Cosmic Starship runs in a web browser, which makes it unusual to stream: there is no launcher, no install and nothing for your viewers to buy if they want to try it. It also means the usual “add a Game Capture source” step does not apply. This page covers how to capture it, which in-game settings help on stream, and how to get clips for YouTube Shorts, TikTok and Reels out of every session.
We are the team that makes the game. Where we say “in our testing”, it is a test we ran ourselves and logged. Where we have not tested something, we say so.
Give the game its own window
On our Play page the game sits inside the page with the site around it. For streaming, use the Open in its own window link above the game. You get the game alone in a browser window, which is cleaner to capture and lets you close or move the website tab without touching the stream. The fullscreen button inside the game works too, but a windowed browser is easier to capture reliably.
The game saves progress in the browser you play in. If you stream from a different browser or computer than the one you usually play on, export your commander from Settings › Commander profiles › Export profile and import it on the streaming machine first.
Capturing a browser game in OBS
In OBS Studio, add a Window Capture source and choose the browser window with the game. Game Capture is meant for full-screen desktop games and usually will not pick up a browser. A Browser Source is not the answer either: it loads a page inside OBS, but you cannot play it from there.
If the Window Capture shows a black screen, you are not alone. OBS users on the forums trace it to the browser’s hardware acceleration, or on laptops with two graphics chips, to OBS and the browser running on different GPUs (see for example this OBS forum thread). A common suggestion there is to turn hardware acceleration off in the browser. For our game that is a poor trade: Cosmic Starship draws its battles with WebGL, and without hardware acceleration it either runs slowly or falls back to a simpler 2D view. Try these first:
- On a laptop with two GPUs, set both OBS and the browser to use the same one in your operating system’s graphics settings.
- Try a different capture method in the Window Capture source’s properties, if your OBS version offers more than one.
- As a last resort, use a Display Capture of the whole screen and crop it to the game.
The same steps apply to Streamlabs Desktop and other OBS-based tools. If you stream from a phone or tablet straight to TikTok LIVE or YouTube, use your device’s own screen-sharing option for the platform’s app.
Settings that help on stream
- Text size (Settings › Display): Large or Larger enlarges the menus, mission briefings and item descriptions, and in battle the mission panel, subtitles and pause menu. Many of your viewers watch on a phone, where a 1080p stream shrinks to a few inches wide.
- Screen shake and Motion: lower the shake slider, or set Motion to Reduced, so the picture stays readable for viewers. Shake that feels great in your hands can be tiring to watch.
- Visual effects: Adaptive lowers detail when the frame rate drops, Full keeps everything on, and Performance is the light setting for a computer that is also encoding the stream.
- Crew voices are on by default and every line has a subtitle, which helps viewers watching on mute. If your own commentary and the crew keep talking over each other, turn the voices off.
- Music has its own slider. The soundtrack was composed for the game with ElevenLabs Music. Turn it down if you prefer your own music under the stream.
Clips for Shorts, TikTok and Reels
The game can record its own videos while you play, separately from OBS. Open Settings › Video:
- Record battles: Highlight clips, Whole battle, or both. Press L (or REC on screen) to start and stop a recording at any time.
- Video shape: Landscape 16:9, Vertical 9:16, Square 1:1, or Both 16:9 + 9:16.
- Framing: Wide (the default) or Close, for how much of the battle a vertical or square video shows.
- Quality: 720p or 1080p.
- Battle info on the video: the mission, timer, hull and shields, kills and the game’s name with your site’s address. Turn it off for a clean picture.
What we found when we tested it:
- Highlight clips start four to eight seconds before the moment that triggers them (your ultimate, a capital ship or boss destroyed, a boss changing phase, a legendary drop, the victory) and run a few seconds after it. Moments close together become one clip of up to 30 seconds, and each battle keeps its eight best.
- With the shape set to Both, one battle with highlights and whole-battle recording on gave us four files: a victory clip and the whole battle, each in 16:9 and 9:16. We checked the vertical file with ffprobe: 720 × 1280.
- In Chromium, the saved files were MP4 with H.264 video and Opus audio. The game saves MP4 in Chrome, Edge and Safari and WebM in Firefox.
- The tactical pause is cut out. A test run of 28.5 seconds that included a 14.8-second pause produced an 11.6-second video, so you can stop to talk to chat without dead air in the clip.
- Our first build of the vertical framing showed only the middle third of a wide screen. The current Wide framing shows about 56% of the width, with a blurred copy of the battle above and below where the battle info sits.
Each video appears on the results screen with Save and Share buttons, and Settings › Video keeps the whole session’s videos until you close or reload the game. Nothing is uploaded anywhere: the files stay on your computer until you post them.
Missions that make good streams
- Boss missions: each of the nine bosses arrives with an entrance card, has phase marks on its health bar and dies in slow motion. These are your best clips. See how to beat every boss.
- Hold the Station: waves drop out of hyperspace and a siege flagship arrives last, so the tension builds on its own. With Meridian’s beacon turned up, raiders come for your own station too (see the station guide).
- A doctrine challenge: let chat pick your doctrine before each mission. Glass Cannon on a hard boss is a good time for everyone except you.
- Who Would Win?: between missions, run a fleet battle that chat designs. Our guide to games to play with chat has the format.
What we have not tested
We would rather tell you this than have you find out live:
- Our recording tests ran in Chromium with a software renderer. We have not measured the frame rate cost of recording clips while OBS is also encoding, on a typical streaming PC. Recording both shapes at once runs two recorders, so if your computer struggles, record one shape at 720p.
- We have not tested capture on every browser and graphics driver combination. The OBS fixes above come from OBS users, not from our own lab.
- The Share button opens your device’s share menu where the browser supports it. Our tests ran in headless Chromium on Linux, which has no share menu, so we have not seen it work end to end.
If you stream the game and run into something, or measure something we have not, tell us on the contact page and we will add it here.