The Interface & Panels

SpaceDwarves runs in a single screen built from four persistent zones — a top HUD bar, a left navigation rail, a central canvas map, and a sliding right panel — plus overlays, modals and toasts that appear on top. This page describes every surface and what each does, so you always know where to look.

Screen Layout at a Glance #

The Top HUD Bar #

The HUD bar is always visible and gives an at-a-glance read on your colony. It has three regions:

• Corporation identity (left): your corp logo (click to open the Account panel) and corporation name. A hamburger button opens the navigation drawer.
• Live resources (centre): your Credits with a live +/- per-second rate, followed by resource chips. Iron, Copper, Water and Meals are always shown; other resources (Ice, Steel, Fuel, Alloys, Machine Parts, Electronics, Components, Station Parts, Grain, Food, Castings, Ammunition) and each ale type appear once you hold any. A scope filter switches between an empire-wide total and a single asteroid.
• Colony wellbeing (right): five status pills — Health ❤, Fatigue 😴, Meals 🍽, Ale 🍺 and Population 👥 — each with an OK / WARN / DANGER badge. Clicking a pill jumps to the relevant panel (Dwarves or Buffs). A Mining Burst button appears here once unlocked, alongside Help (?) and, where available, an Install button for the installable (PWA) app.

Navigation: Rail, Drawer & the Right Panel #

On desktop, a vertical nav rail down the left edge lists the panels you can open; the hamburger in the HUD opens the same list as an off-canvas drawer. On narrow/mobile screens the rail becomes a bottom bar of primary panels (Dwarves, Expeditions, Market, Quests) with a More sheet for the rest.

Each nav item shows an icon and label, and locked panels display a 🔒 badge until their unlock condition is met. Opening a panel mounts it into one of three places depending on its type:

• Right panel — standard side panels (Dwarves, Market, Expeditions, etc.); slides in from the right on desktop, up as a sheet on mobile.
• Overlay — full-screen surfaces (Research, Automate, Projects, Community, Account, Help, Inventory).
• Modal — centred dialogs (Settings, Build Drawer, Building detail, Notification Log, and the various pop-ups).

A main panel, an overlay and a modal can be layered at once. Escape dismisses them in priority order (modal → sub-panel → panel → deselect), and the browser Back gesture mirrors that behaviour.

The Sector Map (Canvas) #

The central canvas is your sector map — a pannable, zoomable view of everything you own in the current sector:

• Asteroids are drawn as tier-coloured circles; unclaimed rocks appear greyed with a dashed border.
• Stations are larger markers that show their specialisation and the asteroids they buff.
• Expeditions show as squad icons with a progress ring along an animated path.
• Cargo routes and mega-project sites are drawn as connecting lines and construction markers.

Controls: pan by dragging (or WASD / arrow keys), zoom with the scroll wheel (or + / -, 0 to reset). Clicking an asteroid opens its estate / surface view; clicking a station, an expedition target, or a mega-project site opens the matching panel. Hovering shows a tooltip with stockpiles, production rates, station bonuses, or expedition details. Layouts are deterministic, so each asteroid keeps the same position every session.

The Surface (Asteroid Detail) View #

Selecting an asteroid opens its surface view, which lays out everything on that rock in themed districts:

Each entry shows its icon, level, and assigned crew (or occupancy and training progress for accommodations). Click a building to open its detail modal, click a deposit to allocate miners, or use the + Build button to open the Build Drawer filtered to that district. Switch districts with the tabs, arrow keys, or swipe.

The Bottom Ticker #

A continuously scrolling ticker runs along the bottom of the screen. It cycles through, in order:

1. 🎯 Current quest objective — title plus progress toward the target.
2. 🔔 Recent notifications — the latest alerts (each kept for about 60 seconds).
3. 💬 Flavour lines — rotating dwarven lore and humour.

Clicking the ticker opens the Quests panel.

Notifications & the Notification Log #

Events surface as toasts in the corner. To avoid spam, repeated events are deduplicated: instead of stacking, an identical notification refreshes its existing toast and increments an ×N count badge. At most a handful of toasts show at once, and clicking one opens the Notification Log modal — the full, timestamped history for that event. The Settings panel lets you tune how intrusive notifications are (see below).

The Settings Panel #

Open Settings (a modal) to configure the game. It is organised into sections:

• Display — colour theme, font size, and number format (abbreviated vs. full).
• Gameplay — autosave interval, plus a dev-only game-speed control.
• Audio — sound-effects and music toggles with volume sliders.
• Notifications — notification style (all toasts / digest / silent) and how often expeditions interrupt you for decisions.
• Save & Data — see below.
• Controls — a quick reference of key bindings.
• About — the current game version.

Save, Sync & Data #

The Save & Data section is where you manage persistence:

Sync Now is a VIP feature with a built-in cooldown of 120,000 ms (2 minutes). While cooling down the button is disabled and counts down (☁ Sync in Ns) before returning to ☁ Sync Now. Regular cloud syncing happens automatically for VIP accounts; this button is for forcing an immediate push. See Persistence & Saves for how free vs. cloud saving works.

The Help Center #

The Help overlay (the ? button in the HUD) is tabbed:

• 📖 Wiki and 💬 Forum — embedded community resources (with an “open in a new tab” fallback if embedding is blocked).
• 🎮 Discord — the community server widget or a join link.
• ❤ Support the Team — a link to support the developers.
• 🐛 Report a Bug — a sign-in-gated form with a category, a detail level (which controls how much diagnostic context — version, browser, and optionally your save — is attached), and a description.

All Panels at a Glance #

Every management surface in the game, with its job:

Where to Next #

• Read how time and idle progress work: Core Game Loop.
• New player? Start with Your First Session.
• Unsure of a term? See the Glossary.