Guides › Getting started
Getting started
Everything you need for your first trip: how to fly, how to find things, and how to bend time.
Your first minute
Open Gravity Lab and choose Begin your journey. You'll swoop in to orbit above the Earth, which is lit by the Sun as it is right now, with the clock running at real time. Drag to look around. Click any world to fly to it. The camera then locks on and keeps that world centred while it moves. To fly free again, press any movement key.
Flying
| Control | What it does |
|---|---|
| W S | Forward and back |
| A D | Slide left and right |
| Space C | Up and down |
| Shift | Hold to boost twelve times faster |
| Drag | Look around |
| Scroll | Change flight speed |
| Click a world | Fly there and lock on |
On a phone or tablet, an on-screen joystick replaces the keys. Drag with one finger to look around, and tap a world to go there.
Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune have no solid surface. Keep flying down and you'll pass through their cloud decks toward the core. Venus is different: fall through its sulfuric-acid clouds and you reach the solid ground, mapped from the Magellan spacecraft's radar.
Finding anything
Press / or Ctrl + K (or click 🔍 Search) and start typing a name. Search covers planets, moons, dwarf planets, comets, spacecraft and rovers, stars, about 6,300 known exoplanets, nebulae, black holes and galaxies. Matching is forgiving: "cen" finds Alpha Centauri, and typing a kind of thing such as "black hole" or "moon" lists every one. The category chips under the search box let you browse a whole group at once.
Other ways to find somewhere new:
- 🌍 Home takes you straight back to Earth orbit.
- Tours are guided trips: Grand Tour: To the Edge of Everything, The Hunt for Life, Monsters & Marvels and Tour the Unique Planets.
- ✨ Explore a Star generates a star system nobody has charted and flies you to it.
- 📜 Timeline lays out the future of the universe in order, with simulations you can run.
- 📏 Size Comparison puts anything next to anything, from a person to the observable universe.
Controlling time
Gravity Lab keeps its own clock, and the whole universe follows it. The planets move along their orbits, the Earth turns, and spacecraft travel along their paths.
| Key | What it does |
|---|---|
| K | Pause and play |
| , . | Slower and faster, from real time up to 100 million years per second |
| N | Jump back to now |
| ⇄ | Run time backwards |
Speed time up and you'll see the Moon go through its phases in seconds and the planets sweep around the Sun. Run it backwards to see where Voyager 1 was at launch in 1977.
Readable scale and true size
Space is almost entirely empty. At true scale, if the Sun were a beach ball half a metre across, the Earth would be a peppercorn 54 metres away, and Neptune would be more than a mile and a half out. Seen like that, the planets are invisible dots. So Gravity Lab starts in Readable scale, which enlarges the planets and squeezes the distances between them so you can see everything at once.
Use the Scale switch to change to True size, with real sizes and real distances. Everything is still where it really is, only now it's to scale. Flying from the Earth to Mars at true scale is one of the best ways to understand why spaceflight takes months.
Showing and hiding things
The 👁 menu filters what's on screen: spacecraft and satellites, asteroids, stars, galaxies, labels and more. The ⚙ Settings panel covers graphics, narration, sandbox options and controls. Your settings are saved on your own device.
Graphics quality has three presets. Ultra suits dedicated graphics cards. Balanced suits most laptops and phones. Battery saver keeps things light when you're unplugged. Gravity Lab picks one for you when it starts, and you can change it at any time.