Development

With version 0.7.5, the game finally properly explains how to play together. Time to write down the why behind it — because anyone coming from other online games notices one thing right away: there's no open server list here, no "join any world" button, no matchmaking with strangers. Multiplayer here works by password and word of mouth only. That's not a missing feature. It's on purpose. The reason is uncomfortable but honest: the internet can be mean. 😉 Anyone who has spent

Not every insight fills its own article. Here's a collection of small lessons from the last few months — each of them cost us at least one evening. Doorways need three blocks of height. Sounds wrong, but it's physics: our player character is a capsule of just under 1.9 blocks — but the stair-climbing logic (step offset) additionally probes 0.6 blocks upward while walking. A two-block-high door is mathematically tall enough and still too low in practice: you get stuck. Since t

An online game that kids play needs more than a "report" button in the fine print. How we implement protective mechanisms as a consistent design principle — as of today, with an honest look at what's still missing. Reporting where it happens. In the game there's the /report chat command: it automatically quotes the last chat lines along with it — whoever reports doesn't have to retype or prove anything. Every report carries the world ID so we know the context. When entering a

Our NPCs can give players hints about treasure — an abandoned wreck or, if you're on good terms, a hidden chest. When we planned the feature, one solution seemed obvious: we have an AI backend, so why not let the NPCs have the language model phrase the hints! We decided against it — and the reason makes a nice lesson. The problem with the LLM: Our NPC dialogue from the AI backend is cached for cost reasons. For small talk that's perfect — nobody notices whether the trader del

When we built the public world browser — the list where players can make their worlds visible to others — we baked in a rule you might stumble over: A world can only be listed publicly if it has a join password. If the owner removes the password, the world automatically disappears from the list. That sounds paradoxical — public, but locked? Here's the why. Blocks Beyond The Stars is played by kids. An open list of freely joinable worlds would be an invitation for every anonym

For a long time, every new game began the same way: on a rocky, grey planet. That was a deliberate beginner-friendly decision — rock is easy to read, nothing distracts you. But it came at a price: the game's first impression was, of all things, its most monotonous planet. Screenshots from newcomers? Grey. First hour of play? Grey. So we rebuilt the start. The starting planet is now chosen from a selection of varied world types — with one important guardrail: it has to stay fa

VEGA, the game's onboard AI, and our NPCs can hold lively conversations thanks to a real language model. How that's built — and why the game works without it too — is what this article is about. The setup. The AI integration lives in its own backend service, built with LangChain/LangGraph and an OpenAI-compatible interface. Behind it right now is a Mistral model, hosted in Europe (OVH). The interface is deliberately swappable: if a better or cheaper model shows up tomorrow, w

Some features look small and still touch every layer of the game. The energy fence is one of those — here's the complete making-of, from the wish to the documented weakness. The wish: Players wanted to secure their bases against wild animals without bunkering down behind massive walls. So, a fence — but a sci-fi fence: energy panels you can craft, and a gate made of a shimmering energy membrane that you yourself simply walk through while wild animals stay outside. The design:

Survival mechanics are a tightrope walk: too harsh, and new players die frustrated before their first moment of success. Too soft, and eating becomes a meaningless chore. How we developed our hunger loop — including the corrections playtests forced on us. The false start. In early versions, newcomers regularly starved before the game had explained to them what you even eat. One playtester nailed it: "I'm starving — and I can't even find seeds!" (In our game, seeds are for pla

Block worlds are angular — that's their charm and their limit. For a while now we've been working on the question: how much more "organic" can Blocks Beyond The Stars look without losing its voxel soul? A look inside a running experiment. Our analysis sketched out a staircase of upgrade tiers: Tier 0 — edge breaking: Beveled block edges and merged faces. The world stays visibly blocky but loses the harsh "Lego glitter" on every edge. Low risk, immediately visible effect. Midd

Multiplayer features come in two kinds: those that let players play next to each other, and those that let them play with each other. Three of our features from the second kind — and what we learned designing them. Taming & companions. Wild creatures can be tamed and become companions that follow their owner and defend them. It got interesting in the details: a companion is allowed aboard the ship (wild animals get escorted out), it travels along between planets, and it has i

Blocks Beyond The Stars is completely open source — client, server, tools, all public on GitHub. Why put yourself through that, as a family project? And what does it actually get you? An interim assessment. The invitation is built in. We didn't just want a public repository, we wanted a genuine invitation: in the game itself there's a "Join in" button with an overlay that explains how to contribute. Plus a CONTRIBUTING guide, good first issues, and an automated contributor ag