Against loneliness in space: why our villagers wave now 👋🏘️

November 7, 2026

In mid-October, Justus said something that stayed with us: "Sometimes the game feels lonely." And yet our worlds are full of people: villagers with jobs and daily routines, crews on the space stations, settlers in your own base, traders with ships of their own. So why does it still feel empty? This article is about that question and about what we built from the answer.

Lots of people, but nobody reaches out. When we took a closer look, the answer was almost embarrassingly simple: no systems were missing, attention was. The villagers did turn towards you, but they only spoke when you pressed E yourself. Your first visit and your hundredth were the same, because the game didn't even remember when you had last been there. Your own residents greeted you in your base with "Oh — a pilot! We don't get many visitors out here." In your own home. 🙈 Much of what the world could have told you also went through a radio that you first had to research, build and put on. And the game even contained ten finished voice recordings that were never played.

For kids, this matters. When you play alone, you want the world to greet you back. So instead of building even more systems, we made the existing ones friendlier: say hello, remember, be glad.

The world greets you back. Since version 2026.10.15, villagers wave at you when you walk past and say your name once they know you. Someone who hasn't seen you in a while calls out "You're back!", and your own residents finally say "Welcome home!". Every villager now remembers you personally: strangers become acquaintances and then friends, and friends now and then have a small present for you. People also talk to each other, about the rain, the stars and about you: "Did you hear? Justus chased off the bandits!" If you do something good, people should hear about it. VEGA now tells you news from your base even without a radio and is happy with you about every achievement.

Wishes without a clock. A golden ! above someone's head means: this person has a wish, for example a few berries for a cake. It was important to us that this never turns into a chore. A wish never expires, there is no countdown, and if you only have part of it, you hear "no hurry!". The first wish is always easy, and nobody wishes for something your world doesn't have, so no berries without berry bushes. Siblings in the same world get different wishes, so nobody can snatch one away from the other. If you help a village with all four of its tasks, it throws you a party, and that waits patiently too, until you drop by some evening. 🎉

Voices, but no babble. All NPCs now speak with wordless voices like VEGA: humans and robots, female, male or neutral, matching their faces. There was one firm rule for this: no jumble of voices. Only one speaks at a time, you only hear them up close, big groups get quieter, and nobody talks over VEGA. A village square should sound lively, not exhausting.

Life in the wilderness. Next, we wanted you to meet someone away from the villages as well. Since version 2026.10.17, new worlds have small huts out in the open country. Gatherers, miners, woodcutters and hunters live there: they work during the day, sit by their campfire in the evening and sleep at night. Wanderers roam the land and talk to you. We looked closely at hunting, because kids play this game: it happens rarely and only to calm wild animals, never to your pets, and the animal simply sparkles away. One version later, following Justus' idea, the pioneers arrived: people with a small base of their own, a cellar and a pixelated skin that looks just like a player's. It makes the world feel as if someone else is out there.

A home with faces. Your own base has become more personal too. Every resident has their own bed: take it down and exactly that person moves out, put it back up and the same person returns. And because Justus reported that it stopped at five residents, a base now has room for up to 32.

And the AI? On our hosted worlds, a language model can phrase the residents' lines more personally. How that is kept safe is described in VEGA and the AI Backend. For village life we had one firm rule: every line also exists hand-written, in all 14 languages. In singleplayer and in the browser, the world greets you back just the same, only with our own lines.

You can't switch off loneliness with an update. But our guiding rule for everything still to come is set: the world should notice that you are there. 💛