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June 21, 2026 Multiplayer grew up: the default player cap jumped from 4 to 12, and there's now tiered radio comms with live voice chat — talk to your crew across the planet! For the tinkerers, the dedicated server ships as a Docker image, so hosting your own world works on any OS with one command. Behind the scenes we added a whole wall of CI quality gates too.

I'm developing an online game, and my son plays it. That sentence sounds harmless — but it's the strictest design constraint this project has. Because I sit on both sides of the table: as a developer who wants features, and as a father who knows what's out there on the internet. A few decisions that wouldn't exist without this dual role: Accounts without an email address. A kid shouldn't leave a data trail just to stack blocks. So our accounts don't require an email — what we

June 21, 2026 First real gameplay update! Floating scan-drones now fire ranged lasers (watch out!), ship destruction leaves a proper explosion behind, the rear hatch shows a cool blue energy door in flight instead of an open hole, and landing actually flies you to the planet you picked. Plus fresh screenshots from every planet type — the gallery finally shows how varied the worlds are.

It started with a simple idea at the dinner table. My 10-year-old son, Justus, had a very precise vision for his dream game: "Minecraft, but in space. With self-built spaceships, procedurally generated planets, and base building." As an IT professional, I thought the idea was fantastic – but I also knew that, alongside my full-time job, I simply didn't have the time to write thousands of lines of code for a game engine in the evenings. The solution? We bring artificial intell

June 20, 2026 Small update, big milestone: our release pipeline now automatically mirrors the installers to itch.io. Downloading the game just got a lot friendlier — and we stopped shipping a Unity folder that literally has "DoNotShip" in its name. Oops. 😅

June 20, 2026 The repo went public, so we put on our grown-up pants: a proper pull-request workflow with a protected main branch, security patches for the AI backend, and a full sweep of compiler warnings. Open source means doing things properly — even for a family project.

June 20, 2026 Yep, two releases in one day — that's what launch-day energy looks like. 😄 v0.2.0 was mostly about getting the release machinery itself into shape so future updates could ship smoothly. Not glamorous, but every spaceship needs a working launchpad.

June 20, 2026 This is where it all began: the very first tagged build of Blocks Beyond the Stars. No fancy release notes yet, just a game that finally existed outside our own machines — blocks, stars, and a whole lot of ideas from Justus waiting to be built. Every journey starts with version 0.1. 💫