Purge in Space
Enter a match
Open Play, choose a pilot alias, and continue as a guest or sign in. The lobby searches available backends and active rooms. If no suitable room exists, it creates one. Autonomous pilots fill open positions so you can begin without waiting for a full lobby.
Desktop controls
- WASD or arrow keys: move in any direction.
- Mouse: aim the turret independently of movement.
- Space or left click: fire.
- T: use Blink when available.
- Y: activate Immunity when available.
- Shift: turbo boost.
- Tab: open or close the scoreboard.
- M: toggle game music.
Mobile controls
Play in landscape orientation. Use the movement and aim areas to steer and target. The fire control and active ability buttons remain on-screen. Mobile graphics settings reduce expensive effects where needed without changing the rules.
Capture a citadel
Move into a neutral or enemy citadel's influence area and survive its defenses. A successful capture changes the owner of its Voronoi region. Your territory color appears around that region, and the citadel's ability becomes active for your ship.
Neutral citadels are not weak decoration. Their turrets can damage careless pilots, so approach with room to evade and avoid remaining directly inside predictable firing lines.
Build ability stacks
Five passive abilities improve fire rate, speed, HP regeneration, fire range, or damage. Blink and Immunity are active abilities with cooldowns. Owning several citadels of the same type increases the stack up to the maximum.
Bonuses depend on current ownership. If another pilot captures the citadel, the stack disappears on the next simulation update.
Understand territory and continents
Each citadel claims the world cells closest to it. Adjacent regions belonging to the same owner merge into a continent. Large continents can grant the dominant ability represented by their citadels. A capital marker identifies the most important region in the connected group, and supply lines connect allied neighboring citadels.
Fight other pilots
Movement and aim are separate, so you can strafe across a firing angle or retreat while shooting. Watch health, cooldowns, nearby citadel fire, and the opponent's active abilities. Blink can cross a short distance toward the aim direction. Immunity creates a temporary invulnerable window.
Respawning and elimination
Fresh pilots begin with zero owned citadels. Dying before the first capture causes a normal open-space respawn rather than immediate permanent elimination.
After you have owned territory, your citadels become your respawn network. With bases remaining, you respawn at a surviving citadel with temporary invulnerability. If you have previously owned a citadel and later lose all of them, another death can permanently eliminate you from the match.
When one pilot kills another, the defeated pilot keeps only a limited fallback while the attacker can inherit the remaining citadels. This makes fights between established empires especially important.
Become Emperor
Control the required share of world territory continuously for the hold duration. The HUD shows the leading percentage and timer. If rivals reduce the leader below the threshold or take the lead, the coronation progress is interrupted.
First-match priorities
- Learn movement before chasing a kill.
- Capture a reachable neutral citadel.
- Note which ability it grants.
- Keep a path back toward owned territory.
- Expand toward a second useful ability.
- Watch the minimap for a leader approaching the Emperor threshold.
The beginner walkthrough turns these rules into a first-match sequence.