Terms of Service
These terms cover buying, owning and using space in The Charted Universe. They sit alongside our Acceptable Use policy and our Privacy Notice. By creating an account or buying anything here you agree to them.
Who we are
The Charted Universe is operated by Red Kite 9 Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 13157267), registered office Riverside House, 3 Place Farm, Wheathampstead, Hertfordshire, AL4 8SB, England. You can reach us at support@charteduniverse.space.
Purchases made before 28 October 2026 were sold by Red Kite 9 Ltd, and the terms that applied at the time still apply to them.
Most purchases are sold through Onelink, Stripe's merchant-of-record service. For those, Onelink takes the payment, sends your receipt and handles the tax on your purchase. The exceptions are purchases made before we switched and renewals of a vanity URL subscription that started before then. Red Kite 9 Ltd still supplies your system and is responsible for it. A purchase sold through Onelink is also covered by Onelink's buyer terms.
For a purchase sold through Onelink, questions about the payment, the receipt or a refund go to Onelink support. For any other purchase (including anything bought before we switched), and for questions about your system, its links, gifts or vanity URLs, write to us at support@charteduniverse.space.
What this is
The Charted Universe is an infinite, procedurally generated universe. Every screen is a solar system at a coordinate, and each system is computed from its coordinate rather than stored. The same coordinate produces the same system for every visitor.
Anyone can explore it for free. Only coordinates inside the charted frontier can be bought. Space beyond the frontier is uncharted and not for sale.
Your account
You sign in with a link we email you. Your account is tied to that email address, so keep access to it. You are responsible for what is done through your account.
You must be 18 or over to create an account, buy anything or claim a gift. Anyone can explore the public universe without an account.
These terms also apply if you buy for a business. Anything described here as a consumer right applies only to consumers.
Buying a coordinate
When you buy a coordinate you get a permanent licence to customise the solar system at that address: its name, its colours, its planets and the links on them. Your choices are laid over the generated system and shown to everyone who visits.
It is a one-time payment and it is permanent. There are no upkeep fees, and we do not reclaim or resell a coordinate you have paid for. You bought permanence and that is what you keep.
A coordinate is a place in this universe, not property outside it. You do not acquire our software, the generator or the design of the universe itself.
The price is the one we quote at checkout, in pounds sterling. It depends on how far the coordinate is from the origin. Coordinates at a distance of 1 to 4 from the origin (the Inner Core) cost £499. Certain iconic coordinates, labelled as such in the buy panel (for example (42,42) and (69,420)), cost £249 whatever their distance. Both are bought through the normal checkout. The origin itself is not for sale.
Paying
For a purchase sold through Onelink, Onelink takes the payment as merchant of record and your card statement will show ONELINK* CHARTED UNIVE. The price at checkout includes any tax, and checkout may show it in your own currency. Renewals of a vanity URL subscription that started before we switched are charged by us through Stripe and show our usual statement name.
The system underneath stays the same
The generated system at a coordinate is deterministic. Each coordinate is produced under a fixed generation version, and once anything has been sold under a version, that version's output does not change. New visual features are added as opt-in extras or apply only to space charted later. The system you bought will not be regenerated into something else underneath you.
What you put on your system
Names, tooltips and links are yours. You give us permission to store them and show them publicly as part of the universe, including in previews, search and the map, for as long as they are on your system. Everything you add must follow the Acceptable Use policy.
Text is plain text only. A link becomes clickable only after it has passed a safety check, and it is checked again every week.
Upgrades
Cosmetic upgrades are one-time purchases attached to a single system. A star logo is reviewed by a person before it appears, and an image that fails review is not shown.
Vanity URLs
A vanity URL is an annual subscription, not a purchase. It costs £19 a year and points a short name at one of your systems for as long as the subscription is active.
If a subscription lapses, the name expires after a 30-day grace period and becomes available to others. Some names are reserved and cannot be registered, and some brand names can be registered only after we have verified who is asking.
You do not own a name. If someone with rights in a name complains, we may freeze it while we look into it, and we may decline to renew it. That process is set out in Trademark & Slug Disputes. Nobody can hold a company's name hostage here.
Limits on how much one account can hold
Each account can hold up to 3 systems in the Core band, 10 in the Mid band and 25 across the Outer and Rim bands. It can also hold one Inner Core system and two iconic coordinates. Iconic coordinates do not count toward the distance-band limits. The limits exist to stop bulk buying for resale, so that space stays available to people who want to use it. A verified business can ask us to raise a limit, and we decide each request by hand.
Gifts and memorials
You can buy a system for someone else. A gift is held for the recipient until they claim it. Only an account signed in with the recipient email address you entered can claim it, and you can correct that address from the gift's manage link until the gift is claimed. The recipient must also be 18 or over to claim it. A memorial is permanently protected: it is never reclaimed, it cannot be transferred, and it is not blanked if the person who bought it later closes their account.
Transfers and resale
You may not sell a system, or hand over or sell your account, on or off this site. A system stays with the account that bought it.
We do not take a system back because it was sold. We deal only with the person who bought it, through the email address on the account, and we will not help anyone recover or take over an account or system they bought from someone else.
Moderation and freezing
Anyone can report a system. A person reviews every report. While we look into a system we may freeze it. A frozen system is shown as plain generated space with the words "Under review", and its links are not shown. Nothing is deleted, and the coordinate stays with its owner. If the review clears it, we unfreeze it and it appears as it did before.
Suspension and closing your account
For a serious or repeated breach of these terms or the Acceptable Use policy we may suspend an account. Suspending an account does not put its coordinates back on sale.
You can close your account at any time. What we erase, what we keep and what happens to your systems is set out in Account Deletion.
Cancelling and refunds
Your right to cancel, and what it means to ask us to start straight away, is set out in Cancellation & Cooling-Off. When we refund, and what a refund does to a system, is set out in Refunds.
Changes to these terms
If we change these terms we will change the date at the foot of this page. A change to the terms does not take away the permanence of something you have already bought.
Our responsibility to you
Nothing in these terms limits or excludes any right you have as a consumer that the law does not allow us to limit, including your rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015. Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, or for fraud.
The links on a system are chosen by its owner and lead to sites we do not run. We check them for phishing and malware, but we are not responsible for what is on those sites.
Subject to the first paragraph of this section, we are not responsible for losses that were not a foreseeable result of something we did wrong, and if you use the universe for a business we are not responsible for loss of profit or loss of business.
If you buy as a business, our total liability to you is capped at what you paid us in the 12 months before the claim.
Governing law
These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and disputes go to the courts of England and Wales. If you are a consumer living in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts, and you keep the protection of the mandatory laws of the place where you live.