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July 7, 2026 Small release, but a genuinely useful one — this is the update where hosted worlds finally become discoverable. Up until now, joining someone's world meant they had to send you a link or a token personally. Cozy, but not exactly "come one, come all." Now you can browse worlds other players are running and just hop in. 🚀 🌍 A public world browser Meet the new "Public worlds" list — a card on the web portal and a browse dialog right inside the game's Official Worl

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

July 6, 2026 This one's a bit of a "quality of life" powerhouse. The headline: you never have to open a browser to play on our hosted worlds anymore. Everything the web portal could do now lives right inside the game — plus you can farm food, fence in your creatures, get treasure tips from villagers, and start new games somewhere that won't immediately try to kill you. 😄 🖥️ Play without ever touching a browser The big one. The Official Worlds menu inside the game now does e

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

July 6, 2026 The "just my friends" update: world creators can now password-protect their hosted worlds (with guess-proof cooldowns). Server restarts announce themselves with an in-game countdown instead of surprise-kicking everyone. The portal got a kid-friendly rework — including a "Feedback & ideas" card so kids can send wishes without filing a report against anyone — and the Play button now launches the game directly in your browser. One click, playing. 🌐

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

July 5, 2026 A monster release. The world looks softer and more hand-crafted thanks to the organic look overhaul — ambient occlusion, beveled edges, real 3D plants, grass tufts, and fully rotatable building shapes. Gamepad and touch controls arrived (experimental). And the big one: hosted Official Worlds — create a world on the web portal, share it, and friends join with one click. No port forwarding, no server setup, with kid-friendly community rules, reporting and full DSGV

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

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

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 has no studio, no budget, and no deadline. It has a family: me (Marcel) at the keyboard, Justus (10) as merciless lead tester and idea machine, and Verena, who keeps the whole thing grounded. How a game gets made under these conditions — a look behind the scenes in the literal sense. The rhythm. Development happens in the evenings and on weekends. That sounds like little time, and it is — but it enforces a discipline that bigger projects sometimes lack

"How do you come up with your features?" — Honest answer: mostly, we don't. The features come to us, while playing, at the dinner table, in conversation. Three examples of how a passing remark becomes a game mechanic. The camera. The wish: "I want to take photos like in real life." Not screenshots — photos, as an item in the game. So there's now a craftable camera: you stand there, take aim, the HUD disappears, click. The pictures land in a photo gallery in the menu. Since th

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

June 29, 2026 Quality-of-life galore: ladders are finally climbable, you auto-step onto slabs and stairs, shaped blocks show proper icons, and stone needs a drill (soft stuff still digs bare-handed). Oxygen tanks come in three tiers now, and climbing out of water no longer feels like wrestling a wet slide. Plus: the first experimental browser client landed, contributed by Devin Dixon — with German localization fixes from Maqbool Ahmed. Community power! 🙌

The credits of this game list no graphics studio and no sound studio. Yet every block has a texture, every biome its music, and every energy fence its hum. How that works — and how it feels — is what this post is about. The tools. We use generative AI as our missing team: block textures are made with image models, sound effects with ElevenLabs, and the music is homemade. On itch.io we write, with a wink, "100% AI-made, driven by a 10-year-old's imagination" — and both halves