Okay. Now that the admin work is out of the way, lets get into some gameplay! How about we make our first move?

First, lets check out our home planet. Meet ‘Curly Spiteful’!

Everyone starts off with a level 0 planet, and some spaceships (we will talk about these later in the guide). For now, lets check out the stats of the planet:

This is what the planet information pane looks like. It contains a lot of information. If you want to learn about the individual stats, please check out the guide written by DFDAO.

The next thing you will need to do is zoom out - using the scroll wheel of your mouse. Hopefully you will have found a planet near to your home planet that you can take over!

Fortunately, there is another planet quite close to where I spawned in! Look, its name is ‘Flaky Dry’ (the green planet in the top-right), though your closest planet will have a different name. To capture it, I will need to send some energy to it! At the moment, I have selected that I am sending 50% of my energy (39). Fortunately, level 0 planets don’t have space pirates - but you will encounter these on planets level 1 and higher. These pirates mean that you have to send a certain amount of energy to overcome the pirates before it will be yours. For now, lets capture the closest level 0. Press the ‘Send’ button (or hotkey ‘Q’) - a white line will appear:

To target the attack, click on the planet you want to send the energy to. This will start a transaction on the blockchain with the details of your attack (a dotted white line means the transaction has been submitted, but not yet accepted):

If you don’t see the pane on the right, hover your mouse over the far right of the screen, a white bar with an ‘<’ icon will appear. Click this to open the pane, if you want to see these details.

Once the blockchain has successfully included your move transaction in a block, your move will begin! It will show in the UI as a solid line once the transaction has been accepted!

Great! Our attack transaction was accepted, and we can see that it will land in 17s!

Lets wait for the move to land…

And here it is! Flaky Dry is now mine!

This is the general process of expansion in Dark Forest. You will need to choose which planets you want to take over carefully, there may be opponents nearby hoping for the same planet - which may embroil you both in an interstellar war!