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Space stations as their own locations — how it works

Status: implemented (see TODO.md for live Done/Open status) · 2026-06-19

Overview

Boarding a space station puts the player inside the station, floating in space as its own place — no planet visible, no weather, no clouds, constant interior lighting (no day-night), breathable (life support), walkable, with NPCs (vendor / quartermaster / dockhands). A station is modelled as its own location and boarded exactly like travelling to another body, so it reuses the proven world-transition path and is cleanly isolated from any planet.

How it works

  • Void world type. A Void flag on PlanetType makes WorldGenerator.Generate return an all-air world immediately (no terrain, caves, ore, flora).
  • The orbital_station planet type. Void=true, SpaceSky=true, breathable atmosphere (life support → no oxygen drain), zero flora/creatures, weather disabled, a fixed non-advancing time-of-day. The universe generator never assigns it to a celestial body — it is a code-defined type, not part of the planet pool.
  • Station environment. The station world's WorldEnvironment is SpaceSky=true, clear weather, cloud density 0, fixed time-of-day, breathable. The client gates clouds/weather/day-night on env, so the black sky, constant light and lit interior fill follow from the env. As a belt-and-braces fallback, Sky.cs also still treats a non-empty Game.StationName as "boarded" → space sky, no day/night and lit interior (so a boarded station looks right even before its env arrives); the env path and this StationName check coexist.
  • LoadWorld skips planet content for void worlds: no settlement/wreck stamping, no flora/fluids/creatures/landing-zone init; it sets the fixed station env instead.
  • Boarding = per-player travel into the station world. BoardStation mirrors HandleTravel: range/validation checks → leave the space instance → remember the return location → LoadWorld("orbital_station", "station:"+id) → stamp the station onto a clean origin with a solid hangar floor + spawn the station NPCs (scoped to this world) → set CurrentLocationId, position and AboardShip=false → SentChunks.Clear() → send WorldReset + player state + inventory + NPCs + environment. The client's OnWorldReset clears chunks, nulls the spawn and re-snaps once chunks stream — the robust reposition.
  • Leaving = travel back. LeaveStation loads the return planet world, restores the ship and position, re-snaps via WorldReset, and unloads the station world if empty. It can undock back into space flight around the orbited planet rather than dropping to the surface.
  • Player-built stations reuse the same machinery: StampPlayerStation stamps the player's own cells into the orbital_station void world (spawn on a guaranteed floor pad), registers the build as a boardable CelestialBody, and persists it as a space_structure. Stations are peaceful — void worlds hard-skip enemy/creature/flora ticks.

Key files & classes

  • GameServerSpaceStations.cs — BoardStation, LeaveStation, StampStation, StampPlayerStation, station NPC spawning, multi-station iteration per system.
  • WorldGenerator.Generate — early-out for Void worlds.
  • PlanetType (Void flag) + the orbital_station definition.
  • LoadWorld (GameServer.cs) — void-world content skip (if (!planet.Void)), per-world NPC scoping.
  • Client Sky.cs + OnWorldReset — env-driven space sky / lit interior (with a StationName fallback), clean reposition.
  • Tests: BoardStation_PutsPlayerInOwnVoidWorld_OnSolidGround_WithLifeSupport, LeaveStation_TravelsBackToThePlanet, LeaveStation_UndocksBackIntoSpaceFlight, VoidPlanet_GeneratesEmptySpace.

Design notes

  • The earlier bug was that BoardStation stamped the station into the planet world at a high Y and teleported there without a real world transition — no WorldReset, no SentChunks.Clear(). The station chunks never streamed in time, so gravity pulled the player down until far-below planet terrain finally loaded: the "black → fall → planet" symptom, with weather/clouds/day-night bleeding in from the shared planet world. Modelling the station as its own location fixed both at once.

Known gaps / deferred

  • Station-world edit persistence is intentionally light (regenerate on board; player-built stations persist as space_structure).
  • Residual "flora into space" on pre-fix persisted station worlds is hardened separately (structure-stamp enclosure checks + re-clearing old stamped worlds) — see TODO.md.