A moon is a second, much smaller world that forms in the same slot as one of your planets. You do not colonise a moon. The only way one ever appears is out of the debris of a battle fought over a planet, and it always belongs to the player who owned that planet.
A moon produces nothing. There are no mines, no power plants, no Shipyard and no Research Lab on one. What it gives you is five buildings you cannot get anywhere else, plus a second place in the slot to park ships and resources. Moons do not count against your ten planet limit either.
Getting to your moon
A moon shares its planet's slot, so it uses the same coordinates with an m on the end. The moon over 1:4:10 is 1:4:10m. In the planet switcher at the top of the screen it shows as a small grey disc tucked into the corner of the planet's picture, with its coordinates listed under the planet's. Click either one to switch to the moon.
From there everything works the way it does on a planet. The moon has its own Buildings page, its own stored resources, its own ships in orbit and its own row in the Galaxy view.
Formation
Moons come from debris, and only from debris. Every battle that creates debris also rolls for a moon at the defending planet. The chance is that battle's debris, ore plus crystal, divided by 15,000,000. So 150,000 debris is 1 percent, and it stops climbing at 20 percent.
| Debris in the battle | Moon chance |
|---|---|
| under 150,000 | no roll at all |
| 150,000 | 1% |
| 750,000 | 5% |
| 1,500,000 | 10% |
| 3,000,000 or more | 20%, the cap |
The battle report prints the number whether the moon forms or not. Under 1 percent it stays quiet and the Moon section does not appear at all.
The rules that catch people out:
- The moon goes to the defender. Crash a fleet on somebody's planet and the moon that pops out is theirs, not yours.
- Only that battle's debris counts. Debris already floating in the slot does nothing for the roll, so you cannot seed a slot with one big fight and then farm it with a string of small ones.
- The moon does not eat the debris. It forms and the field is still sitting there to be harvested.
- One moon per slot. If the slot already has a moon there is no roll.
- The defender has to be a planet. A battle at a moon never creates a moon, and NPCs never gain one.
- Only ships make debris. Defenses leave none, so flattening a wall of Gauss Cannons gives you nothing to roll on.
- Nothing improves the odds. There is no commander, no perk and no credit purchase in SFC2 that raises the chance.
Making a moon on purpose
Debris is 30 percent of the ore and crystal build cost of every ship destroyed, on both sides. Working backwards from that gives you the fleet you have to throw away. The numbers below are ships lost, counting losses from both sides of the fight. Hydrogen never turns into debris.
| Ship | Ore + crystal each | For 1% | For 10% | For 20% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hermes Class Probe | 1,000 | 500 | 5,000 | 10,000 |
| Helios Class Solar Satellite | 2,000 | 250 | 2,500 | 5,000 |
| Artemis Class Fighter | 4,000 | 125 | 1,250 | 2,500 |
| Atlas Class Cargo | 4,000 | 125 | 1,250 | 2,500 |
| Zagreus Class Recycler | 8,000 | 63 | 625 | 1,250 |
| Apollo Class Fighter | 8,500 | 59 | 589 | 1,177 |
| Hercules Class Cargo | 12,000 | 42 | 417 | 834 |
| Dionysus Class Recycler | 16,000 | 32 | 313 | 625 |
| Poseidon Class Cruiser | 27,000 | 19 | 186 | 371 |
| Gaia Class Colony Ship | 30,000 | 17 | 167 | 334 |
| Carmanor Class Cargo | 36,000 | 14 | 139 | 278 |
| Athena Class Battleship | 60,000 | 9 | 84 | 167 |
| Hades Class Battleship | 70,000 | 8 | 72 | 143 |
| Ares Class Bomber | 75,000 | 7 | 67 | 134 |
| Prometheus Class Destroyer | 110,000 | 5 | 46 | 91 |
| Zeus Class | 9,000,000 | 1 | 1 | 2 |
A single Zeus lost is 2,700,000 debris on its own, which is an 18 percent roll. Two of them hit the cap.
Trying more than once
20 percent is the ceiling on any one roll, and the game keeps no record of your failures. Every attempt is its own coin flip, so five 20 percent tries do not add up to a guarantee.
| Attempts | Chance of a moon at 20% a try | Chance of a moon at 10% a try |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 20% | 10% |
| 2 | 36% | 19% |
| 3 | 48.8% | 27.1% |
| 5 | 67.2% | 41% |
| 10 | 89.3% | 65.1% |
| 15 | 96.5% | 79.4% |
| 20 | 98.8% | 87.8% |
| n | (1 - (1 - chance)n) × 100 | |
Buildings
A brand new moon has exactly one building field on it and zero ore, crystal and hydrogen. The only thing that field can take is Lunar Base level 1, and nothing else unlocks until it is standing. Since the moon makes nothing, ship the resources up from a planet with a Transport first.
After that, every Lunar Base level adds three fields and takes one of them for itself, so you gain two usable fields a level.
| Total fields on the moon | 3 × Lunar Base level + 1 |
|---|
Five buildings exist on a moon, and that is the entire list.
- Lunar Base: the fields everything else sits in. It is also the one structure in the game you can never tear down, so decide how big you want it before you spend the room.
- Capitol: the only thing on a moon that speeds up construction. Needs Lunar Base 1.
- Oracle: moons only. Sweeps five solar systems each way per level for targets and costs a flat 5,000 hydrogen a scan, taken from the moon. Needs Lunar Base 1.
- Warp Gate: moons only. Jumps a fleet instantly between two of your moons with no fuel and no cargo. Needs Lunar Base 1 and FTL Tech 7.
- Lunar Dock: the recall point for a Hephaestus Class Attack Platform. Needs Lunar Base 1.
Everything else is planet only: mines, power plants, warehouses, the Resource Den, the Shipyard, the Research Lab, the Foundry, the Missile Silo and every entry on the Defense page. With no Shipyard there is no way to build ships or defenses on a moon at all.
Build time uses the same formula as a planet with the Foundry part left out, because a moon cannot have one. A Capitol on the moon divides it by one plus its level, and the Lunar Dockyard alliance perk takes another 10 percent per level off for every member.
Overview, All Planets, Buildings has a Moons table listing every moon you own with its five building levels and its field count. It is the quick way to spot one that is about to box itself in.
Resources on a moon
A moon has no mines, so it generates nothing. Every last unit on it was flown in.
With no warehouses, a moon's storage capacity reads 100,000 of each resource, and the figures in the top bar turn red once you go past it. Nothing stops you going past it: transports land their full load and a moon will happily sit on millions. The cap only limits what the Trade Merchant will convert.
Parking the overflow on a moon is a genuine use for one. A planet's mines stall once its warehouses fill up, so moving the surplus up to the moon keeps them running.
The catch is plunder. A moon cannot build a Resource Den, so there is nothing sheltering what is sitting there. On a planet the Den holds back a slice; on a moon an attacker gets a straight cut of the lot.
Attacking and defending a moon
A moon is a separate target from its planet. It gets its own row in the Galaxy view, indented under the planet, with the same Spy, Attack, Message and Buddy actions on it.
- A moon can be probed and attacked exactly like a planet.
- It cannot build defenses, so anything defending a moon is a fleet you parked there. Ships sitting on a moon are just as visible to probes and just as exposed as ships on a planet.
- The moon and the planet are separate for everything else too. A Capitol or a Shipyard on one does nothing for the other.
- Missiles are pointless against a moon. There are no defenses up there to destroy, and the ABMs on the planet do not cover the moon.
- Debris from a battle over a moon lands in the shared slot, so it shows on the planet's row rather than the moon's. Recyclers sent to either one collect it.
Losing a moon
Nothing in SFC2 destroys a moon. There is no moon destruction mission and the Zeus Class does not crack one here. In the old game a fleet of Zeus could, and a lot of pages still talk as if that carried over. It did not.
A moon only goes away with the planet it shares a slot with.
- Abandon the planet and the moon goes with it. There is no Abandon button on a moon's Overview page. The planet's Abandon is blocked while the moon still has ships parked on it or fleets on their way out.
- Move Planet takes the moon along to the new slot. It is blocked while the moon has stationed fleets, fleet tasks going either way, or a mission running.
- If the account is removed for inactivity, everything goes with it.
Not in SFC2
If you played the old game, none of the following exists here.
- Moon size. Moons in SFC2 have no diameter and no size. The field count comes from the Lunar Base level and nothing else, so a moon off a 1 percent roll is exactly as good as one off a 20 percent roll.
- Moon destruction. Covered above. Zeus cannot do it.
- Abandoning a moon on its own.
- Lunar commanders and lunar architects. Nothing changes the formation chance or the moon you get.
Quests
Two quests pay out for moon work: Big Bang Theory for owning your first moon, and Base on the Moon for getting a Lunar Base to level 5.
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