The short versionAbout one minute
The whole deal, in eight lines.
- The game is free.You never have to pay for anything to finish it.
- Stardust is a game feature, not money.It has no cash value, you cannot cash it out, you cannot give it to another player, and you cannot sell it.
- Refunds go through the store you bought from.Not us. They hold the money.
- Play fair.Do not cheat the leaderboards.
- Your player name and your crew name are made up by the game.If one comes out badly, reroll it or tell us.
- The Humlets, the art, the sounds and the game itself are ours.You get to play it, not to resell it.
- In Europe and the United Kingdom you have a 14 day right to change your mind.With one important exception, explained in section 8.
- Record it, stream it, monetise your videos.Sharing this game is the point of it.
The termsSections 1 to 16
The terms in full.
1. Who these terms are with
These terms are an agreement between you and [Company Legal Name], [Address] ("we", "us"). They cover Planet Plink on iPhone, iPad, Android, the web and Steam.
By playing, you accept them. If you do not accept them, do not play, and if you already installed the game, delete it.
2. Who can play
Anyone can play. The game is built for all ages and it contains nothing that needs an adult.
If you are under the age where you can enter a contract on your own (which varies by country, and is 18 in most), then your parent or guardian has to agree to these terms for you. In practice they already did: on a phone or tablet, the app store account that installed the game belongs to somebody, and if that somebody is a child, the store's own family controls decide what happens next.
Purchases and children. Every purchase in Planet Plink goes through your store's own payment sheet. That is where the family controls live: ask to buy, purchase approval, spending limits, and turning purchases off completely. Settings inside the game also has a Purchases off switch, and switching it on takes the shop away until it is switched back. If a child spent money you did not intend them to spend, take it up with the store first: they hold the payment and they can refund it. Then tell us, because we would like to know.
3. Your licence to play
We give you a personal, non exclusive, non transferable, revocable licence to install and play Planet Plink for your own entertainment, on devices you control.
You may not: sell, rent, sublicense or redistribute the game or any part of it; take it apart to make a competing product; strip out the art or the sounds and use them elsewhere; run it through automation, a bot or a modified client; or work around any security or rate limit in it.
You may absolutely: record it, stream it, make videos about it, monetise those videos, and post your score anywhere you like. Sharing this game is the point of it. If you want brand assets, the press kit has them.
4. Your player name and your crew name
There is nothing to type in Planet Plink. Your display name is generated by the game from a word list, as an adjective, a celestial noun and two digits. Crew names are generated the same way.
You can reroll your name in Settings as many times as you want. We keep the word lists deliberately dull and family safe, and we check the combinations, but language is large and we may still have missed a collision that is unfortunate in your language. If a generated name or crew name is offensive, tell us at hello@planetplink.com and we will pull the word out of the list. That is a bug on our side, not a rule you broke.
We may change a generated name if we have to remove a word from the list.
5. Stardust and other things in the game
Stardust is the game's currency. Power ups, boosts, Garden slots, themes and Humlet Machine pulls are things you can spend it on. None of it is money and none of it is property.
To be exact, and this is the part that matters:
- Stardust has no monetary value. It is a number in a save file that changes what the game does. It is not a currency, not a token, not a security, not a credit balance, and not a store of value.
- You cannot cash it out. There is no route by which Stardust, a Humlet, a Crest, a star, an award or an entitlement becomes money, and we will never add one.
- You cannot transfer it. Stardust, Humlets, characters, awards and entitlements are tied to your device's save file. There is no trading, no gifting of items, no marketplace, and no way to move anything to another player. The only things you can send another player are a link to a board and a picture of your score.
- You cannot sell it, and if you try to sell an account, a save file or an item somewhere else, the buyer is buying nothing: there is no account to transfer, so there is nothing we could move even if we wanted to.
- It is licensed, not owned. What you get when you spend or buy is a licence to use a game feature, for as long as we run the game.
- We can change the numbers. Prices in Stardust, earn rates, drop budgets and rewards are game balance, and we will tune them. We will not tune the earn side downward to push you toward buying; that is a rule we have written into our own design documents, not just here.
6. Earned Stardust and bought Stardust are not the same, and we tell you before you buy
Read this before spending money. It is the one thing about our economy that could surprise you, so we put it in the terms as well as on the purchase screen.
The Humlet Machine, which is how you collect the 120 characters, accepts only Stardust you earned by playing. Stardust that arrived because you paid for it will not open the Machine. That is not a bug and it is not a trick: it is a deliberate mechanism, and it exists so that collecting characters can never be a paid random reward, which is to say so that this game contains no loot boxes.
So, plainly:
- Buying Stardust does not buy you Humlet Machine pulls, at any price, in any pack, in any bundle, or in the premium half of a Star Pass.
- Buying Stardust does pay for power ups, boosts, extra drops, extra Daily attempts, Garden slots and themes, which frees up the Stardust you earned for the Machine. On our own numbers that makes a paying player collect characters about 22 percent faster. We would rather publish that figure than claim money makes no difference.
- Machine pulls can also be paid for with a free gift token, which comes from the four hour free gift or the free half of a Star Pass. Tokens are never sold, in any product, for the same reason.
Wherever you can start a pull, the game shows two numbers: your total Stardust and how much of it you earned. The Machine says the rule in plain words before you turn the crank, and the Star Pass card says it above the buy button, before you pay.
7. Buying things
Everything in the shop shows exactly what you get before you buy it, with the price in your real currency next to the Stardust number. There are no loot boxes, no mystery boxes, no random packs and no gambling in Planet Plink. Nothing you can buy is random.
Payment is taken by the store, not by us. On iPhone and iPad it is Apple, on Android it is Google, on Steam it is Valve. They are the merchant of record, they handle the tax, and the receipt comes from them. We never see your card.
Consumable items (Stardust, power ups, boosts) are delivered once and used up. Non consumable items (No Ads, themes, the starter pack, and characters if we ever sell them by name) can be restored: Restore purchases is in both the shop and Settings, and it works after a reinstall or on a new device signed into the same store account. Consumables cannot be restored, which is a store rule rather than ours, so we grant them immediately on confirmation and write them to your save file straight away.
A Star Pass is a one time 30 day product, not a subscription. It does not auto renew, it will never charge you again on its own, and there is nothing to cancel.
8. Refunds and changing your mind
Refunds go through the store. We cannot take a payment and we cannot give one back, because the money never reaches us in a form we can reverse. Ask Apple, Google or Valve, whichever one sold it to you. Each of them has its own request process, and each of them decides. If a store refunds a purchase, we remove what it granted, and if that takes your Stardust below zero we floor it at zero rather than leaving you in debt. A refund never takes away Stardust you earned by playing, and never takes away your collection.
Except as the law requires, purchases are final and Stardust is non refundable. That sentence has real exceptions and here they are.
If you are a consumer in the European Union, the European Economic Area or the United Kingdom, you have a right to withdraw from a purchase of digital content within 14 days without giving a reason. There is an exception, and it is the one that applies to almost everything in our shop: once you have expressly agreed to immediate delivery and acknowledged that you lose the right of withdrawal by doing so, and the content has been delivered, the right is gone. The store's purchase sheet is where that agreement and that acknowledgement happen, so in practice a pack of Stardust delivered into your wallet is not returnable, and a Star Pass you have started drawing rewards from is not either. Where the content has not been delivered, you keep the full 14 days. To exercise it, ask the store, and copy us at hello@planetplink.com so we can help.
Nothing in these terms takes away your statutory rights as a consumer, including the right to a remedy if what we sold you is faulty or not as described.
9. Play fair
The leaderboards, the Daily Drop, duels and leagues are the same for everyone. In those modes every player is identical: character traits and pre run boosts are switched off in code, so nothing you own or bought can change your score.
Do not: submit a score you did not play; change the game files or run a modified client; use an automated player; use more than one device or a fresh install to farm rewards, referrals or crew credit; or exploit a bug you found instead of telling us about it.
If we think a score is impossible we may remove it, quietly, without removing your ability to play. If a player id is doing this repeatedly we may stop accepting its submissions. We do not take away your collection, your progress or anything you paid for as a punishment for a leaderboard issue.
Find a bug that lets you cheat? Tell us at hello@planetplink.com. We would rather owe you a thank you than run a broken board.
10. Things other players leave in the game
When a player conquers a planet, a small figure of their chosen Humlet stays on it, with their generated name and their Crest. When enough players conquer the same planet, the first hundred names are engraved on a monument there.
Those names are generated by the game, so there is nothing there that anyone wrote. There is no way for a player to leave a message, a symbol or an image. If a generated name that ended up on a monument turns out to be a word we should not have in the list, tell us and we will replace it.
11. The game will change
We update Planet Plink. Levels, planets, seasons, characters, balance and prices change. We may add features, and we may remove ones that are not working. We may run limited time events.
We may also stop running the online parts (leaderboards, crews, leagues, duels, the live counters). If we ever plan to, we will say so in the game with reasonable notice, and the single player game (Endless, Journey, the Garden, your collection) will keep working offline afterwards, because it already does. That is a design commitment, and it is the reason the game does not need our servers to be a game.
12. Ending it
You can stop at any time by deleting the app. Nothing to cancel, nobody to tell.
We can stop your access to the online features if you break section 9 or section 3, or if we have to for legal reasons. Because there are no accounts, "ending it" on our side means we stop accepting submissions from a player id. The game itself keeps working.
If we terminate you unfairly, tell us and we will look again. There is no appeals bureaucracy here, there is an email address.
13. What we promise, and what we do not
We built this carefully and we test it. We do not promise it is free of bugs, that it will never lose a run, that the servers will always be up, or that it will work on every device ever made.
The warranty disclaimer and the limit on our liability are still being drafted, and the note at the bottom of this page says exactly what is open. Two things are settled and will not change in the drafting: nothing will exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, or for fraud, and nothing will remove the statutory quality and description rights in section 8.
14. Apple, Google, Valve
Where you got the game from, the store's own terms also apply, and where they give you more than we do, theirs win.
Apple requires us to say some specific things, and they are true: these terms are between you and us and not with Apple; Apple has no obligation to support the game; if the app fails to conform to any warranty, you may tell Apple and Apple will refund the purchase price if you paid one, and Apple has no other warranty obligation; Apple is not responsible for any claim you have about the app; Apple is a third party beneficiary of these terms and may enforce them.
15. Law and disputes
We have not chosen a governing law or a forum yet, and rather than fill this section with a placeholder we would rather tell you the truth about it. Nothing in these terms limits your statutory rights, wherever you live. If you have a problem with us, you can reach a person at hello@planetplink.com, and we would very much rather sort it out that way than any other. When this section is drafted we will say so in the game before it takes effect, per section 18 of the privacy policy and section 11 above.
16. Contact
hello@planetplink.com for anything about the game.
hello@planetplink.com for anything about data.
[Company Legal Name], [Address]
Review statusNothing hidden
What is still open, quoted rather than summarised.
These terms are drafted and have not yet been through legal review. Three parts of the source document are open questions for a lawyer rather than notice to a player, so they are not woven into the terms above. They are reproduced here instead, because quietly dropping them would be the dishonest way to publish a terms of use. The operating entity and its address are also still placeholders.
- Section 8, withdrawalThe withdrawal wording above, whether a model withdrawal form has to be provided, and how the exception interacts with a store led purchase flow where the trader is Apple, Google or Valve rather than us. Also whether the Star Pass, being a 30 day product delivered in instalments, is treated as a single delivered item or a service, because that changes the answer.
- Section 13, warranties and liabilityThe warranty disclaimer, the limitation of liability, and the cap. Standard drafting would exclude implied warranties to the extent permitted, exclude indirect and consequential loss, and cap total liability at the greater of the amount you paid in the previous 12 months or a small fixed sum. All three have to be written to survive UK and EU consumer law, which does not allow a trader to exclude liability for death or personal injury caused by negligence, for fraud, or for the statutory quality and description rights in section 8. In an all ages game the reputational cost of an aggressive cap is real, so counsel should draft the mildest version that still protects the company.
- Section 15, law and disputesThe whole section is a lawyer's to write rather than to review. Six decisions, in the order they matter: governing law and forum, chosen against the reality that the company is in one place and the players are in 175 storefronts, and that a consumer in the European Union cannot be deprived of their own country's law or of the right to sue where they live; whether to require arbitration at all, which is not available against European or United Kingdom consumers and whose optics in a family game are worse than the exposure it removes; the informal resolution step, its length and where notice is served; mass arbitration exposure, relevant only if arbitration is chosen; the European Union online and alternative dispute resolution disclosures, and whether a body must be named; and severability, no waiver, assignment, entire agreement and the survival list. The current recommendation, for counsel to accept or reject, is no arbitration clause, no class action waiver, small claims court expressly preserved, and a simple informal resolution step of 45 days before anything is filed.
Related pages: how refunds work, why Machine pulls cannot be bought, and the privacy policy.