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September 20, 2026 This time you get the brush. 🎨 There are three new editors in the main menu: the Texture Editor repaints every texture in the game, the Form Editor builds forms of your own – now across several blocks – and under My Tools you give your drill, pistol, blade and scanner a look of their own. The best part: whatever you make is yours straight away, on any installation, without waiting for an update. In the world itself nothing changes – the shaping tool, its l

It started on a Friday evening. By Saturday afternoon there were six episodes of a cartoon series — about five minutes each, with drawn characters, voices, music and sound effects. A series set in our own game world, following the crew of a freighter called the Lifter 420. What happens to them, we're not telling yet. How something like this comes together over a weekend, we'll happily explain. It began with a sheet of paper. The crew wasn't invented at a desk, it came from Ju

September 17, 2026 Justus played the shapeshifter update for one evening – and sent four more reports. All four of them are in this version. Thank you! 🙏 The most important one: in a Sandbox world you can now really craft anything, without materials. 🧰 The world dialog has promised that for a long time, and the server always allowed it – but the menu still looked into your backpack first and greyed the button out with "Materials missing". From now on you need no blueprints,

September 16, 2026 This week one player moved the game forward more than anyone: Justus. In two days he sent more than twenty reports — a crash, a ship in a lava lake, a chat that swallowed /help, a station that was gone after a restart — and a whole pile of ideas. Thank you! 🙏 The biggest of them: eight new professions. 🧑‍⚕️ The doctor sells medpacks, field medkits and — expensive — a detoxifier, the shopkeeper sells food (but only while you stand in the shop with them), t

September 15, 2026 Lyxette asked where her settler was actually supposed to walk, whether a bigger base would draw more people, and what settlers do all day anyway. Here is the answer: your worlds have people living in them now. 🏡 Every bed in your base brings a resident — up to five, once the base has its first settler. By day they work, in the evening they sit on a chair or a bench, and at night they lie in their own bed with a little "z z z" above them. They walk real rou

September 13, 2026 Until yesterday a planet ended where the loaded chunks ended: a few hundred blocks out, then a wall of fog, and nothing behind it. Now there is a world behind the fog. 🌄 Mountains, valleys, coasts and seas are drawn all the way to the horizon — from the same generator as the real chunks, column for column exactly what will be there when you arrive. Nothing pops, nothing shifts as you get closer. And on that far landscape stands what you built there: the ci

September 12, 2026 Justus had an idea, and it is a whole world now. 🏙️ New galaxies can roll a lava desert — sand over sandstone, buttes carved by the wind, a lava sea, lava rivers, no water, no plants, no animals and 55 °C. You can breathe, but you will not want to stay outside. And in the middle of that desert stands a single city, 256 blocks across: a purple wall with a red band and four gates, streets in a grid, a landing plaza with lamps and guard posts, two markets, a

September 12, 2026 The third wave of ideas from the school club "Building Games with AI" is in the game — and this time they are whole planets. 🌈 Sophie's Rainbow Planet is almost all sea: rainbow water down to the depths, islands that float on the water with kelp forests hanging from their undersides, and a seabed of sand you can dig. On Damian's Flower Planet nothing grows but flowers, and exactly one creature lives there: the flowerling, a walking flower with a bloom for

September 10, 2026 Almost everything in this update came from players who built big — a spaceport, a walled compound, a perimeter far larger than anything the game had ever been asked to cover. And then they found that the game's helpers stop at the edge of a small base. 🔌 A sentry post shoots 14 blocks, but it only worked within 8 blocks of your base core — so on a compound of 80×80 it was useless exactly where you need it most. That is what the new Power Relay block is for

September 9, 2026 Sometimes the good news just walks in. Starting tomorrow, glitch.fun hosts the AI Gaming Conference, the big online festival of the Glitch Festival — from September 10 to 30, three weeks, entirely in the browser. And Blocks Beyond the Stars is part of it. 🎉 Here is the festival page: go to the AI Gaming Festival And where do we stand? Number 1 in the Survival Games and number 4 in the Sandbox Games. 😮 We had to look twice when we saw it. One honesty paragr

September 8, 2026 If you had been looking closely, the animals were sliding across the ground. A leg was a single box swinging at a rate that had nothing to do with how far the animal actually travelled. That is over. 🐾 Every creature has real limbs now: hip, thigh, knee, shin and foot, front legs folding back and hind legs forward, and a foot that is set down stays where it is while the body travels over it. The game picks between six ways of walking on its own – a walk, a

September 6, 2026 Until now every desert looked like a dune sea and every highland like a mountain range. No more: every new world now rolls its own terrain – dune seas next to badlands, fjord coasts under mountain country, glacier valleys, impact basins full of water, rock bridges over gorges, crystal geodes underground, oases in the desert, moss on warm wet rock. 🏔️ On top of that come eight new kinds of planet – from island archipelagos to ash seas with basalt continents

September 5, 2026 Nothing new to build or discover this time – instead the whole game went into the workshop. 🔧 We spent two days measuring where the time really goes: on your screen, on the server and on the wire. Then we tidied up, piece by piece. You will notice it right away: on the same computer the game now draws three to four times as many frames per second, the small stutters while walking are almost gone, and if you stand still there are none at all. The server has

September 3, 2026 Last night was the first club evening at KuBa West — and today there is already the first release with the kids' bug reports in it. Exactly as promised. 🎒 Ben, Marie and Nikita are the first to make it into the credits (the club has its own block there now), and their reports from the browser game brought a whole list of things to light: landings that dropped you through the floor, titans that could not be scanned, thin slits of light along block edges, a c

September 2, 2026 Today was the day: our game-development club at the Kurfürst-Balduin Realschule plus in Trier West has its first evening behind it. Before we tell you how it went, a thank-you first: that this club can take place at KuBa at all is thanks to a very dedicated head teacher and the extremely kind support of the school's IT lead. Thank you both! 🙏 Just before the start: stage fright. Justus, Verena and I were honestly quite nervous once I had booted the first ma

September 1, 2026 The tablet update was barely out when Justus, of course, immediately got going on the Galaxy Tab A8 again. And indeed: smoother! But then, right after the loading screen — poof, game gone. This time speed wasn't to blame, memory was: on a tablet with little RAM the browser simply won't hand over enough of it, and that's the end of the session. So this time the plan was: slim down. 🥗 The big one: on phones and tablets the game now keeps only as much of the w

August 31, 2026 Justus likes playing from the sofa best — and since the gamepad update, sometimes on the tablet in the browser. Except: on our Galaxy Tab A8 it stuttered from the intro on, the controls felt sluggish, and stepping out of the ship popped up an evil-looking browser message: "EncodingError: unable to decode audio data". It looked like a crash, but it wasn't one — under memory pressure the tablet had simply failed to decode a music track, and in that case the game

We have never hidden that we use AI a lot on Blocks Beyond The Stars — without it, a game this size simply would not be doable as an after-work project. But for us, "developing with AI" does not mean: type a wish, take the result, hope. Over the months a fixed pattern has emerged that sounds surprisingly old-fashioned — and works precisely because of that. Today we lay it out in full. It always starts with a human and an idea. Before any AI does anything, someone wanted or no

We announced it here in July, and now it is really happening: on Wednesday, September 2, our game-development club at KuBa West has its first afternoon. Between "wouldn't that be something" and "Wednesday it begins" lay a conversation with the head teacher, a concept paper, a stack of worksheets, a rollup banner — and quite a few evenings at the kitchen table. And now? Now, honestly, we are pretty nervous. 😅 The dress rehearsal already happened. Last Wednesday I got to prese

August 30, 2026 Justus has wanted "the Scout ship, but with bigger wings" for ages. Until now that meant: open an empty room, rebuild the whole ship block by block, and then change the wings. Ten minutes in, the motivation was gone, the ship half done, and I was the bad guy. From today it is different: the LOAD button in the three build editors — ship, station, town — now lists every built-in ship and every built-in template in the game right next to your own designs. Pick th