Leaderboard
- Loading…
About Moonhaul
Moonhaul is a free browser game about the hardest part of flying freight: the freight. You pilot a lunar lander in one-sixth gravity — rotate with the thrusters, burn along whatever direction you happen to be pointing — and slung beneath you on a cable is a cargo pod with real mass. It is not decoration and it is not attached to your hull. Every burn you make sets it swinging, and once it swings its momentum reaches back up the cable and drags the lander with it. Fly badly and the two of you argue all the way across the sector.
Each contract is a haul from the depot you are parked on to the lit pad somewhere across the map, and it ends the same way: the pod down on the deck, then the lander down beside it, slow and level, with the swing killed. Come in too fast, too sideways or too tilted and you are a new crater. Fuel arrives only when you deliver, so every correction you did not need is a metre of range you no longer have — and the further you get, the further apart the pads sit, the taller the ridges grow and the more mascons there are waiting to bend your descent.
How to fly it
- Desktop: A/D or ←/→ rotate the lander, W or Space fires the main engine. There is no separate "left" or "right" — you go where your nose points.
- Phone / tablet: three pads across the bottom of the screen — two rotation thrusters on the left, the main engine on the right. Hold them like buttons.
- Lift off and the slack cable snaps taut and plucks the pod off the deck. That first swing is the tutorial.
- The instrument strip shows altitude, descent rate, drift and attitude. Green means that number is inside landing limits; red means it will kill you.
- A delivery pays for the contract, the pod's condition, how gently you touched down and how still the load was — plus a tip for the fuel you did not burn.
Killing a swing
The one skill that separates a long run from a short one is stopping a pendulum, and the trick is the opposite of what panic tells you. A swinging load cannot be fought with the engine — burning against it just feeds it more energy on the next half-cycle. Instead you chase it: drift the lander gently in the same direction the pod is travelling, so the cable goes slack at the end of the arc and the swing has nothing left to convert. Get above the pod at the moment it reaches the far side of its swing and it will hang almost dead underneath you.
The same idea explains why patient pilots go further. Small, early corrections cost almost nothing and never excite the pendulum; large late ones cost fuel and leave you arriving over the pad with a load doing forty in the wrong direction. On the Moon you have plenty of time — gravity is weak and everything falls slowly — so the winning approach is almost always to start slowing down much earlier than feels necessary.
Tips for a longer run
- Fly the pod, not the ship. Aim the pod at the pad and let the lander end up wherever it needs to be to make that happen.
- Set the pod down first. It is on a cable below you, so it always lands first — arrive with it already slow and the rest is easy.
- Kill the swing before you descend, not during. A swinging load turns a landing into a coin toss.
- Coast. In one-sixth gravity a lander that is pointed level and moving already needs no engine at all. Burn to change something, then stop.
- Watch for the purple haze. Mascons pull you off a trimmed descent without ever touching you — cross them high, or plan for the drift.
- Land beside the pod, not on it. The pads are wide enough for both, but only just.
Where the lunar lander game comes from
Landing games are one of the oldest genres in existence: the original Lunar Lander was a text game in 1969, on paper terminals, in the year of the actual landing, and it became a vector arcade cabinet ten years later. Their whole appeal is that they are honest — nothing chases you, nothing shoots at you, and every crash is a sum you got wrong about thrust, mass and time. Moonhaul is our tribute to that lineage and openly owes it the fuel gauge, the flat pads and the terrible slowness of a bad approach. What we added is the thing those games never had: a second body on the end of a rope, which turns a maths problem about one object into a negotiation with two.
FAQ
Is Moonhaul free? Yes — free to play in your browser, supported by ads, with no purchases.
Do I need an account? No. You only enter a display name when submitting a score to the leaderboard.
Does it work on mobile? Yes — the bottom of the screen becomes three thruster pads, and it plays well with two thumbs.
Why does my lander get dragged sideways? That is the cargo. It has mass, it is swinging, and the cable transmits its momentum straight back into your hull. Kill the swing and it stops.
What ends a run? Touching the ground anywhere except a pad, landing too fast or too tilted, breaking the pod, or sitting on a pad with an empty tank.
How do I get more fuel? Only by delivering. There is no refuelling stop and no pick-up — the tank you land with is the tank you leave with.
More games like this
- Tether — rope physics again, but you are the thing on the end of it.
- Driftbreak — thrust and momentum in open space, with nothing to land on.
- Jackknife — the same problem on the ground: something heavy behind you that does not want to go where you do.
Or read Why one-button games are secretly the hardest — one of our write-ups on how these games are built and how to play them better.