Until Zero

Switch off the night sky, one star at a time.

UNTIL ZERO is a minimalist puzzle built from the real night sky. Every level is an actual constellation — Orion, Ursa Major, Scorpius — its stars projected straight from sky data. The goal is simple to say and hard to master: turn every star dark.

How it works

Press a star and it — plus every star joined to it by a line — drops by one. A star already at zero doesn't stay off: it wraps back up and relights. So you can't just tap everything down — touching the dark undoes your work. Reading the figure and finding the exact order is the whole game.

Every press has to count. Your budget is the fewest moves possible — waste one and the sky stays lit.

Features

• 87 real constellations, drawn from IAU sky data and projected to their true shapes.
• Difficulty that climbs with the stars — from a 3-star warm-up to a 17-star tangle.
• A short tutorial that teaches the twist before it bites.
• Online leaderboards — a global ranking by total score, and a separate board for every single constellation. Beat the sky, then beat everyone else.

Controls

• Mouse — search, pick a constellation, press stars
• Type to search · Tab global leaderboard · R restart · Esc back

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Every visual and every sound is generated in code — no engine, no assets. Just math and starlight.

Credits & data

• Constellation figures & star positions: d3-celestial by Olaf Frohn (MIT), based on the official IAU constellation set and standard star catalogs. Star coordinates are projected onto a tangent plane to reproduce each figure's true shape.
• Puzzle & generation: a numeric Lights Out (σ-game) over the finite field Z_k. Levels are generated and every one is verified solvable via Gaussian elimination over Z_k, with the press budget set to the minimum-weight solution. The mechanic follows Sutner's σ-automaton (1989) and the linear-algebra method of Anderson & Feil (1998).
• Leaderboards: powered by Supabase.