Planned Release Date: Dec 10, 2026

About This Game

Your wallpaper is a galaxy of 200,000 stars, and on one of its worlds, someone has just begun to think.

Galaxization is a galaxy and civilization simulator that runs as your Windows desktop wallpaper. Behind your icons a procedurally generated galaxy slowly turns, and every day your PC is on, about two million years of its history go by: a first species leaves its homeworld and splits into rival nations that trade, found religions, go to war, build wonders, collapse and climb back.

It is a game you watch. The galaxy runs itself; you observe, explore and read. There are no fleets to command and nothing to win. No two galaxies share a history. Each happens once, and you are its only witness.

Choose what your wallpaper shows

• The whole galaxy. A steady view from above, with every civilization's territory spread across the spiral arms.
  
• The black hole. The view from just above the accretion disk at the galaxy's centre, starlight bending around the shadow.
  
• A star system. Set any system you have flown into as the wallpaper, or follow one planet around its star.
  
• A planet's surface. Stand on the ground and make that sky your desktop: the sun rises and sets about every twenty minutes.
  
• A civilization's capital. The wallpaper follows it, and moves with it when the capital moves.
  
• Or let the observatory choose. It flies to where history is being made, tours the star systems worth seeing, or follows an ark in flight. Every view you save is one click away in the tray menu.

What you do

• Leave it running. Glance up between tasks: the wallpaper shows the year, the name of the age and the newest line of the observatory's log. Something worth reading happens about every half hour; a great power takes days to rise and fall.
  
• Fly in. Ctrl+Alt+G turns the wallpaper into a place you can move through: from the whole galaxy into any of 5,000 star systems, down to a planet, and onto its surface to watch the sun cross the sky.
  
• Read its history. Every civilization has a file: its character, its neighbours, what it has learned, what it believes, and its own chronicle since its founding.
  
• Set the pace. Time flows at 10 to 50 years a second, as you choose, and slows by itself when history is being made. Everything else is up to the galaxy.

It stays out of your way

• Stops drawing when a maximized window or a full-screen game covers it; the history carries on. Idle on the desktop it draws ten frames a second on under 1% of the CPU, on integrated graphics, in a few hundred MB of memory.
  
• Silent on the desktop by default; the orchestral score plays when you step inside. No extra account and no launcher: the game itself never goes online, and Steam handles achievements and cloud saves.
  
• Turn the PC off and the galaxy waits for you.
  
• A second monitor becomes the observatory console: every civilization side by side.

A galaxy built on real astronomy

• Seven kinds of galaxy, from grand-design spirals to irregulars, nearly all with a ray-traced black hole at the centre: starlight bends around its shadow, and the side of the disk turning toward you burns brighter.
  
• Planetary systems worked out from their star: habitable zones, giants beyond the snow line, multiple suns, white dwarfs, and tidally locked worlds whose people live in the twilight belt.
  
• Life follows its chemistry: carbon life in water, silicon life in sulfuric acid, slow life in methane lakes at 90 K. Most habitable worlds stay barren or never get past microbes; in a whole galaxy only a few worlds, sometimes one, ever come to think.
  
• The sky has consequences. A nearby supernova strips a world of its life. A sea people cannot light a fire, so metal comes late. A chemical rocket can barely leave a heavy planet.
  
• The in-game Encyclopedia explains the model behind the numbers.

Science fiction, happening on its own

• A sky where being heard is dangerous. An older power can watch a younger one for a hundred thousand years unseen, leave it an invention it will believe is its own, or snuff out its capital from the dark. The cautious switch off their own lights.
  
• Generation ships at a tenth of the speed of light. Over ten thousand years more than half never arrive: mutiny, a forgotten mission, a grain of dust.
  
• Machines that wake. Minds that upload, merge into a choir, or leave the galaxy altogether. Dyson swarms that take hundreds of thousands of years to close around a star: a few hours of your time.
  
• Rarely, war. When it comes you can enter the battle: thousands of ships a side, flagships, shields, and a cannon fired with the power of a star.

A history nobody wrote

• Revolutions, plagues, schisms, assassinations, cold wars, a feud's fifth war, a peace that lasts a million years. Dynasties, prophets and poets with names. Fifteen wonders.
  
• 124 technologies, 17 doctrines of faith, 103 schools of thought. A civilization's tech tree stays dark until it gets there: you see what it has learned, and a question mark where it is reaching next.

One galaxy, once

• No seed to type and nothing to replay. When you are ready, order a jump to another galaxy. The old one is ranked against every galaxy you have watched and sealed in the Archive of Galaxies.
  
• Nine endings, rare on purpose. A Codex for this galaxy, a Hall of Sightings for the rarest things you have seen in any, 53 Steam achievements, and local mods.

Is it for you?

If you leave nature documentaries running, lose evenings to timelines of the far future, or have stood outside at night doing the arithmetic on how many of those stars have planets, it was made for you. If you would rather command the fleet, this is not that game.

The story

Millions of years from now, humanity travels the universe freely. Passing this galaxy, we sensed that life here might be on its way to thought, as we once were. So we left an observatory at its edge, an observation AI to keep it, and its orders: watch, record, report, never interfere. A Chronofold engine folds aeons into days. You are the technician who reads its reports. The first launch begins in our own Milky Way.

Music composed for Galaxization and performed with BBC Symphony Orchestra Discover by Spitfire Audio. Piano: Salamander Grand Piano V3 by Alexander Holm (CC BY 3.0). Solo violin: VSCO 2 Community Edition by Versilian Studios (CC0).

AI Generated Content Disclosure

The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

The game's text (chronicle templates, interface and its translations into four languages), the store description, and the composition of the score were written with the help of AI tools, then edited and reviewed by the developer. All visuals are rendered by the game's own engine or by procedural Blender scripts; no AI image or video generators were used. The game does not generate any content with AI while it runs.