Concordia

How to explore Concordia

The simulation has three modes, one key map and a link format that opens any view you find. This page covers all of it, from the first step through the front door to the twelve engineering overlays.

Three ways in

Pick a mode at the lower right of the screen. You can switch at any time without losing your place.

A panoramic cabin interior with window seats, rails and a glass floor gallery, and a city curving beyond.
The panoramic ascender cabin in Story mode, with the live altitude and gravity readout. Open this view

Moving around

Movement changes with where you are. On the rotor floor you walk. Anywhere else inside the station you fly. Outside the hull you are in space mode, where speed scales with distance. The screen shows the current mode and your speed.

Input What it does
W S or Up Down Forward and back
A D or Left Right Strafe
Space or PageUp Jump on foot, climb when flying. Double-tap Space, or press V, to take off
C or PageDown Descend, and land on the floor
V Take off, or drop to the floor when flying inside
Shift (hold) Run, or boost
Z X Roll, where gravity does not set your up
H Level the view
[ ] Halve or double the base speed of the current mode
Q E, , ., Home End Skew: orbit the point under the cursor and keep it there
Mouse drag Look around
Mouse wheel Move toward whatever the cursor points at
L Toggle pointer-locked mouselook. L or Esc releases it
F At an axis transfer chamber, move between a rotor and the stationary spine
M Open the atlas: city and axis views, chapter travel, an Orbit tab, and Viewpoints
? Show the keyboard shortcuts

Near Earth, the Moon or the Sun, release the movement keys for a second and the view captures an orbit. Any movement key resumes free flight. The sun, Earth and Moon keep their true apparent sizes: Earth is 1.9 degrees across and the Moon and Sun about 0.5.

Flying out through a rotor end wall leaves the city. The rotor floor itself is solid.

Interface levels

Press U to cycle the interface: full, minimal (each card shrinks to a one-line pill) and clean (only the scene). Esc, U or the corner button bring it back. Each card also collapses with its arrow button, and your choice is remembered.

Press P at any level to save the current frame as a PNG. The interface is never in the picture. The ♫ button turns environmental sound and menu feedback on or off together. Live Time keeps the rotors and the sky moving in real time, and Reference Lighting puts the sky at a fixed baseline hour.

Share a view

The address bar always matches what you see. Use the Copy link button in the top bar to copy it, and anyone who opens the link lands in the same place. Every link starts at /explore/, and these are the parts you can combine:

Parameter Values Result
viewpoint an id such as artificial-sky-breakthrough Opens that saved view. Every id is listed on the scene atlas
chapter a chapter key such as ascender Starts the story at that chapter
mode story, explore, engineer Sets the mode
overlay one of the twelve slugs below Opens Engineer mode with that overlay selected
skytime hours, for example 14 Pins the sky of Tsiolkovsky (Rotor 1) to that hour of its day
quality Low, Medium, High, Ultra Sets the rendering quality
ui full, minimal, clean Sets the starting interface level

Example: /explore/?viewpoint=complete-habitat&overlay=gravity opens the exterior view with the gravity overlay. If a link has both viewpoint and chapter, the chapter wins. Unknown values are ignored.

Open in the simulation: Ascender: Artificial Sky Breakthrough Open in the simulation: A first moment of weightlessness. Open in the simulation: Gravity overlay on the whole station

The twelve overlays

In Engineer mode each overlay draws labels into the scene and puts a short explanation in the panel, with a link to the page that covers it in depth. The slug is what you put after overlay= in a link.

The whole station in space with gravity overlay labels marking 1 g at the ground and near zero at the axis.
Gravity overlay on the whole station. Open this view
The momentum control bay with engineering overlay labels beside four ring housings and the stationary spine.
The momentum overlay, with labels showing how the four rotors and the rings cancel each other. Open this view

If it runs slowly

The simulation draws a whole city, so it asks for a real graphics card. A laptop with integrated graphics will manage at lower settings.

  1. Open Engineer mode and drop the rendering quality from High to Medium or Low. The physical content stays the same. Only density, shadows and effects change. Or start there with ?quality=Low.
  2. Lower the render resolution to 75 or 50 percent. The default, Auto, already adjusts for speed.
  3. Switch the interface to clean with U to see only the scene.
  4. Close other tabs that use the graphics card. Video calls and other 3D pages compete for it.

On a phone or tablet, the pages on this site work everywhere, but the simulation is built for a keyboard and mouse. Dragging looks around, and the keys do the moving, so a phone can look but not walk. Use the links on these pages to open a view, and do the walking on a computer.

If the simulation does not start, it needs WebGL, which every current browser has. A message that the habitat could not initialize means WebGL is switched off or the graphics driver is out of date. Turn on hardware acceleration in the browser settings, update the browser and reload. Every view on the scene atlas also has a picture, so the places can be seen without the simulation.

  • A day aboard A family of five lives in the Arbor Quarter of Tsiolkovsky (Rotor 1). Today they leave Concordia for Earth.
  • Scene atlas This is a guide to eighty-four views of Concordia, grouped by where they are: streets and parks, the climb to the axis, the machine rooms, the spaceport and the outside of the...
  • How Concordia works Gravity from spin, shielding from rock, air from plants and power from sunlight. These pages explain each system in plain language, then show the numbers.