A red wall
creeps in from the side
Your ship hasn’t moved, yet the planet keeps getting bigger. No, you are the one being pulled in. This note splits that moment into five steps. Every number and every line of on-screen text comes straight from the source; only the “this is what I would do” parts are play-story.
AstroMaster planet gravity is baffling the first time you meet it. Bullets bounce off a planet, and once you touch the surface not even an Antimatter Shield can save you. Yet the same planet can also double your speed. Below is what to do, in order, once one has you.
The warning appears: 7 meters from the surface
When your ship comes within 7 meters of a planet’s surface, “! DANGER: ROGUE PLANET !” appears. That same warning shows only once every 8 seconds. Planets are placed off to the side rather than dead ahead, a new one spawns every 850 to 1300 meters, and at most two exist at once. With a radius of 15 to 22 meters, one often fills a whole side of the screen.
The moment the warning appears. The planet’s big edge fills the lower left while the ship passes in front. The red text above is “! DANGER: ROGUE PLANET !”, and the planet also shows on the top-right radar (70 m range).
Check your speed first: how hard are you pulled?
The gravity field reaches 25 meters beyond the surface. The pull is stronger the closer you are: about 3 m/s² near the surface and about 0.6 m/s² at the edge of the field. Over the last 6 meters it eases smoothly to zero, so nothing lets go abruptly at the boundary. These figures come from source comments, so read them as “about”. Asteroids bend around the same gravity, and bullets that hit a planet bounce away.
| Ship | Planet gravity | In-game text |
|---|---|---|
| Scrap-V | x1.4 (pulled harder) | Planet gravity (weak engine) |
| Vortex-Core | x0.6 (pulled less) | Thrust bonus in gravity wells |
Slide sideways: through the ring
If the pull is toward the planet, it is safer to circle around it sideways than to thrust head-on against it. The screens below are real flights inside the field. The ship passes around the planet, and combo and damage text keep appearing as it goes.
- From level 3, every planet has 2 to 4 stealth mines hiding on its shadow side. They only show up through a scan beam and a blink.
- So when you circle a planet, avoiding the shadow side is how you avoid the mines (that judgment is a story built on the source facts).
Slingshot: turning gravity into speed
With the booster on, when your nose is nearly perpendicular to the planet’s pull (the source test is a cross product above 0.82), your speed jumps at once. The new speed is max(current speed, top speed x 0.6) x 1.5, applied along the nose direction. On success the “SLINGSHOT!” banner appears with a 50-point score bonus. You must wait a 2.5-second cooldown before using it again. Vortex-Core gets +15% slingshot strength every 1.5 kilometers.
- The “circle sideways” knack and the order of the steps are storytelling. All the source checks is whether the nose and the pull direction are perpendicular.
- None of the screens captured for this note caught the “SLINGSHOT!” banner, so no picture of that moment is included.
If it fails: touching the surface ends it
Touching a planet’s surface deals 9999 damage, an instant wreck. Even the Antimatter Shield item cannot stop this (its drawback in the item table reads “Cannot stop a planet crash”). There are two ways around it. While warping or invincible, you bounce off. The 1.5 seconds of invincibility right after a rental expires and you drop into Scrap-V counts too. But warp leaves the engine dead for 2.5 seconds afterward, so using it next to a planet is a last resort.
- When “DANGER: ROGUE PLANET” appears, check your speed readout first.
- Stop thrusting head-on and pick a path that circles sideways.
- Turn the booster on when the nose is perpendicular to the planet, and aim for a slingshot.
- Stealth mines sit on the shadow side, so stay on the lit side.
- If contact is truly seconds away, use Warp Nitro (180 H-Coins). Just remember the 2.5 seconds of dead engine afterward.
Getting past a single planet takes only a moment, yet it holds this many choices. Next time a red edge shows up beside the screen, think of your speed first.
Even while you are being dragged in, your finger is still on the screen. Let go and you slide; drag and you turn away.
Play AstroMaster now
Playing it is much faster than reading about it.
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