the settings seem to affect the amounts of ores that are generated. Your character will be inserted (dropped) from about 50 blocks above the surface. By changing the world settings, here is what you can expect to find when you land:

Tree Cover
With tree cover set to maximum you will usually land within sight of any of the various Plants that grow on your moon. At the minimum setting your moon will be barren. Although quite rare, crystal plants will be more common than any of the Light bearing plants.

Terrain Roughness
Each moon will have large areas of flat frozen lakes. Choosing the highest terrain roughness setting does not seem to decrease the size or frequency of these lakes, as might have been expected. Instead it changes the height of the hills and the depth of the lakes. The ice can be up to 20 blocks thick and the hills may be 26 blocks above the ice surface.

Exotic Terrain
This setting is less exciting than it may sound. The difference between a moon created with the maximum or minimum setting may not appear to be drastically different. The highest setting will give you a moon with terrain that is more jagged. This is more obvious if you view the surface of your moon from a high vantage point, there will be less features that follow a straight line for any distance (with the exception of Superblock boundaries. A Superblock’s horizontal dimensions are 128x128, for further details see the blogs Internal Data Format or As Far As the Eye Can See).

Cave Frequency
This setting is not what a new player would expect. In Update 1.7.0 there do not appear to be any "natural" caves, and Chasms have been removed from this version. However this setting seems to have a minor effect on the frequency of Astronaut Lairs. These "artificial" caves can usually be found within 4 square kilometers (sq km) of your insertion point. Because there is no way to predict where these lairs will appear, as they are often behind hills or even completely underground, it is not certain how far you will need to look to find one.

Wildlife Level
With this set to maximum, Mobs will spawn in abundance, except for the Blue I, which is always rare. With this set to minimum, however, all Mobs will spawn very rarely.

Game Modes
While at the world settings screen you also have the option of selecting 1 of 2 game modes.

Creative Mode
In Creative mode you will be able to “Create without limits, safely.” Nearly all of the blocks are given to you as infinite stacks in your inventory. This mode is focused less on Collecting Materials or defending yourself. You start the game with basic equipment, but upgrading your Devices is fairly easy using the Assembler and the Materials in your inventory.

Explore Mode
In Explore mode you will need to “Survive on an alien moon.” You will have to find and collect resources to upgrade your equipment or build structures. Looking in the Ice may be the easiest way to find and mine ores. Plants are easy to spot and will be your source for Light. You will also need to defend yourself from enemy Astronauts, and watch out for the other native Mobs.

Space and Time
It may be that Lunacraft's creators have chosen Neptune as the planet which your moon will orbit. Not only does the round planet, visible in the Night sky, look like Neptune, they have also chosen to include Neptunium as one of the most valuable materials. Your moon will rotate once in just over 5.5 minutes. It is usually bright enough for you to work even at night; however, if you don’t want to spend too much time in the night, a Chronoboost and Chronoslow can help lessen the time you spend in darkness. It used to be that when transitioning from day to night, your entire moon would go black for a few moments; however, this seems to have been patched out in Update 2.01. True to Minecraft’s tradition, the Sun in Lunacraft appears as a bright square in the sky. The sky can be any random color. In the Options menu you can set "show fog" to off or on, which will make the atmosphere in the distance seem clear or hazy.

Size
There does not seem to be a limit to the surface area of your moon, but the height limit is 127 blocks (63 blocks below the ice surface and 63 blocks above it). You can jump another 29 blocks above the upper block placing limit, which will give you a wider field of view looking down on your moon. The total area of your exploration is displayed beside Moon A, B, C, or D on the app's title screen. Each new moon will show that 1.0 sq km has been explored. The only real limit is most likely based upon a 32 bit integer, but any computer would crash long before it reaches the limit of over 2 billion blocks from the center out.