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Updates
New versions, changes, improvements, and important notes about current builds of Blocks Beyond the Stars.
Version 2026.9.12 – The paintbox update: paint every texture, build forms over several blocks 🎨🧱
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
Marcel Dütscher
1 day ago3 min read
Version 2026.9.11 – The quarters update: build freely in Sandbox, a real bed in your ship 🛏️🧰
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,
Marcel Dütscher
4 days ago3 min read
Version 2026.9.10 – The shapeshifter update: eight professions, two new planets, stations as they really are 🎭🛰️
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
Marcel Dütscher
5 days ago4 min read
Version 2026.9.9 – The neighbours update: residents with a bed and a job, stations from modules 🏡🛰️
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
Marcel Dütscher
6 days ago3 min read
Version 2026.9.8 – The horizon update: a world behind the fog 🌄✨
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 133 min read
Version 2026.9.7 – The city update: a lava desert with one gigantic guarded city 🏙️🔥
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 123 min read
Version 2026.9.6 – The new-planets update: four planets from the school club, rays and hydras, and water in every colour 🌈🐟
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 123 min read
Version 2026.9.5 – The big-build update: power to the far corner, a real waterfall, and double doors 🔌💧
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 103 min read
Version 2026.9.4 – The living-world update: animals finally walk properly, plus glaciers, atolls and meandering rivers 🐾🏔️
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 83 min read
Version 2026.9.3 – The landscape update: every new world rolls its own terrain, eight new kinds of planet and wrecks in space 🏔️🌌
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 62 min read
Version 2026.9.2 – The tune-up update: three to four times the frames per second, and Lyxette's seventh round 🚀🛰️
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 52 min read
Version 2026.9.1 – The school-club update: the first fixes from the club, and Lyxette's space station 🎒🛰️
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 32 min read
Version 2026.8.26 – The headroom update: more breathing room on tablets 🧠
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
Marcel Dütscher
Sep 22 min read
Version 2026.8.25 – The tablet update: smoother in the browser, and the hand is yours again 📱
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
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 313 min read
Version 2026.8.24 – The drafting-table update: load finished ships, roll templates, menus on the pad 📐
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
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 303 min read
Version 2026.8.23 – Animals that jump, and answers that arrive in the game 🐾
August 29, 2026 Until yesterday, the animals in Blocks Beyond the Stars were, frankly, sleds. A grazer was simply pinned to the ground height beneath it — no gravity, no jump, no landing. A block in the way stopped it dead; dig the ground away and it hovered. Justus never minded, until yesterday he watched a herd animal jump a ledge, land on the far side and keep walking. "It can do that now?!" Yes. It can do that now. 🐾 Every species now has a motion class — walker, crawler
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 293 min read
Version 2026.8.22 – An update one player wrote 🎒
August 26, 2026 Sometimes the best game designer is simply someone who plays and writes down what feels off. On Monday Lyxette sent three reports from his singleplayer world, and one more on Tuesday morning — 20 points in total. Nine real bugs, one fall through the floor, seven variations of "why can't I see what my gear actually does?", and one honest question about lava and water. We spent two days doing nothing but working through those 20 points — all 20 are in. Justus ke
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 264 min read
Version 2026.8.21 – The big bundle: crews, a boat, a sentry post and a safer chat 📦
August 25, 2026 After the update marathon of the past weeks, Justus asked the fair question: "So when is there something new to do?" 😄 So we sat down, wrote up where the game is wide but shallow — and spent three days building 26 pieces of it. This is by far the biggest update since the constellation release, and above all it does one thing: it gives you more reasons to stay in one place, and more reasons to play together. 🚀 Let's start at home. Your base can defend itself
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 253 min read
Version 2026.8.20 – Encore! The music stops repeating itself 🎶
August 22, 2026 Yesterday it was the luggage, today it's the playlist. If you've spent a while on a planet with two music tracks, you know the drill: A, B, A, B — at some point Justus started humming the ice-planet theme at the kitchen table before it had even started. 😅 That's over: the music now draws from a shuffle bag — every track of a context plays once before anything repeats, the all-round pieces are blended into every planet's pool, and the game remembers what it pl
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 222 min read
Version 2026.8.19 – Packing light for the browser 🎧
August 22, 2026 A small update with one big number: the browser version of Blocks Beyond the Stars now loads about 40 MB instead of 208 MB on your first visit. On glitch.fun and on our own Play page that means roughly ten seconds to the main menu instead of close to a minute (or ten on a bad day). 🚀 What was going on? Our music. All 40 songs of the game's library sat inside the game package — 164 MB, of which one play session hears maybe three to five tracks. At some point J
Marcel Dütscher
Aug 222 min read
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