Version 2026.10.1 – The sparks update: effects for every tool, engine plumes in space and doors that open ✨🚪

October 2, 2026

Until now, almost every shot, scan and drill hit looked the same: a little cube that blinked and was gone. Not any more. ✨ In this update every weapon, scanner, drill and gadget has an effect of its own – on foot and in flight. 🔭 The terrain scanner sends a wave rolling over the rock, and the ores it finds glow through the ground as ghostly cubes. The hand scanner shows a fan of light and a hologram box with a sweeping scan line, the weather scanner fires a probe beam into the sky, the translator sends out sound-wave rings, and the ship's planet scanner sweeps over the globe and lights up the resources it finds. 🔫 Every weapon fires differently: a slug, a rail shot with rings, a laser, a plasma ball that lights up the cave walls around it. Targets flash white when they are hit, and a marker at the crosshair shows where a hit came from. Defeat stays friendly: creatures break apart into sparkles, robots fall to parts, and bandits beam away.

⛏️ When you mine, a block cracks, the mining beam glows on it, chips in the block's own colours fly off the face you hit, and in the end it bursts and leaves a small gem to pick up. A placed block lands with a little pop. 🚀 And in space: every engine nozzle has its own plume, space dust streaks past to show how fast you are going, and the hyperjump is a tunnel of light. Your shield is a hexagon bubble that ripples where it is hit and shatters when it breaks. Enemies explode, asteroids break apart, and your ship glows with heat as it comes in to land. 👥 Best of all, you now see the shots, drilling and scans of other players, and they see yours. If it gets too much, the settings have Screen shake (0–100 %), Reduce flashes for light-sensitive eyes and Reduced effects. A few old bugs are gone along the way: the terrain scanner's ore markers were hidden behind the terrain, and the lights of beam pads, emergency lamps and glowing creatures never shone. Now they do.

🚪 And then there was a report from the school club: Daimien built a house on a flower world, hung a door in it and reported: "The door won't open." Nothing was broken in the browser, but there were three ways a door you built could stay shut, and the game never told you how doors open. Now nothing can be built into a doorway (before, a right-click at the door put the block in your hand into the opening), a flower in front of the gap no longer turns the door sideways, and a right-click at a closed door tells you: "Doors open with E." E works the door you are looking at first, and your ship's hatch can no longer be walled up. One sentence, four fixes – thank you, Daimien!

The network protocol stays at version 8 and the terrain generation at 19, so all your saves and worlds simply carry on. An older game version can still join, but it shows neither the other players' effects nor the new door hints – so better update (the desktop game does that on start, and the browser is always current). All new texts are in all 14 languages. Have fun making sparks! 🎆