THE LAST TRANSMISSION / LUNAR EXPEDITION
Lunar Ice Prospector
Into the shadow.
Some lunar polar terrain has not seen direct sunlight for extraordinarily long periods. Cold traps can preserve ice, but darkness alone does not tell you what lies beneath the dust. Take a rover into a fictional 3D crater, compare clues, and return with a sample record.
A strategy game with an invented lunar landscape, AI-generated regolith texture, and illustrative rover and lander designs. This is not a surveyed lunar map, a NASA mission simulator, or a forecast of real ice deposits. Time and power advance only when you act.
LUNAR ICE PROSPECTOR
The next twelve meters are your decision.
Scan the sunlit ridge for comparison. Enter the crater by the north ramp. Collect up to three cores, then return to the base beacon.
Please wait while the expedition prepares.
Your expedition record is kept. Reload the landscape to continue.
At rover: ? · No scan at rover
The 3D landscape loads when you start. Drag to orbit, pinch or use + and − to zoom. Look arrows and drive arrows control different things.
The return-energy estimate is the energy needed to drive back, not your remaining battery. At base, no return drive is needed. Hydrogen at rover describes only your current cell; an unsurveyed base cell does not erase readings or samples collected elsewhere.
Map overlays: H+ enhanced hydrogen clue; H modest; · low. A gold core marker means sampled. Pale line: traveled route. The 3D annotations and local survey panel show H+ for enhanced hydrogen, H for modest hydrogen, · for low hydrogen, and ? for an unsurveyed cell. Tags stay at surveyed locations, shrink with distance, and are hidden by intervening terrain. Short stems connect tags to their ground rings; mint rings indicate enhanced clues. Use the local survey panel when distant tags are too small to read. The local panel stays readable when the 3D view is zoomed out. Gold cones mark samples; the dashed gold line marks the survey boundary. Steep terrain and boulders block movement. These are game classifications, not calibrated instrument measurements.
Your sample record
No cores collected. A dry comparison sample is useful science.
| Site | Depth | Survey first? | Assay result |
|---|
HOW TO PLAY
A careful return beats a dramatic discovery.
- Begin with a comparison. Survey the sunlit ridge and sample it if you want a dry control. Survey hydrogen records a five-by-five-cell area around the rover and reveals the survey annotations. Read H+ (enhanced hydrogen), H (modest), or · (low) on the landscape and in the local survey panel; ? means that cell has not been surveyed. The gold outline in the panel marks the rover’s current cell. If distant labels are small, use the panel or zoom closer.
- Use the ramp. Drive south from base through the broad north entrance. Each step is 12 meters (about 39 feet 4 inches). Drive arrows, arrow keys and WASD move north, west, south and east across the survey grid. Dragging, pinching and the look arrows change only your camera. Select Full survey map to locate the crater and base, or Hide survey marks to enjoy the bare landscape.
- Choose a location, then choose a depth. A hydrogen survey points to nearby places worth investigating; it does not tell you exactly how deep an ice-bearing layer lies. In this game, the sunlit starting area produces dry comparison samples. Drive into shadow and look for enhanced hydrogen clues before choosing another sampling site.
- Different depths test different layers. The depth menu offers 0.2 m (7.9 inches), 0.6 m (1 foot 11.6 inches), and 1 m (3 feet 3.4 inches) below the surface. Each assay tests material at the selected depth; choosing 1 m does not combine results from all the shallower layers. A shallow pocket can therefore produce a positive result at 0.2 or 0.6 m and a negative result at 1 m. Deeper is not automatically better. These layers and outcomes belong to the fictional game, not a measured lunar deposit.
- Use a negative result to plan the next test. “No H₂O above threshold” means the sample at that location and depth did not produce enough simulated water signal to count as a detection. It does not establish that the whole site is dry. If the hydrogen clue is enhanced, consider trying a different depth at the same location. You have only three sample tubes, and every assay uses one, so balance depth comparisons with samples from different locations.
- Keep enough energy to return. Shadow driving and drilling cost more. Stop in sunlight to recharge. The return estimate shows energy needed for the shortest traversable route, without further science stops. Your remaining energy is shown separately under Battery. At base, no return drive is needed.
- Downlink at base. The report rewards returning data, comparing sites, surveying before sampling, and including both positive and negative assays. The 100-point total awards 30 for returning to base, up to 30 for different sampling locations (15 each, capped at two), up to 15 for surveying before sampling (5 per core), 20 for returning both a positive and a negative assay, and 5 for returning with at least 15 battery units. Three positive samples can therefore earn 80 points; a dry comparison sample is useful evidence. Restarting changes the fictional buried pockets.
THE REAL SCIENCE
A hydrogen clue is the beginning of a question.
Water has been detected on the Moon, including evidence for ice in permanently shadowed polar terrain. Its form, concentration, distribution and accessibility vary; an attractive dark crater is not automatically an accessible reservoir. NASA’s overview explains the different observations and the questions that remain.
Neutron measurements can reveal hydrogen enrichment indirectly. Additional instrument measurements and sampling help investigate what carries that hydrogen. Rover instrument designs combine complementary measurements rather than treating one map color as proof of recoverable ice. The game’s combined drill-and-assay action compresses that reasoning into one simplified step.
Polar terrain creates competing demands. Low sunlight can favor cold trapping while making solar power harder to obtain. Terrain can obstruct communications. This game uses a fixed invented shadow mask for its power rules and a simplified relay indicator. The 3D lighting is an artistic view of that landscape; there is no live Sun or Earth geometry, thermal solver, radio model, calibrated neutron response, realistic wheel dynamics, resource extraction or actual mission schedule.
Distances describe the game grid. Power is in abstract energy units, and action durations are chosen for playability. The continuous crater, distant hills, fragments, rover, lander and AI-generated ground material are artistic reconstructions. Camera perspective and lights do not add a measurement of lunar topography or deposits. The score measures completion of game goals, not scientific certainty, the value of an actual sample, or a mission’s engineering feasibility.
FOLLOW THE RECORD