From Planet Builder to a Shared Galaxy: How TerraForge Grew Up

Every project I build starts as an experiment. TerraForge was no different. It lived at planet-builder.chriswest.tech, a single-player sandbox where you spun up a world, dialed in oceans and atmosphere and terrain, and watched a little planet come to life in 3D. I made it because I wanted to make it. That was the whole plan.

Then I started paying attention to my analytics, and something surprised me. People were finding it. Not because I was sharing it, but because they were searching for it. "Planet builder" kept climbing as a term that led strangers to my site, week after week. And once they landed, they didn't just poke around and leave. They built things. They came back. A tool I'd treated as a weekend curiosity had quietly picked up an audience I never went looking for.

So I did the thing you're supposed to do when people show up. I took it seriously.

From an experiment to TerraForge

The first change was the name. planet-builder.chriswest.tech was honest, but it described a feature, not a place. If this was going to be somewhere people returned to, it needed to feel like somewhere. So it became TerraForge. The rename wasn't just cosmetic. It was me admitting, mostly to myself, that this had graduated from an experiment into something I wanted to nurture.

Under the hood it's still built the way I build everything: Next.js, Three.js, and React Three Fiber doing the heavy 3D lifting right in the browser. What changed is that a planet builder with no memory is a fundamentally lonely thing. You make something beautiful, close the tab, and it's gone. For a community to form, the worlds had to persist. And they had to be shareable.

Worlds that stick around, and worlds you can share

The two features that changed TerraForge the most were the least glamorous to build: accounts and saving.

Recent Worlds saved from the community

Once you can save a planet, your whole relationship with the tool shifts. It stops being a session and becomes a collection. You come back to tweak the world you made last week instead of starting over from an empty sky. That one change turned a lot of one-time visitors into regulars.

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Sharing was the other half. Handing someone a link to a planet you made turns a private moment into a social one. Suddenly the thing you built has an audience of more than one. People started sending planets to each other, and I started seeing worlds I never would have thought to make. That's the part I love most. The community's imagination runs in directions mine never would.

For the backend I reached for Supabase. Postgres holds the planets and the accounts, its auth handles login, and storage covers the rest. It let me add the whole community layer without standing up a pile of custom infrastructure, which meant I could spend my time on the parts users actually feel instead of plumbing they never see.

Planet of the Week

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Once people were sharing, it felt natural to celebrate what they made. So every week I feature a Planet of the Week, on the TerraForge site and on X. It's a small ritual, but rituals are what give a community a heartbeat. It gives people a reason to check back, a little friendly recognition, and it quietly shows everyone else what's possible in the tool. Some of the planets that have shown up are better than anything I've built, which is exactly how it should be.

Built for kids, and for their families

Here's a decision I care about more than any single feature. TerraForge is built to be safe for kids and families, and that shaped how I did accounts.

There's no password to forget, no profile to overshare on, no pile of personal data sitting in a database waiting to leak. Logging in is a simple email code. You type your email, you get a one-time code, you're in. The profile itself is deliberately thin: enough to save your planets and put a name on your creations, and nothing more.

I did this on purpose. A tool that a nine-year-old and their parent can both feel good about is worth more to me than one with a dozen social features and a privacy policy nobody reads. Storing less sensitive data isn't a limitation here. It's the design. The fewer things I collect, the fewer things anyone has to worry about. My wife teaches special education, and living with someone who thinks about access and safety all day has a way of shaping how you build.

What the community taught me

The real lesson of the last few months is one I keep relearning: build the thing you want, then watch closely what people actually do with it.

I didn't set out to make a community platform. I made a planet toy and paid attention. The search terms told me there was interest. The way people used the tool told me what to build next. Almost every feature I added came from noticing behavior, not from a roadmap I wrote in advance. Saving, sharing, Planet of the Week, none of it was the plan on day one. All of it came from real people showing up and showing me what they wanted.

That's a very different way to build than sitting down and speccing a product start to finish. It's slower to get going and more surprising to steer. But the thing you end up with is shaped by actual humans instead of your guesses about them.

Where this goes: a shared galaxy

I'll leave you with where my head is at.

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A planet is a single world. But worlds belong to systems. What I want next is to let people build their own star systems. A star, its planets, the way they orbit, the whole little cosmos. And then I want to take all of those systems, everyone's, and drop them into one shared galaxy. A community sky you can fly through, where the star you pass was made by a kid three time zones away, and the one past that was made by someone you've never met.

I don't have a date. I don't have it all figured out. It's a big, dreamy idea, and those are the ones worth chasing. But everything I've added so far, the saving, the sharing, the accounts, has quietly been laying the foundation for exactly that.

If you want to be part of it, the door is open. Go make a planet at TerraForge. Save it. Share it. Maybe I'll feature it next week. And when the galaxy opens up, your world will already have a place in it.