It’s easy to use, beautifully tutorialised, and hugely fascinating. What happens when you fire a teapot which is ten times larger than the sun through the heart of the solar system? Or if hapless scientists inadvertently create a black hole on Mars? What does the collision of two galaxies look like? Or the Earth being hit by a tennis ball the size of our own moon? Universe Sandbox 2 gives you the tools to run all such simulations in a level of depth which is at least superficially convincing and informative. I can do loads of other things too, and the inhabitants of Earth will rarely thank me for them.
But it’s not nearly fast enough: the two suns can’t resist one another, conjoining violently to make a sweet fiery love that rapidly engulfs the core planets of the solar system, gobbling up the the Kuiper belt and spreading turquoise tendrils into the interstellar dark that lies beyond. Mars decides Venus had the right idea, and legs it. Mercury plunges directly into the heart of Hot Earth and is consumed utterly. At 74.5 Jupiters, it becomes a molten glowing ball, and soon thereafter an actual sun, albeit a tenth of the mass of the system’s normal sun - which is nonetheless swerving through space as the two bodies waltz around one another. Earth’s surface temperature now exceeds 500 degrees centigrade.
Venus is gravity-slapped clear out of the solar system. When it hits a mass equivalent to 42 Jupiters, it begins to ignite, stripes of brilliant orange encircling the gloomy swirling globe. Moments later, Earth completes its transformation from happy blue-green habitation to gigantic blue-grey death vortex. Somewhere, I like to think, some semi-sentient hemorrhoid is honking about the myth of global enbiggenment just before being crushed to death by his own skull, which has become 35 times heavier than it was earlier that day. The planet swells further, its own rotation slowing and slowing. Venus gets a bit too interested, spiralling after Earth then twisting away at the last moment, like an unsuccessful pickpocket. What happens is that, as Earth reaches a mass equivalent to Jupiter - 318 times that of Earth’s normal mass - the orbits of other planets begin to distort alarmingly. Where is all the weight coming from? It’s as if some malevolent god had discovered Earth’s settings panel and decided to yank up the mass slider, just to see what happens. Hour by hour, it just keeps putting on mass. Otherwise known as Universe Sandbox², if you’re the kind of terrible prick who insists on using Character Map to enforce your brand. This week he has become death, destroyer of worlds, and really quite a lot of moons as well, in Universe Sandbox 2. Each week Marsh Davies orbits the supermassive blackhole that is Early Access and comes back with any stories he can find or gets shredded to subatomic spaghetti as he tumbles towards a point of infinite mass.
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