Stellar Station — Galaxy Gardeners (Decentraland)

A docked-crew-only space station in Decentraland: the social hub of the Galaxy Gardeners game, with an arcade, a living galaxy hologram, and a black market run by an ancient alien civilisation.

Overview

Stellar Station is the inside of a space station in Galaxy Gardeners, a cross-platform space exploration game (iOS app + a Decentraland ship world). Players can only come aboard while their ship is docked at a station in the game, so the scene checks their docking status against the game server and returns anyone else to their ship. It's a 256 m × 256 m Decentraland World (stellarstation.dcl.eth), kept private: it's opted out of Decentraland's public Places listing because it's an in-game destination, not a public venue.

What's aboard

• A multi-level hub with ring balconies, an observation deck, a lounge and working lifts (elevators with collective dispatching, synced between players).
• An arcade of seven original playable cabinet games (a pseudo-3D racer, an orbital shooter, a lander, an asteroid dodger, a brick-breaker, a vine-growing snake game, a space-invaders take), with per-station high scores.
• Terra, an "Earth room" park with sittable benches, butterflies and birdsong.
• A Space Bar with bartender characters, drinks and emotes, and a hidden pod behind the back bar.
• A giant rotating 3D galaxy hologram over the atrium, with a live social heat map showing where explorers are across the galaxy.

The Eld's black market (feature highlight)

Behind the bar is a relay to "the Eld", an ancient alien civilisation that grants favours for MANA. Players can buy wormholes, star naming rights, cloaking, pirate-radio broadcasts, pod insurance and more. Every purchase is quoted by the server before any MANA moves, verified on-chain after payment, and recorded as refundable if it can no longer go ahead. Two recent additions:

• The Wormhole Map: a one-time purchase that overlays every known wormhole in the player's galaxy onto the hologram (linked black-hole pairs, dormant black holes, open and scheduled timed wormholes, private ones marked), kept current by polling only while the player is aboard.
• Star destruction: players can collapse a star into a supernova remnant. Remnants are drawn smaller than any live star to de-crowd the map, their contents disappear (nothing is deleted, so admins can restore them), and black holes are protected.

Engineering notes

• Performance-first ECS: per-frame systems never re-write materials or text needlessly; animated materials step through a small fixed set of looks; pollers keep one request in flight.
• The engine runs headless under Vitest so behaviour like "no per-frame material writes" or "never two requests in flight" is tested, and the test suite gates every deploy.
• Server work in TypeScript/Express on Supabase, with SQL functions for atomic game rules and pgTAP tests for them.