Exploration
Starsea Voyage Guide: Islets, Resource Planets, and Loot
The Starsea Voyage is the exploration layer: a ticket-limited trip through islets and resource planets that brings back materials your home planet cannot produce.
At a glance
- Tickets
- Star Anchors — five when the feature opens, three per day after
- Where to buy
- Loomi TV order screen
- Nodes
- Islets and resource planets
- Map
- Starsea Map, region by region
- Neighbors
- Up to two accompany a trip
- Bring
- 200–1,000 Dough and a stack of food
How the Starsea Voyage unlocks
The voyage opens on the second day of play, at the same point the Luca Arbor reaches level 6. It is not a menu you can ignore: the Starsea is the main way the game introduces new Neighbors, and testers met their third Neighbor on the day the feature opened, with a chance at a fourth from the third day onward. Which Neighbor appears differs from player to player.
What this means practically is that the voyage is on the critical path for anyone who wants more Planettes, more gifts, and more house blueprints. If you spend the first week farming and skip the Starsea, you are behind on Neighbors far more than on materials — and Neighbor progress is the slower of the two to catch up.
What a voyage costs: Star Anchors, not fuel
In the Final Beta a trip is paid for with Star Anchors, a ticket rather than a fuel gauge. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Earlier tests used Lumia Batteries as voyage fuel, and guides written from that build still describe buying batteries every day. Since the Final Beta, movement inside the Starsea is free and only landing on an islet spends a ticket, so there is no penalty for browsing the map or changing your mind before you commit.
| Detail | Final Beta |
|---|---|
| Ticket item | Star Anchor |
| On the day the feature opens | 5 available |
| Every day after | 3 available |
| Where to buy | Loomi TV order screen on your own planet |
| What spends one | Landing on an islet |
| What does not | Sailing, opening the map, looking around |
Three a day is a hard ceiling on how much ground you can cover, and it is the same ceiling for everyone, which is why the voyage is a pacing system rather than a grind. Buy the full stock every day even if you do not plan to sail: the tickets are cheap, the stock is limited, and a day you skip is a day of exploration you cannot buy back. The currency guide covers what the purchase costs and how to keep Loomi flowing.
Lumia Batteries still exist in the game as an item, but treat any guide that calls them voyage fuel as describing the Second Test or earlier. The daily routine lists the ticket purchase alongside the other resets.
Islets, Resource Planets, and regions
The Starsea is organised into three layers. A region is a named area such as Hexia H83 or Taffeh T31. Inside each region sits a fixed set of islets, and each islet is a small landing zone with its own resource list. English material also uses Resource Planet for these destinations; this guide uses islet for the individual island, because that is the unit a ticket buys.
Two properties of islets decide how you plan. First, their fixed resources are fixed — the trees, flowers, and special fruit seeds on a given islet do not rotate, so a map plus a resource list is genuinely reusable, and once you know which islet grows bamboo you never need to search for it again. Second, their wildlife is not fixed — bugs, fish, and other creatures that appear on a visit can differ from those on your previous one. A collection target that is a creature is therefore a repeat visit, not a solved location.
There is a third rule that catches people: if you land on an islet and do not finish clearing it, the remainder does not wait for you. You have to come back on another ticket to collect what you left behind. That single rule is the reason to land with empty pockets and a full Strength bar rather than to squeeze one more islet into a day.
Which Neighbor abilities help on which islet
Neighbors have Starsea abilities, and each is tied to the gathering skill it speeds up. The documented abilities fall into six families — Beachcombing, Bug-Catching, Fishing, Harvesting, Mining, and Woodcutting — and each Neighbor carries two or three of them at either Enthusiast or Expert level.
| Neighbor | Starsea abilities |
|---|---|
| Dorjelang | Beachcombing Enthusiast · Mining Enthusiast · Woodcutting Expert |
| Isaki | Bug-Catching Expert · Mining Enthusiast · Woodcutting Enthusiast |
| Yunguo | Bug-Catching Enthusiast · Harvesting Expert |
| Frostia | Bug-Catching Enthusiast · Fishing Expert |
| Medowlyn | Beachcombing Enthusiast · Harvesting Enthusiast · Woodcutting Enthusiast |
| Rebella | Beachcombing Enthusiast · Fishing Enthusiast · Mining Expert |
| Nerina | Bug-Catching Enthusiast · Fishing Enthusiast · Harvesting Enthusiast |
| Msafiri | Bug-Catching Enthusiast · Fishing Expert · Mining Enthusiast · Woodcutting Expert |
Take a Neighbor whose Expert skill matches the islet you are clearing. On a wood-heavy islet that is Dorjelang or Msafiri; on a fishing islet it is Frostia or Msafiri; on a mining islet it is Rebella. The pairing is worth more than a second Enthusiast, because the ability that matters is the one attached to the resource you are actually harvesting. Harpeno's ability was missing from the reference data, so treat his slot as unknown rather than as empty.
The size of the bonus was not published, and these ability lists date from the build before the Final Beta. Use them to choose a companion, not to predict an exact yield.
How the Starsea Map tracks what you have explored
The Final Beta replaced the old blind voyage with a proper map. The Starsea Map shows the region you are in and the islets distributed around it, so you can see where you are and what is left before spending a ticket. In the earlier battery era the destination was effectively a blind draw; that is no longer true, and guides that describe voyages as random are out of date.
The map also gives exploration a visible shape: an islet you have not visited is a hole in the picture rather than a line in a menu. Community route posts exploit this directly — the standard advice for the first days is to head for islets marked with a question mark, and to sail to specific islets for specific materials only once the region is filled in.
What you actually bring back
An islet pays out in four kinds of value, and they are worth separating because they compete for the same three tickets.
- Fixed flora and seed stock. Trees, flowers, and special fruit seeds that the home planet does not sell. Bamboo, apples, and cactus are the ones testers called out as important early, and bamboo shoots and cactus fruit drop at guaranteed blue quality.
- Creatures. Bugs, fish, and beachcombing finds, rolled fresh each visit. These are the collection and donation targets rather than the material targets.
- Drift stars and chests. Each islet holds one collectible star, and islets marked with a turnip hold three; a full region totals 14. Some sit behind small puzzles, and chests appear alongside them.
- Neighbors. The encounter that adds a resident to your planet, which is the payoff that does not repeat once the slot is filled.
Sell the surplus rather than hoarding it. Half a stack of the blue-quality bamboo shoots and cactus fruit is worth holding for cooking and gifting, and the rest is income; the Dough section explains why that income matters more than it looks. The stars and chests behave like one-time pickups, so an islet you have fully cleared is worth returning to mainly for creatures and regrowing flora.
The one thing worth doing before you leave is digging. Plants that do not grow on your own planet can be lifted with the mattock and replanted at home, which converts a one-off find into a renewable harvest — the same five-Strength lift that works on your own wild trees. Testers describe stripping an islet bare this way, and it is the only route to a permanent supply of another region's flora.
Drift stars are not always lying in the open. A seasonal region was documented with five star tasks: catching pests, lighting a brazier, catching a gecko, finding five hidden collectibles, and stepping a musical scale on a designated island in the right order. If a region shows fewer stars than the map suggests, look for a puzzle rather than assuming a bug.
Which region to explore first
Your starting galaxy decides the region you can reach first, and each region has a short list of islets worth prioritising because they unlock a resource rather than merely yield one. The community maps converge on three islets per region.
| Region | Galaxy | Priority unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| H83 | Hexia | Garlic, bamboo, ginkgo |
| T31 | Taffeh | Dragon fruit, dragon's blood tree, canna, purslane |
| H84 | Hexia, snow season | Welcoming pine, ice bloom, blueberry |
The logic is the same in all three: spend the first tickets on the islets that unlock a plant, because a plant you have unlocked can be grown or harvested at home, while a plant you have only seen is a one-off. A full H84 region contains 12 islets, which at three tickets a day is several days of focused sailing — so pick the unlock islets first and treat the rest of the region as filling in the map.
The galaxy guide covers which region pairs with which starting choice, and why the snow-season map is a seasonal version of Hexia rather than a third galaxy.
How much Dough to carry
Bring 200 to 1,000 Dough. Islets spawn unmanned vendor carts that sell items for Dough, and a cart you cannot afford is a wasted landing — you have spent a ticket to look at a shop you cannot use. The upper end of that range is for the mid-game, when carts stock more and when a good roll is worth the carry.
Do not carry your whole balance. The cart stock is convenience, not an investment, and you need the same Dough at home for seeds, furniture, and the ticket purchase itself. A working rule is to carry what you would be willing to spend on an unplanned purchase and leave the rest in the wallet.
Is there a daily cap or a time limit?
The cap is the ticket count: five on the day the feature opens, then three per day. There is no documented per-trip timer in the Final Beta, and no published Strength cost for sailing or landing, so the limit on a session is tickets rather than minutes. You can browse the map, change regions, and decide not to land without losing anything.
Because the cap is shared by every player, the voyage cannot be rushed with playtime. Testers who only visited islets they had not yet seen could finish a whole region by the fifth day, which is roughly the intended pace; anyone trying to clear two regions in a day is fighting the design rather than optimising it.
Putting a three-ticket day together
Open the Loomi TV order screen first and buy the day's tickets, then decide the day's purpose before you sail. Three tickets cover one of three jobs: an unlock run (two or three islets that add a plant), a collection run (creature targets, where the islet choice matters less than the time of day), or a cleanup run (returning to islets you left half-cleared). Mixing them is how a day ends with three partly finished islets and no unlock.
Then pick the companion to match. A wood islet wants Dorjelang or Msafiri; a fishing islet wants Frostia; a mining islet wants Rebella. Land with empty pockets, gather in one sweep, and leave only when the islet is actually clear, because a return trip costs another ticket. The Strength guide covers how much you can actually carry out before the bar runs dry.
Baseline: Final Beta 0.95 (Starsea Call). Ticket counts, region names, islet totals, and Drift Star counts come from test-period reports; Neighbor ability lists date from the preceding build, and the size of their gathering bonus was not published.