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The survey log is stored only on your device, at Documents/farstars_survey_log.json inside the app container. There is no server copy, because there is no account. If the app was deleted, offloaded or the device was reset without an encrypted backup, the log is gone permanently.

If the app is still installed and the log simply failed to load, write in below with your device model and iOS version — that is a bug and worth chasing.

Only for the very first boot, and even then it is optional. The loading screen pulls five public feeds — orbital telemetry, the minor planet catalogue, a nebula index, the list of people currently in orbit and the daily astronomy observation — and caches them to disk.

If a feed is unreachable the stale cache is served; if there is no cache, a built-in fallback set takes over and the galaxy is generated identically.

That is the design. Sectors are hashed from a single world seed the moment you pan over them, and every star, planet, resource vein and anomaly falls out of that number in a fixed order. Nothing is stored. Fly two thousand units out, come back a week later, and the same molten world is in the same orbit with the same iridium still in the ground.

Probe returns, expiring contracts and the daily nudge are local notifications, and they only fire if you tapped Enable alerts on the settings screen and allowed the iOS prompt. Check Settings → Notifications → Most Stars Are Far on the device.

Declining changes nothing about the game: probes and contracts still resolve on their own timers whether the app is open or not, you just are not told about them.

Camera and photo library are requested only at the moment you tap the matching button on the settings screen to set a viewport backdrop. Notifications are requested only when you tap “Enable alerts”.

Nothing is requested at launch, and none of them gate any part of the game. Decline all three and the generated nebula plates stay in place.

An anonymous hull id — a random identifier minted on first launch — plus commendation unlocks, your codex summary and ranking scores, and event-name product analytics. The hull id is not tied to a name, an email, an advertising id or the device itself.

Your callsign is the only free text that ever leaves the device, and it is whatever you type into the settings screen. It defaults to “Commander”. Analytics can be switched off in-app.

Yes. Open the settings screen, copy the hull id shown there, and send it below with the topic set to Data deletion request. Everything filed under that id — ranking entries, commendation records, codex summaries — is removed, normally within seven days.

Deleting the app on its own orphans the hull id permanently but does not erase what was already filed, so send the id first if that matters to you.

A deep survey needs a tier 2 sensor suite. Until then you can run orbital sweeps, which map the shallow crust only. Upgrade the sensor branch on the ship screen and the mantle and biology readouts unlock.

Dumping a full hold softens the local price on purpose — demand pressure is part of the economy. Prices ride a noise field rather than a random walk, so a commodity that has been climbing keeps climbing long enough to read the trend off the sparkline. Split large loads across stations, or take a contract for the premium.

That is expected. The deep link is an opener, not a router: it brings the app to the foreground and leaves it on the exact screen it was on. Any path or query on the URL is recorded in the log and ignored.

Yes to both. iOS 15.0 or newer, iPhone and iPad, portrait and landscape. In landscape a side rail replaces the bottom dock and the grids widen; on iPad the type scale and column counts step up so nothing reads as a stretched phone screen.

Device model, iOS version, app version, and what you were doing in the ten seconds before it happened. If a screen is drawing wrong, a screenshot attached to a direct email to [email protected] beats a description. The form below collects the first four automatically-ish — fill what you know.