Outlander

Outlander is a lunar lander game for iPhone. Bring the ship down onto a marked pad — slowly, level, and without running the tanks dry. Gravity never stops pulling, your fuel does not come back, and the ground is not forgiving.

The game runs entirely on your device and collects no data. The one optional exception is Game Center: sign in and your best run is submitted to a global leaderboard. Every piece of art and every sound in the game is generated procedurally by code.

How to play

Controls

• Swipe the left half of the screen sideways to bank the ship. How far you swipe from where your thumb landed sets the angle.
• Let go and the ship flies itself back to level — use that to recover from a bad angle.
• Hold the right half to fire the main engine.
• Both can be held at once, with two thumbs. Steering and the engine each burn propellant.
• Top-right corner pauses.

Touchdown limits

All three must hold the moment the footpads touch, and both pads must be on the deck. Clipping the hull on rock is fatal at any speed.

The instruments read green inside the limit, amber as you approach it, and red once you are past it.

Scoring

• 500 for a successful landing, plus up to 700 for precision, plus 100 per level reached.
• That total is multiplied by the pad: ×1, ×2 or ×4. Narrower pads are worth more.
• Fuel you did not burn is worth 12 points each, added after the multiplier.

A tight pad taken cleanly is worth far more than a wide one taken slowly. You get three ships; the levels keep getting harder for as long as you last.

Your ten best runs are kept on the device under High Scores. If you are signed in to Game Center, each finished run is also submitted to the global Leaderboard.

Help & troubleshooting

There is no sound

Outlander respects the iPhone's silent switch, so flick it off. Check that the Music and Effects sliders in Settings are turned up, and that the volume is not muted. The game deliberately mixes with other audio, so anything else you are playing keeps going.

The steering feels too twitchy, or too slow

Settings → Steering sensitivity changes how far you have to swipe for a full bank. Lower is calmer and needs a longer swipe.

My high scores disappeared

Scores are stored only on your device, and there is no cloud backup. Deleting the app erases them. The Reset table button on the High Scores screen also clears them permanently.

I keep crashing

Start braking earlier than feels necessary — the engine takes a while to arrest a fall. Come down slowly over the pad rather than approaching it sideways, and release the left half of the screen to level out before you touch. Turning Pad markers on in Settings makes the landing zones easier to pick out.

Does it need an internet connection?

No. The whole game — every level, your local high scores, all settings — works offline, including in airplane mode. A connection is only used for the optional Game Center leaderboard, and skipping it costs you nothing else.

The leaderboard is empty or will not open

That means you are not signed in to Game Center. Open the Settings app, find Game Center, and sign in with your Apple Account. Your local high scores are unaffected either way.

Privacy policy

Effective 17 August 2026

What the app stores

Two things are saved locally on your iPhone, using Apple's standard on-device preference storage:

• High scores — the initials you type in, the score, the level reached and the date.
• Settings — music and effects volume, steering sensitivity, haptics, and whether pad markers are shown.

This information stays on your device. It is never transmitted, never seen by me, and never shared with anyone. The initials are whatever you choose to type; nothing requires them to identify you.

Game Center (optional)

If you are signed in to Game Center on your iPhone, the app submits your score to a leaderboard when a run ends. That means:

• Your score and your Game Center alias — the nickname you chose with Apple, not necessarily your real name — become visible to other players on the leaderboard.
• Game Center is Apple’s service. The data is handled by Apple under Apple’s Privacy Policy. I receive no personal information about you from it.
• Nothing else is transmitted — not your settings, not your local scores, not how or when you play.

If you are not signed in, nothing is sent anywhere and no connection is made. The rest of the game is identical either way. You can sign out at any time in the Settings app under Game Center.

What the app does not do

• No personal information is collected — no name, email, address, phone number or contacts.
• No location, camera, microphone, photos, health or fitness data is accessed.
• No advertising identifier is read, and no App Tracking Transparency prompt appears, because nothing is tracked.
• No analytics or crash-reporting service is embedded.
• No data is sold or shared with anyone. Apart from a Game Center score, nothing is transmitted at all.

Children

Outlander is suitable for all ages and collects no data from anyone, children included. There is nothing to disclose under the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) or the GDPR's provisions for children.

Deleting your data

Deleting the app from your iPhone removes everything it has stored. You can also clear just the scores with Reset table on the High Scores screen. Because nothing is held anywhere else, there is no request to make and nothing for me to delete on your behalf.

The App Store itself

Downloading the app is a transaction with Apple, and Apple may collect information such as download and crash statistics under its own terms. That is governed by Apple's Privacy Policy, not this one. I do not receive any personal information from Apple.

Changes to this policy

If the app ever starts handling data differently, this page will be updated and the effective date above changed before the new version ships.