v0.7.4 — Playtest Polish: Comfort, Oxygen & a Friendlier Start 🎮

July 8, 2026

Sometimes the most valuable thing that can happen to a game is a real person sitting down to actually play it — and then telling you, honestly, every little thing that bugged them. That's exactly what happened here. A huge thank-you to Severin, whose hands-on playtest is behind pretty much this entire release. 🙌 This one's all quality-of-life, but it's the kind of polish you feel in the first five minutes.

⏸️ Comfort & controls

The big one: Esc now opens a proper pause menu (Resume / Settings / Quit) instead of instantly asking "leave the game?". That means you can finally reach Settings — and the volume — without leaving your world, and changes take effect immediately. Switch language and the HUD flips live; drag the volume and you hear it right away; tweak quality, VSync, FPS cap, fog, mouse sensitivity — all applied on the spot. The Settings screen itself also got wider and properly organized, with real section headers so that long list finally scans. Oh, and Alt-Tabbing out and back no longer sets your mouse cursor loose. 🖱️

🌊 Survival tweaks

• Shallow water breaks your fall now — even a single block of water cushions the landing, Minecraft-style. No more dying next to a puddle that looked deep enough. 😅

• Oxygen lasts noticeably longer — a full tank now runs ~285 seconds on foot at Normal.

🧭 A friendlier start for new players

This is where Severin's feedback really shows:

• The oxygen mechanic is finally visible — on a breathable world your vitals bar now literally says "Oxygen (breathable)", so you understand why it isn't draining, plus a one-time hint that space, water and toxic worlds will empty your tank.

• "Where's the iron?" now has an answer — the starter mission and mining tutorial tell you it sits just a few blocks down, and ores (iron especially) are a bit more common.

• Your first minutes stay yours — the guaranteed starter data cube no longer glows right next to your ship; it's a short walk off the landing pad now (~20 blocks), so new players aren't yanked into a minigame before they've even looked around.

🖱️ Official Worlds & portal polish

The hosted-worlds flow got a real UX pass: loading spinners everywhere something runs in the background (waking, creating, stopping, deleting, uploading saves — no more "did that even work?" moments), a friendlier name prompt if your chosen player name is taken, and a cleaner, better-aligned Official Worlds window. Best of all, your own worlds and the public ones now live in one single scrollable window — clearly split into "My worlds" and "Public worlds" — instead of popping open a second window.

The theme this time is simple: listen to the people who play, then fix the small stuff. Every single one of these was a "hm, that's annoying" moment for someone real — and that's the best kind of to-do list. Thanks again, Severin. 🚀