Justus' laptop is our yardstick 💻

November 7, 2026

Our strategy contains one question every new idea has to pass: Does it still run in a browser tab? For us, performance isn't a clean-up phase at the end. It's a feature of the game, as important as any other. Our yardstick for it isn't in an office, it's at home: Justus' laptop. Inside are an Intel i5-8250U and a Radeon 530, a processor from 2017 and an entry-level graphics card. These are exactly the devices kids play on: the old family laptop, school computers and a tablet in the browser. A game that only runs on fast machines leaves exactly those kids out.

Measure first, then tinker. At the start of September we spent two days doing nothing but measuring where the time goes: on the screen, on the server and in the network. Quite a bit came to light. The server, for example, rebuilt the same landscape around the home landing pad every ten seconds. Then we cleaned up piece by piece, always the biggest thing first. The result arrived with version 2026.9.2: on the same computer the game now draws three to four times as many frames per second, and the small stutters while walking are almost gone. Everything looks exactly as before, it just runs much more smoothly. 🚀

Loading time: from 23 to just under 3 seconds. On our city world Glutweite, a lava desert with a huge guarded city, the server needed around 23 seconds before you could even join. So we split the start-up into stages and timed each one. Since then the loading bar on PC shows the real steps. It turned out that the search for landing pads ran again on every start and took almost eight seconds. Now the world remembers its landing pads, and looking them up takes two milliseconds. The city's doors were measured one by one against the world on every start, which cost almost five seconds. Now the game measures them on the blueprint, in 20 milliseconds. And the program's warm-up runs alongside instead of before. Since version 2026.9.14 you're in after just under three seconds. ⏱️

The landing map that wouldn't show up. Since the water update in version 2026.10.14 the landing map in space often stayed dark for a long time. The reason: for every single pixel of the map the game worked out how far a pond spreads, cell by cell. On a big planet our measurement added up to 13.7 seconds, more than that in the game itself, and in the browser the map practically never arrived. Now the map only needs a quick hint whether there's water at a spot. It appears instantly, rough at first and sharp a moment later. 13.7 seconds became a tenth of a second.

The browser: 40 instead of 208 megabytes. On the first visit the browser version used to download 208 MB, and 164 MB of that was music: all 40 songs, of which one play session hears maybe three to five. While waiting for the loading bar, Justus asked at some point whether the game was broken. 😅 Since version 2026.8.19 the songs sit next to the game as separate files and are only loaded when it's their turn. The first visit now needs around 40 MB, and you're in the main menu after about ten seconds.

Tablets, and graphics that set themselves. On a tablet every megabyte counts. A single unpacked music track takes around 80 MB of memory, so the game no longer preloads music there. In the browser the game guesses a quality level on first start and then measures for about 15 seconds. Since version 2026.11.8 the PC does that too on a new install. It starts on "Medium", and the game only switches to "High" once it has measured a real world. It never changes anything in the middle of a game, and if you pick your graphics yourself, you keep them.

Pretty effects, but with a switch. Every new effect has to be switchable. The atmosphere effects from version 2026.10.10, fog, light shafts and glowing lava, come in Off, Some and All, or one by one. The browser on "Low" only gets the frugal ones. That way the game can shine on a strong computer without leaving Justus' laptop behind. ✨

Is it stuttering for you? Then press F1 (F2 in the browser) and write briefly where it's catching. Since version 2026.9.2 bug reports carry your system info, which computer and which graphics, so we know where to look. 🔧

Justus and Marcel