Landing Pads

Where does a rocket come down? From 2.0 a rocket always lands centred on a pad, facing the pad's front, or — when there is no pad to use — on an automatically placed Landing Pod. Arrivals are animated: the rocket appears high above its landing spot and descends with its engines firing, with you seated inside until touchdown.

How the landing spot is chosen#

The first rule that finds a spot wins:

1. The pad you picked. Use the pad button on the rocket's flight console to choose a named pad in the destination. If that pad has been broken, you are told and the next rules apply.
2. Home pad. A rocket flying back to the world it came from returns to the pad it launched from, if that pad still stands — named or not.
3. Paired pad. If you launched from a named pad (for example "Home Base") and the destination has a pad with exactly the same name, you land there. Automatic labels such as "Pad 3" never pair. If several pads share the name, the oldest one wins; a far-away, ambiguous name is ignored.
4. Nearest pad. Otherwise the nearest registered pad within 2048 blocks of the arrival area.
5. Landing Pod. If none of the above applies, a Landing Pod is placed for you.

A pad with another rocket already standing on it is skipped — a landing never stacks rockets.

Registering a pad#

Use a Name Tag on a Rocket Launch Pad to register it as a landing spot (the tag's name labels it; an unnamed tag gives "Pad N"). Sneak and use an empty hand on it to unregister it. Pads registered before 2.0 keep working; the first time a rocket lands on one, its centre and front are worked out and remembered.

A pad cannot be renamed while someone else is sitting in a rocket parked on it.

Docking Ring#

The Docking Ring is a 3×3 landing plate with hazard-stripe lights. Place it with room for the whole 3×3; it registers itself as a landing spot straight away (no Name Tag needed) and faces the way you were looking. Breaking any part removes the whole ring and drops it as one item. Rockets of any tier can take off from a Docking Ring.

At an orbital station, arriving rockets prefer the station's Docking Ring, then its original landing pad. New stations are built with a Docking Ring; older stations keep their pad.

Landing Pods#

A Landing Pod needs a flat, solid 5×5 patch (no water, lava, leaves, ice or magma), three blocks of open space above it, no structure in the way, and some distance from other players' stations you cannot use, from cargo pads you have no access to, from terraform regions that other mods register with Nerospace, and from other pads. Nothing else counts as off-limits: a Terraformer's own ground and other players' bases are not avoided. The search spirals out from the arrival area — up to 24 blocks — and, if nothing fits, builds a small platform in the air above, still keeping the same distances. An empty pod nearby is reused, and pods are kept at least 32 blocks apart so they don't litter the landscape. Breaking a Landing Pod removes it from the list of landing spots.

Founding a station from a rocket#

Choosing New Station in the dock list needs a Station Charter in your inventory, which is used up when you arrive (never at launch, so an aborted trip costs nothing). Without a charter you dock at the shared origin platform instead and get a message. The option is hidden in the dock list while you hold no charter.

Good to know#

• If a pad is broken while your rocket is coming down, it steers to the next spot instead.
• If you disconnect during the descent, the rocket still finishes landing.
• If a rocket parked on your pad only shows up while you are coming down (its area had not loaded yet), your rocket steers to the next spot, or sets down on a Landing Pod nearby; it never lands on top of another rocket.
• A rocket saved halfway through a descent finishes landing the moment its area loads again.
• A rider can launch once every five seconds. A launch inside that window is refused with a message, before any launch fee is charged.
• Landings only look at pads they could actually use and at the area around the landing spot, so a world with many pads does not load chunks all over the planet.
• Server owners can shorten the Landing Pod search with landing.podSearchRadius (default 24, range 6–24 blocks).
• Rocket tiers and their destinations: Tier 1 reaches the Orbital Station and Luna; Tier 2 adds Greenxertz and Mars; Tier 3 adds Cindara; Tier 4 adds Glacira and Nyxara. Each tier keeps every destination of the tiers below it, and every tier can fly home.