Moon Lander

Simulation Open source

By Frank Force · MIT license. Source · All credits

About Moon Lander

Set a lander down on the pad without wrecking it. Thrust burns fuel, gravity never stops pulling, and a landing only counts if you arrive slowly, upright, and with both feet inside the pad.

How to play

Rotate with the left and right controls, then hold thrust to fire the main engine. Thrust pushes along whatever way the nose is pointing, so aim first and burn second.

Rules of Moon Lander

  • A landing counts only if both feet come down inside the pad. Clipping the edge with one leg is a crash.
  • You have to touch down under 0.10 speed and under 0.22 radians of tilt, roughly 13 degrees off vertical.
  • Each safe landing scores 100 per level, plus 4 for every unit of fuel left, plus up to 100 for a soft touchdown.

Controls

  • Hold the thrust button, or Up or Space, to fire the main engine
  • Left and right, or the analogue stick, rotate the lander
  • Thrust follows the nose, so rotate before you burn

What makes it worth playing

  • Fuel starts at 80 and drops by 6 a level down to a floor of 42
  • The pad narrows from 6 units down to 3.2 as the ground around it gets rougher, and gravity gets heavier for eight levels
  • An instrument panel for fuel, speed, tilt and altitude, with the safe threshold marked
  • Fresh terrain every level, with the pad dropped at a random point along it

Screenshots

Moon Lander gameplay screenshot 1Moon Lander gameplay screenshot 2

Captured from this build on 2026-08-26.

Tips from playing it

  • Kill your sideways speed early, high up, where you have room to fix it.
  • Short thruster taps use far less fuel than one long burn, since the engine drains 20 a second.
  • Straighten up before the last few metres. Tilt is checked at the moment of contact.

Why this game is here, and what we changed

Picked from the MIT-licensed LittleJS Arcade by Frank Force after checking the licence at source rather than trusting the repository label, and after confirming the game makes no requests to any other site. We host it on our own servers, so it loads straight into the game with no third-party ad code and no pre-roll video. It shipped without a mobile viewport setting, so a phone laid it out at desktop width and scaled it down blurry. We added the setting, and it now renders sharp at the phone's own resolution. We played it through on a real phone-sized screen on 2026-08-26 before publishing this page, and the screenshots above are from that session rather than from the original project.

More on how we pick and fix these: what we changed in the open-source games and how we test a game.

landerphysicssimulationspace
Category
Simulation
Plays in
Your browser, no download
Orientation
Portrait
Players
One player, with your best total saved.
Difficulty
Deceptively hard, and fair once the gauges click
Typical session
2 to 6 minutes a level
Last tested by us
2026-08-26
Created by
Frank Force (MIT)