It's like browsing "Featured Carts" in SPLORE... But they are ranked by STARs!
Controls
- ⬅️➡️: previous / next page
- ⬆️⬇️: previous / next cart
- ❎🅾️: run cart
After you are done with the cart, enter the pause menu and select the last option, back to ★SPLORE.
About
STAR SPLORE aims to help you discover some of the best PICO-8 carts ever made.
- That's why only featured carts are included.
- That's also why carts are ranked by stars, the BBS version of "likes".
As imperfect as these metrics may be, they are the ones we have.
Note: when carts are tied for stars, newer carts rank higher.
Why
STAR SPLORE was inspired by @NerdyTeachers' excelent 200 Best PICO-8 Games list.
As of August 2025, there are almost 10,000 carts marked as "Releases" on the BBS. It may be tough to know where to start.
Even limiting the search to the current 500 or so featured carts, it can be nice to start with the most celebrated ones. That's where the stars ranking comes in.
Updates
New carts won't show up until STAR SPLORE is updated.
STAR SPLORE itself is a regular PICO-8 cart after all. It can't fetch newer carts from the BBS automatically.
On the top right of the screen you can see the publish date of the latest featured cart included in the current version of STAR SPLORE.
Note: when loading carts from the BBS, STAR SPLORE ignores the version number after the ID to get the latest version of the cart.
Offline
STAR SPLORE can also run carts offline, as long as they are in the same folder. Just make sure you don't rename cart files after downloading them from the BBS.
Note that running multicarts offline can be tricky, no matter how you launch them. Please refer to this excelente article from @NerdyTeachers for more information on the subject. Just expand section 3, "For Multicart Games".
Scraper
On STAR SPLORE's GitHub repository you will find the scraper used to extract information from Lexaloffle's BBS.
HTML
You can browse every information and link collected for every scraped cart in this HTML page (download it and open in your browser).
Download
The scraper also creates a file with URLs for all featured carts scraped. You can use that file to download all those carts at once using Wget. Please note that downloading carts from the BBS is perfectly legit according to Lexaloffle's terms of use.
Dumping these 500 or so games together with STAR SPLORE in an handheld is a great way to browse and discover some great PICO-8 games on the go, even when you are offline.
Outlines
I managed to squeeze in a couple outlines to celebrate the launch of PICO-8 0.2.7 earlier this month.
I also used rrectfill() on the page counter!
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