All Posts

The best features of this game aren't in any design document. They start with a sentence at the dinner table. This one was: "Dad, there should be real factories…" Justus (10, internally long since our "Lead Product Manager") had looked at the crafting menus and concluded: always clicking together single items at the workbench — that doesn't feel like industry. A factory, that's something with presses that stomp, rotors that spin, conveyor belts! So that's exactly what we buil

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

June 28, 2026 An experimental macOS build is here — it compiles and packages cleanly, but we don't own a Mac, so we genuinely need YOUR help testing it (even "it bounced in the dock and quit" is useful feedback 🙏). Also new: opt-in crash reporting with a privacy scrubber, one-click client downloads straight from any server's portal, and the kid-friendly mission of the project is now spelled out everywhere.

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

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

June 27, 2026 Our biggest update yet! Explore collapsed ruins, hunt treasure chests, and claim rare industrial factories as your own base with SPS access codes. Rivers and lava now flow downhill into lakes — with waterfalls! And the milestone we're proudest of: native Linux support, built by Cora de la Mouche, our very first external contributor. This is exactly why we open-sourced the game. 💚🐧

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

For weeks I had secretly been working on the game's look in the evenings. Anti-aliasing, ambient occlusion, color moods per biome, light glinting off materials — all things that are invisible on their own and change everything together. And the whole time I showed none of it. Then came the evening of truth. I had Justus cold-start the new build — no warning, no "hey, look what I made". He landed on a planet, stood still for a second, and said: "Wait… is the water real now?" T

June 25, 2026 The game got seriously prettier: post-processing, SMAA, SSAO, glowing emissive blocks, per-biome cinematic color moods, and PBR-style specular on the voxels. Water is clear again (you can actually see the fish—er, blocks). The ship's cargo hold became genuinely usable, and we went fully open source under AGPL. Also new: a native in-game Arcade and Wiki, unblocking Linux and macOS down the road.

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

There are arcade machines in our space stations. Sit down at one, and you can play 20 little minigames — dexterity, puzzles, high-score chasing. Why is something like that in a space survival game? And what does a complete web browser have to do with it? A little story about detours. Why minigames at all? Because arcades belong to space stations like neon light — and because a kid who needs a break from surviving can stay in the game instead of reaching for the tablet. The ma

We've reached a huge milestone in the last few days: Blocks Beyond the Stars is now fully open source under the AGPL license! And not only that – we've already collected our first 20 stars on GitHub. A massive thank you to the community! Since we've only been developing the game as a team of two in our "AI lab" so far, we're now looking for support. We're convinced that this game has the potential to be truly great with the combination of AI tools and a genuine developer comm

June 23, 2026 New players kept starving or getting chewed on in the first minutes — not anymore. You now spawn with starter food, VEGA actually teaches you how eating works, and there's a scrap pistol so you're not fighting laser drones with a machete. Best of all: enemies need line of sight now — duck behind a wall and they lose you. Linux-via-Proton players also escaped a nasty 30 fps lock. 🐧

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

Some releases start with a plan. This one started with a camera. I had just built a little recording tool into the game — it flies the camera through space, lands on a planet, and records short clips without a HUD, with sound. Finally proper trailers instead of shaky screen captures! So I sat down with Justus to get some nice footage. And of course: the moment you point a camera at your own game, it shows off every bug it has. Justus spotted them immediately. "Dad, why is the

June 22, 2026 Ever landed your ship on a wild creature and found it sealed inside like an angry souvenir? Fixed! Ships now politely evict wildlife on landing (tamed companions may of course stay 🐾). Enemies also stop visibly attacking the moment you're safely aboard, the space HUD lost some surface-only clutter, and F1 is now the one true feedback key.

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