By Ben ·
Is Planetarion still alive?
Yes. Planetarion's round 119 opens for signups on Friday 9 October 2026, and its ticks run from 16 October to 4 December 2026, according to the dates on planetarion.com when we checked on 3 October 2026.
Round 118 finished on 25 September with an end of round ceremony on Discord, and the post-round havoc server was still ticking while we looked. Everything below was checked against Planetarion's own pages on 3 October 2026, and where we could not confirm something, the page says so.
The evidence, with dates
| What | Where it comes from |
|---|---|
| Round 119 signups 9 October, ticks 16 October to 4 December 2026 | The planetarion.com front page, and the round 118 and 119 announcement of 25 September 2026 |
| Rounds ended on 8 May, 17 July and 25 September 2026 | The last three "end of round" news posts. That is a new round roughly every ten weeks |
| Round 118 was won by ChronoX of Imperium, and Imperium was the top alliance | The 25 September announcement |
| Between 97 and 99 players online on the round 118 server | The front page counter on 3 October 2026, during havoc. A snapshot, not a round size |
| Run by Ranul Tech Ltd | Planetarion's privacy page |
| Still owned by Jagex | Planetarion's original creators, Fifth Season, say so on their own site. Wikipedia says Jagex licensed Ranul Tech to run it in August 2013, which we could not confirm elsewhere |
What has changed since you last played
The game itself will feel familiar. A normal round still ticks once an hour and lasts about seven weeks, per the beginners manual. There are still five races, galaxies, alliances and asteroids to steal. Havoc, the free-for-all after a round ends, ticks every fifteen minutes with everything researched, and it runs until 8 October this time.
What changed is the size. PC Zone counted more than 30,000 players in October 2000 (via Wikipedia). The front page counter now reads under a hundred. We could not find a public figure for how many planets play a full round, so treat the counter as a pulse and nothing more. The names repeat, too: a player from Imperium finished first in both round 117 and round 118.
Round 119 is announced as "a paid round", with details promised at signup. The site has a shop, but prices are not visible without logging in, so we are not going to guess at one. Official chat has moved to Discord, which is also where the end of round ceremony now happens.
Why people ask
Partly because it is hard to tell from outside. The "Current Games" panel on Planetarion's front page still lists start and end dates from 2023 and 2024 for the live servers, which is enough to make a returning player think the lights went out years ago. The real dates are in the sidebar and the news posts.
The other reason is AD2460. Fifth Season, who created Planetarion in 2000, launched it in December 2014 as a successor, and you will still find it recommended as "the spiritual successor to Planetarion" in search results. It closed on 14 June 2020. If that is the game you were told to try instead, it is gone; Planetarion is not.
If what you miss is something else
If you miss Planetarion itself, the honest advice is to sign up for round 119. Signups open a week before the ticks start so galaxies and buddy packs can form, and the first twelve ticks put new players in large galaxies with mentors.
If what you miss is a round that ends and a field that resets, but you do not need space, Earth Empires carries on from Earth 2025. On 3 October 2026 its front page listed six servers with dated rounds, one of them starting the day before, and 1,474 active countries.
If you want fleets and planets and can live with a universe that never resets, OGame and Astro Empires are both running. We compared them in games like OGame. Utopia, another long-running round-based game, has no dated front-page news after September 2024, so we have left it unconfirmed.
Galaro, for Planetarion players
Galaro is our game, so read this section with that in mind. It is round-based like Planetarion, and the round is called an eon. Here is how the words you already know map across, read from the game's own code rather than its help pages:
| Planetarion | Galaro |
|---|---|
| A tick every hour | A tick every 30 minutes |
| A seven week round | An eon of a few weeks, then everybody starts level |
| Roids stolen by certain ship classes | Roids are captured only when the attacker wins the fight. One raid takes at most about a quarter of a world's asteroids, and only as many as the surviving ships can carry |
| Fleetsave | The game is not built around it. A fleet at home defends, and the prize is capped instead: a Night Shield, set in advance over an eight hour window, cuts a winning raider's asteroid capacity to a quarter, and a Bunker Network cuts it by up to 60% |
| Scans | Four levels of scan. You can attack a world you have not scanned, but you will not know whose it is |
| Score is net worth plus experience | Each asteroid scores 300 points, plus the value of your fleet and half the value of your buildings |
If you want the long version of tick and fleetsave, we explained both in what is an MMORTS.
Two numbers from our fifth eon, which ended on 1 October 2026, will tell a Planetarion player more than the table does.
Asteroids were what people fought over, but they did not decide the eon. The winner held 288 asteroids at the end. At 300 points each that is 86,400 points out of a final score of 1,170,981, or 7.4%. Their fleet was worth 915,715. Across all the human players, asteroids were 6.8% of final score. Asteroids here are mostly the income that pays for the fleet that wins.
A defended home was hard to rob. The most attacked world of eon 5 belonged to a human player and took 32 attacks from players and bots. Raiders won 11 of them and left with asteroids. Once, the defence destroyed the whole attacking fleet. The other 20 ended with the raiders retreating, or with neither side able to finish the other, and in those nothing changed hands.
You would find this out within an hour of signing up, so here it is. Eon 5 had 92 commanders and only 12 of them were human; computer opponents fill the rest of the galaxy. As of 3 October 2026, early in eon 6, it is 9 humans among 89. In the first two and a half days of eon 6 the bots raided human worlds 12 times: six raids won and carried off four asteroids between them, and the other six fled. Galaro has alliances, but nobody has built anything like a Planetarion alliance, because there are not yet enough people to fill one.
So if what you love is a full alliance coordinating defence calls at 3am, Planetarion still has that and we do not. If you want the round-based asteroid war on a phone, on half-hour ticks, without setting alarms, the guide has the combat and economy rules in full.
Ben designs and runs Galaro.