"I love space."
—Markiplier, multiple times while playing this game
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.Universe Sandbox is a space simulation Wide-Open Sandbox game developed by indie dev Giant Army. First released in 2008, the game allows the player to toy with the physics of the universe, from making Pluto a habitable planet to vaporizing Earth by throwing the Sun at it. A player can also create their own planets and star systems, and customize them how they wish.
A sequel, originally called Universe Sandbox 2 was released in 2015. In 2018, it was renamed to simply Universe Sandbox, the classic version being dubbed the Retronym Universe Sandbox Legacy and made unavailable to purchase.
The game is available on Steam here and GOG.com here. The game's official website is also available here. Keep in mind that the game is still in Early Access, as the developers plan on adding much more content to it before it is considered complete.
Universe Sandbox provides examples of the following tropes:
- Alien Sea: The player can customize the color of the water on a planet's surface.
- Alien Sky: A planet's sky can have as many stars and moons the player puts. The atmosphere itself can also be customized, just like the sea.
- All Planets Are Earth-Like: The game provides a large variety of planets to use when selecting randomized planets, though a player can choose to invoke this trope when designing their own solar system. This is even recorded by the game in the "Earth Similarity" and "Life Likelihood" percentages.
- Anti-Frustration Features:
- The Auto-Orbit feature, which puts planets in circular orbits around stars/other planets. This is helpful when attempting to make a solar system.
- Automatic Simulation Speed slows down the simulation when two planets are about to collide, ensuring you don't miss anything.
- Artistic License – Biology: Terraforming a planet can allow a player to add city lights to it, without the need of waiting for any species to evolve. A player can even add cities to a Death World or asteroid.
- Artistic License – Physics: While the game is good at the physics of larger objects, it is horrible at simulating the physics of human-scale objects. They will often collide as if they were planets, but since they don't emit particles, it just looks like they are awkwardly merging together.
- Artistic License – Space: Generally averted, the game follows real physics fairly accurately. There are a couple examples to make the game more fun, such as throwing planets faster than lightspeed, or some of the customization options, such as the ability to make green stars.
- Baby Planet: Averted. Objects small enough to meet this criteria are asteroids that are not completely spherical.
- Binary Suns: The player can make as many stars they want orbit each other. Said experiments are usually unstable, and may result in a supernova.
- City Planet: Averted. While the player can make planets with cities on them, they will not take up the entire planet.
- Colony Drop: One of the game's most advertised features. You can launch planets and stars at each other and watch as the chaos unfolds.
- Death World: Putting a planet too close to its star or making it collide with other planets will result in this due to the sheer temperature. Extremely high temperatures make a planet vaporize, however.
- Design-It-Yourself Equipment: You can tinker with a planets' variables, such as mass, size, and temperature. You can also customize how they look.
- Earth-Shattering Kaboom: You can use the Explode tool to make this happen. Planets will explode into hot fragments, while stars go supernova (even the ones that wouldn't in real life, such as our Sun).
- Easter Egg: You can create magic cold stars with negative luminosity. They will become purple, and make everything around them extremely cold.
- Ghost Planet: Simply take (or make) a planet with visible life, such as Earth, then throw a large asteroid or moon at it.
- Naming Your Colony World: The game has its own conventions for randomized planet names (expect a lot of planets with Nus or Tus in the name). Of course, the player can name a planet whatever they want to.
- No Plot? No Problem!: While the game has no plot per se, there are various pre-built simulations made by the developers, some of which are based on real-world events.
The developers have also stated that they'd like to add missions to the game. - Photo Mode: The game automatically disables the GUI, as well as trails and nametags when taking screenshots. You can also apply filters, such as pixelation and underwater effects.
- Player Creation Sharing: The game lets the player test out trending Steam Workshop items in-game, without the need to subscribe to them. However, you can still subscribe to items if you wish to keep them.
- Rogue Planet: In a new simulation, planets will end up like this if the player does not spawn any stars. They will slowly freeze to absolute zero.
- Shout-Out:
- One of the game's few human-sized objects is the TARDIS.
- One of the abilities the player can use is firing a laser, including the Death Star's superlaser.
- You can actually destroy planets using the force spin tool, causing them to spin so fast that they tear themselves apart, very similar to how the Drej destroy Earth at the very beginning of Titan A.E..
- Single-Biome Planet: Averted. While a planet might look like one from space, the elevation and temperature varies on different parts of the surface.
- Skybox: Spacebox would be a more fitting term. The game allows the player to customize what skybox they want to use, such as the Milky Way, multicolored nebulae, and stars.
- Sound In Space: The player can enable this and listen to stars perform nuclear fusion, as well as the explosions and collisions they cause.
- Stock Star Systems: Most of the star systems listed are available in the game.
- Terraform: The player can edit a planet to do essentially this, and watch as its life likelihood goes up.
- Tidally Locked Planet: The player can make any planet become these, as the day side becomes scorching hot, while the night becomes very cold.
- Unrealistic Black Hole: While the black holes in this game are generally based on our limited understanding of them, it's entirely possible to make a black hole the size of the Milky Way.
- Video Game Caring Potential: The player can make any planet (or moon!) suitable for life by giving it water, an atmosphere, a star to orbit, and enough heat from said star. You can complete this by adding cities to your planet.
- Video Game Cruelty Potential: Alternatively, the player can destroy planets by making them collide with others, having them vaporized in the event of a supernova, or placing a moon extremely close and letting tidal forces do the job. You could also take the simple route and using the Explode tool on it.
- Weird Sun: The player can change the sun in various ways, such as making it twice as massive, or making it purple, or making it so big it swallows the entire solar system.
- Wide-Open Sandbox: The game allows the player to mess around with any of its tools from when first starting the game.
