Technology

The development of Blocks Beyond The Stars happens completely in the open on GitHub — every commit, every pull request, every release is there to read. But let's be honest: who scrolls through a commit list in the evening? From now on there's a more comfortable option: you can simply have the project news read out to you. Our GitHub now has its own podcast. What is Podlog? Podlog is a service that watches a GitHub repository and automatically turns it into an audio podcast. Y

Anyone who installs our game on Windows may know the moment: "Windows protected your PC" — SmartScreen warns about an "unknown publisher," and you have to click "More info → Run anyway" first. That's not a virus; it's simply because our installers aren't signed yet. We want that warning gone — without having to buy an expensive certificate. The problem with code-signing certificates. A Windows publisher certificate (OV or EV) costs money every year, often tied to company veri

A release of Blocks Beyond The Stars today consists of a single command: pushing a git tag. Everything after that is done by the machine. In this article I'll show our CI/CD pipeline — and why the effort pays off even for a hobby project. The release workflow. As soon as a tag like v0.7.4 is pushed, GitHub Actions builds the complete package: Windows installers (setup, portable, MSI), a Linux build, a WebGL build for the browser, and a Docker image for the server — six artifa

What actually happens to the players when we need to update the server? The simple answer would be: pull the plug. We built the better answer — and it's one of my favorite features, even though ideally you barely notice it. The announcement. The server can send a maintenance message to every running world. In the game, a banner with a countdown then appears: "Server restart in 10 minutes." The message has to be actively dismissed — but only after a few seconds, so nobody acci

Blocks Beyond The Stars is also played by children. That shapes not only the game design, but also the security engineering behind it. Three examples. Accounts without email — on purpose. A player account with us doesn't require an email address. That's not a missing feature, it's a decision: we want as little personal data as possible, especially from young players. What we don't store can't get lost. (The honest flip side: there is no "forgot password" via email as a result

All our online worlds — the portal, the official worlds, the worlds created by players — run on a single rented Linux server (VPS). No data center, no five-figure cloud bill. In this article I'll show how the server is set up and what we learned along the way. Hardening first. Before the game was allowed onto the server, the basic security came first: a firewall (ufw) that only opens the necessary ports, fail2ban against automated login attempts, and SSH with keys only. Caddy

Your own world on the internet that friends can join at any time — without anyone having to set up a server. That's the idea behind our Hosted Worlds, and in this article I'll show you what really happens behind the "Play" button in the portal. The heart of it all is the WorldHost: a small service on our server that manages worlds. Each world runs in its own Docker container — fully isolated, with its own save file, its own memory limit and its own CPU cap. When nobody is pla

How a dad, a kid, and an AI turned a pile of raw gameplay footage into two full playlists — without a single hour in a video editor. We finally have a YouTube presence for Blocks Beyond the Stars — 22 Shorts and 6 longer Let's Play / tutorial videos. And honestly? The way they got made is a story worth telling, because the actual "editing" took about half an hour. Here's the full pipeline. Step 1: Justus hits record 🎮 Every good gaming video starts with someone actually play

Our project now has well over a thousand automated tests: around 990 on the server side, about 120 in the Unity client. For a family project, that sounds like overkill. It's the opposite — and here's why. Tests are our second developer. As a solo project, there's nobody who says in code review: "Wait, that breaks the crafting." The tests are that colleague. Every game mechanic — recipes, oxygen, hunger, creature behavior, world passwords — has tests that run with every change

Blocks Beyond The Stars doesn't just run as a Windows and Linux program, but also directly in the browser — no installation, one click in the portal is enough. The road there was more instructive than expected. Unity WebGL is a world of its own. Unity has been able to export to the web for a long time, but the devil is in the details. Our biggest stumbling block: in the browser there are no real background threads like in the native build. Our terrain system normally builds t

In the Unity editor, everything looked perfect. In the finished build: pink surfaces and missing effects. Welcome to one of the nastiest Unity traps — and a few of its relatives. Shader stripping. When building, Unity throws out everything that apparently isn't needed — including shaders. The problem: if you load shaders at runtime via Shader.Find() (like we do with our more than 20 custom shaders for water, atmosphere, holograms, and more), Unity sees no reference to them in

A player places a glow lamp in their base. What happens technically? This innocent question triggered a fundamental decision for us — and the answer is a nice example of how the "more modern" solution isn't always the better one. Option A: real Unity lights. Every glowing block becomes a point light source, the engine computes everything. Looks great — but doesn't scale. A voxel world can have hundreds of glowing blocks in view; real-time point lights in that quantity make an

One of the most frequent questions we receive is: How exactly do you build a complex multiplayer voxel game entirely with AI? The short answer: With very strict guidelines. The AI is fantastic at writing code, but it quickly loses sight of the architectural perspective. That's why I enforced a strict client/server architecture from day one. Our tech stack at a glance: Client: Unity 6 for rendering, input, and voxel meshing. Server: .NET 8 Dedicated Server for chunk generation

At some point the honest diagnosis was on the table: the game played well but looked like a prototype. Instead of eyeing a different render pipeline or even a different engine, we asked ourselves one question: how much look is still hiding in Unity's URP if you really push it to its limits? The answer: astonishingly much. Anti-aliasing (SMAA). Block worlds are made of edges — and flickering edges ruin every screenshot. SMAA smooths them without making the image mushy. Ambient

Blocks Beyond The Stars is open source — it has been from the start. But under which license, that's something we fundamentally changed along the way: from the permissive MIT license to AGPL-3.0. Here's the why. What MIT would have meant: With MIT, anyone may take our code, modify it, and resell it as a closed product — without giving anything back. For libraries that's often exactly right. For a complete game with servers, it felt wrong: someone could have taken our work, bu

Blocks Beyond The Stars has no graphic artist and no sound designer. Still, every new block gets its own texture and every new feature its sound. Our tool for that: generative AI — with a clear workflow around it. Textures. New block tiles are created with OpenAI image models. The prompt describes material, style, and the game's voxel aesthetic; the result is brought down to tile size and sorted into our block atlas — one big texture in which every block type has its fixed ti

Our client mesher has an iron rule: every block that isn't air gets rendered and has collision. Period. This simplification makes the meshing fast and the code simple — until a feature comes along that wants to break exactly this rule. The energy gate. For our energy fences we wanted a gate: a shimmering membrane that players and friendly NPCs can simply walk through, but wild animals can't. A block, in other words, that is visible but doesn't act as a wall for some. Exactly

Multiplayer bugs are a genus of their own: nothing crashes, nothing logs an error — simply nothing happens. Two of our favorite traps from our own networking code, as a warning and for entertainment. Trap 1: the unregistered message. Our network protocol knows message classes — "block changed", "player moved", "chat". Every new message type has to be registered with the codec so it gets an ID and can be serialized. Forget that, and the worst possible thing happens: the send c