Experiment: Rounder Shapes for a Blocky World

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.

Middle tiers — material instead of geometry: Better materials (PBR), detail textures, transitions between ground types. The shape stays angular, but the surface tells more of a story.

Tier 4 — real meshes: Terrain as a smoothed surface, the way "smooth voxel" games do it. Technically the biggest leap — and the most dangerous one: from here on it's no longer a block game, it's a different game.

Our interim finding: the value lies in the lower tiers. First experiments with merged faces (greedy meshing) also revealed a technical hurdle — our lighting is baked into the mesh per cell, which limits merging adjacent faces. That's a result too: some optimizations don't fail because of the idea, but because of an earlier, correct decision.

The honest status: the experiment is running, tier 0 is the candidate, tier 4 is deliberately off-limits for the foreseeable future. Blocky is not a bug. Blocky is the game.