One month of our school club: six planets, six creatures, two giant plants – and a door 🎒🌈

October 2, 2026

One month ago, on September 2, we sat down with our game-development club in the computer room at KuBa West for the first time. That evening we made two promises: every child gets an answer to their suggestion. And anyone who contributes something that makes it into the game goes into the credits. Time to count up what became of those promises. In short: quite a lot. 😄

It started with honest bug reports. On the first evening the kids simply played – in the browser, on computers that didn't always want to play along – and afterwards wrote down what bothered them. Ben, Marie and Nikita typed their findings into the game, wrote them on paper or simply told us, and the very next day's update was full of them. Since then titans can be scanned, no more slits of light flash through at block edges, the camera no longer looks through walls, the days are noticeably brighter, and in the cockpit you simply launch the ship with E. Marie thought she had died – but the game had only brought her to safety and then showed nothing for eight seconds. Now it carries on after a second, and a hint tells you what is going on. Ben wanted to know what the bed is actually for – now the game tells you. In the second week Paul reported that you could get stuck, wedged inside your own ship, and later Nikita found a white floor in the browser that you simply fell through. Both are fixed. And Noah spent a whole evening trying one computer after another until one worked. That isn't in any bug report, but it is just as much a part of it – which is why Noah is in the credits too.

Then came the ideas. On the second Wednesday we wanted to invent animals and plants together. The kids brought whole planets right away. Three days later they were in the game:

• Sophie's Rainbow Planet is almost all sea: water in every colour of the rainbow, all the way down to the bottom, underwater forests, a seabed of sand you can dig in, and islands with plants hanging from their undersides into the water. At the first test, though, these islands hung in the sky. What Sophie meant were islands floating on the sea. So, back to work. 😅 That is exactly why we practise describing ideas as precisely as possible in the club – and asking when something doesn't fit.

• Daimien's Flower Planet has not a single tree, only fields of flowers in every colour – and exactly one creature: the flowerling, a walking flower with a big blossom for a head. It smiles as long as you leave the planet alone, and it brings berries to patient visitors. Mine something in front of it, and you will see the smile turn into a mouth full of teeth. A small confession: for two weeks the flowerling's face was stuck inside its head, and nobody could see the smile or the teeth. Now it grins just the way Daimien imagined it.

• Ben's Gaming Planet is made of green hills full of caves. Gaming PCs, monitors, keyboards and mice lie around everywhere, and somewhere a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse and a PC tower as big as mountains rise out of the landscape. The first version looked more like a meadow with a few computers on it. Now it is clearly a gaming planet. 🖥️

• Lena's Leni lives only on snow and ice: half dog, half bear, with white, shaggy fur and no tail, peaceful and always out in pairs. Lena's second idea is the Paul flower – a flower as tall as a tree, with blue-green leaves bigger than you are. Beautiful, but poisonous.

• On top of that came two ideas from the whole group: a Scrap Planet, where mining shakes random finds out of the scrap, and water in every colour. Every new world with a sea now rolls its own water colour, and the rain joins in, right down to the drops on your visor. 💧

Animals as big as high-rises. One wish came up again and again in the club: really huge animals. A four-legged giant as tall as a high-rise, and a sandworm that hears every step in the sand and suddenly bursts out of the dunes. That became the colossus, forty to sixty blocks tall, the sandworm, a whole new kind of planet – the sand sea – and the thumper, which lures the worm to you. 🐛

The next round: worksheets. After that the kids worked out their ideas on our worksheets: with names, colours, behaviour and everything that goes with it. Three of them have been in the game since version 2026.9.18:

• Theo's Arena Nigra is a black planet that exists at most once per galaxy. A sea of black sand, needles of basalt, a red sky with black clouds, ash storms, lava in the gorges – and three red-and-black sandworms, the Ignivermis. They eat the animals that walk across the sand. Theo's idea even changed the other worms: on every new sand sea world the sandworms now hunt animals, and a siren on the sand lures them in.

• Sophie's Fifi plant is as tall as a tree, with a green trunk, yellow leaves and pink blossoms that glow and light up everything around them at night. Its berries are always edible and grow back after two minutes. You'll find it in small groves on every green world. 🌸

• Paul and Ben's Mini-Michi-Paul is knee-high and yellow, with a big head and two arms. Mini-Michi-Pauls travel in swarms and beg for food, and their call sounds suspiciously like "meins, meins!" – German for "mine, mine!". Two bananas tame one. For it we added a whole new body plan to the game, the biped, and now the randomly generated animals of other worlds can have it too. Mini-Michi-Pauls live on tropical worlds – and on Sophie's Rainbow Planet. That's where two club ideas meet. 🍌🌈

And then there was a door. Last Wednesday Daimien built a house on a flower world in the browser, hung a door and reported: "The door won't open." Behind it were three bugs at once – plus the fact that the game had never explained how doors open at all. One sentence, four fixes – in the game since version 2026.10.1. Thank you, Daimien! 🚪

What else the ideas set in motion. The kids didn't just bring new things into the game, they made the game itself grow. So that Leni and the flowerling look the same on every world, there are now hand-designed creatures alongside the randomly generated ones. Mini-Michi-Paul and the Ignivermis build on that too. Water has its own colour, worms go hunting, and animals can walk on two legs. And in the credits the club has its own block, in all 14 languages: Ben, Daimien, Lena, Marie, Nikita, Noah, Paul, Sophie and Theo. 🎓

How it works for us. Not every idea goes into the game exactly as it was described. With some we ask follow-up questions, some we first build in a general form – the giants came first as randomly generated animals, Theo's worm came after – and when something doesn't fit, we say why. The path is always the same: the kids describe their idea, I turn it into a precise work order for our AI, Justus tests whether it feels right, and in the club the kids check for themselves whether it turned out the way they imagined.

Where to find it all. Everything new is in new worlds – your existing saves stay as they are. Some planets are rare: you won't meet the Rainbow Planet or the Scrap Planet in every star system, and Arena Nigra exists at most once per galaxy. The Fifi plant, on the other hand, grows on every green world, and you'll find Leni in pairs on ice and snow. Happy hunting! 🔭

Thanks to all the kids in the club – and to everyone at KuBa who helps make this club possible! Anyone who would like to join: the club is open to all grades, and all the info is on our club page. See you on Wednesday, after the autumn holidays! 🌟

Justus, Verena and Marcel