Approximately Up Moon Landing: How to Get There and Land

The thing that catches everyone

The Moon has an atmosphere.

That single fact is why the most-watched community tutorial for this trip — a 43,000-view moon landing guide — opens with it, and it is why a ship tuned entirely for vacuum behaves differently than expected on the way down. Whatever thruster mix got you off Earth is not automatically the mix that lands you on the Moon.

What to have mounted before you leave

Everything on this list exists because the descent, not the transfer, is the hard part:

• An Altimeter. You need height above the surface, continuously, to time the burn.
• The Gyro-Line, for a readable attitude reference. Patch 1.0.100 highlighted its centre line to make the screen centre easier to see mid-approach.
• Enough downward-facing thrust to arrest a descent, not just enough to lift off. These are different requirements: lifting off happens at full fuel, landing happens after the transfer.
• Ideally a Braking Point System, which automates deceleration. Since patch 1.0.010 it accepts negative speed values and reads them as absolutes.

A Massmeter helps if you have one — it was added in patch 1.0.104 as the reward for the Operation Ghostfire mission, which is itself a Moon objective. Mass changes your stopping distance, and until that block existed there was no way to check it in-game.

The approach, in order

1. Leave Earth with margin. Fuel spent getting to orbit is fuel you do not have for the descent.
2. Cross to the Moon. This is the slow part. Since patch 1.0.100 you can run the whole simulation at 3x with Fast Forward from the Time Controls menu — the developer added it explicitly for players who do not have hours for a single flight. Nothing is skipped or simplified; the simulation just runs faster, which costs CPU.
3. Plan the approach before you are close. Deciding where to come down while already descending is how overshoots happen. Community guides for finding specific worlds work the same way — the Steam guide for locating Aundara from the Moon is entirely about lining up before you burn.
4. Kill horizontal velocity first. A ship still moving sideways at touchdown tips, and a tipped ship with a running thruster is a ship being pushed across a surface.
5. Descend slowly enough to correct. There is no reward for arriving fast. The achievement list has one for hitting 1,000,000 m/s, and it is not this one.

Landing at the base

The Moon carries a permanent Planet Station: Moonstep, named in the April 2026 devlog as the place where an NPC called Fred waited under a giant “EEL’S EGGS WANTED” sign during the demo events. Planet Stations act as checkpoints and garages, and landing on one unlocks it permanently as a place you can launch from later — so the first successful Moon landing is worth more than the objective attached to it.

An early delivery objective ends at the Moon base with a cargo run that community guides describe as delivering ice cream. The Moon also hosts Operation Ghostfire, which pays three Massmeters, and a live-capture objective: the Ice Age achievement asks you to transport a mastodon from the Moon to Earth alive and release it. A separate Steam thread exists purely on the question of how to catch one.

If the landing keeps failing

Three specific causes, all with published fixes or explanations:

• The ship tips on touchdown. Centre of mass, not thrust. Check where the heavy blocks sit relative to the landing footprint.
• The ship comes apart on the way down. Check H mode for an unconnected component before launch — patch 1.0.110 traced this exact failure to a single loose part colliding with others.
• You cannot jump out to inspect after landing. Patch 1.0.105 fixed being unable to jump on the surface of planets without an atmosphere, after an earlier patch broke it. The Moon is not one of those, but airless worlds later in the system are.

Where every named world sits and what unlocks there is on the planets page, and the instrument blocks referenced here are described in full in the parts reference.