September 2, 2026
A moon is how you stop playing scared. Sensor Phalanx, Jump Gate, and the fleetsaves that actually work all live there. You don’t buy one. You make one.
A moonshot is an attempt to create a moon.
A moon forms by chance when a big enough fight happens at a planet. Debris from destroyed ships drives the roll. The biggest chance a single fight can give you by default is 20%. That is the normal ceiling. Past that, more debris does not help, unless a moon event is raising the cap.
20% does not mean five tries and you’re done. It means each shot has a one-in-five chance. You can get lucky on the first. You can also eat ten in a row. Plan for repeats.
How much wreckage a fight leaves depends on your universe. Fleet-to-debris and defense-to-debris rates are settings. They are not the same everywhere. The fighter count that hits 20%, how many Recyclers that field needs, and what crush fleet can wipe those fighters without eating the planet’s defenses all scale with those rates.
Light Fighters are still the usual fuel. They are cheap, fast to rebuild, and easy to time. Other ships work too if the debris math lines up. Do not memorize a global number. Open the combat simulator in that universe and size the crash from the sim until you are at the 20% ceiling.
As a ballpark from one common rate setup, people sometimes talk about roughly 1,667 Light Fighters for 20%. That is an example, not a constant. Your universe may want more or fewer. Trust the sim.
Periodically GRSE runs moon events. Debris numbers get better than the normal universe rates, and the moonchance ceiling can go up to 40% instead of the usual 20%. Successful moonshots during the event can also get special moon skins.
The sim still wins. Use the sim after the event starts to get the event rates. Do not reuse the normal-rate ballpark counts.
You pick the planet first. That is where the moon will sit if the roll hits. Station the defending fleet there. Crash the fighters there. Recycle there.
Once you have the moon, you get short hops between planet and moon, a place to park that is harder to watch, and the buildings you cannot put on a planet: Lunar Base, Sensor Phalanx, Jump Gate. That is the same moon that unlocks moon-to-moon fleetsaving.
This is the clean version with a friend or alliance mate. You both want moons. You trade shots.
If successful the moon appears immediately at the target planet’s location. If not, rebuild and go again.
Whatever you crash will leave a debris field. Size the Recycle from the sim too: it will tell you how much metal and crystal land in the field. A ballpark people quote for ~1,667 Light Fighters under one common rate is about 101 Recyclers. Again, example only. Your field may need more or fewer.
If you do not recycle it, someone else will. Two reliable ways:
Rules still matter. Even trades of the same crash and Recycle usually stay clean. Uneven resource flow can look like pushing if one account keeps feeding another.
If one of you wants more shots and the other is done, common options:
Ask in alliance chat first. That is what alliances are for.
No alliance? Message someone and ask. You will probably build the fighters yourself. They bring the crush or the ACS pilot.
Last resort: park a sim-sized Light Fighter stack on the planet you want and leave them. Eventually someone probes them and cleans house. You might get a moon. They will almost certainly take the field.
Build Lunar Base so the moon has fields. Then Phalanx when you can. Jump Gate when you can afford it. Start fleetsaving moon-to-moon. That is the whole point. Be very careful when building on a moon because it is very easy to accidentally fill your building fields and not have enough room for another level of Lunar Base. If this happens you will need to destroy something to make room for a new level of Lunar Base to create more fields.
Protect it. A moon can be popped with Deathstars. If someone pops yours, fleets tied to that moon can snap back to the planet and show on phalanx. The fleetsaving guide covers that risk.