Version 2026.10.4 – The discovery update: a bio lab, a scanner in every ship and wormholes 🧪🛰️🌀

October 4, 2026

Everything you harvest is full of secrets now. 🧪 When you pick a plant, fell a tree, mine ore or defeat an animal, you get your loot as always – plus a sample of that species. Samples go into your new sample case, so your backpack doesn't overflow, and with the sampler you can even take a sample from a living animal without hurting it. In the new bio lab you find out what a species carries: one of 19 effects, like running faster, jumping higher, a shield, seeing in the dark, heat protection or hiding from monsters. From that you mix preparations – injectors, gels, bars and capsules – and up to three effects can run at once. There are no recipes to look up: what a mix does follows from what you put in, and your handbook in the Codex remembers every try. 🔬

🌋 Here's the trick: what a species carries depends on where it lives. What survives next to a lava lake protects from heat, and the strongest stuff grows where it's hard to get to – so travelling pays off. The bio lab can also improve your drill, a weapon or a piece of your suit with a material, and the clone tank grows animals from your samples, even on a completely different planet. Cross two species and you get a brand-new one (always friendly), and two plant samples grow a plant with a shape nobody has seen before. 🌱

🛰️ Off to space: every ship now has a scanner, in the last slot of the flight bar next to the laser and the tractor beam. Point the nose at your target and hold fire – brackets lock on, a ring fills up, and the scan sweeps over the target. Scan a planet or moon and a card pops up: air, temperature, gravity, weather, water, lava, plants, animals, machines, terrain and how dangerous it is down there. Now you know before you land whether you need heat protection. 🪐 You can upgrade the scanner twice: the Deep Scanner reaches twice as far and shows a planet's ores, and the new Quantum Scanner finds rare ores and hidden data caches – and if you hold it at empty space, it scans the whole system at once.

🛟 Life pods and anomalies used to be plain red cubes. Now a life pod is a little orange capsule with a blinking distress beacon, and someone waves at you through the porthole – fly close and your tractor beam pulls it aboard. An anomaly is a shimmering bubble with glitching blocks around it, and only the scanner can read it. 🌀 And some systems now have wormholes: glowing tears in space that link two star systems. Fly up, press E, and you come out at the other end – both ways, and without a jump generator. Where one leads stays a mystery until you fly through or scan it. Wormholes are rare (about one pair per galaxy) and never lead to the story's special places.

🔧 We also fixed a lot: the clone tank follows your sample case by itself, a sentry post with a roof right above it isn't blind anymore, and if you take the engine out of your self-built ship, stepping out keeps you aboard instead of stranding you on the planet. Servers now make regular backups, and the "What's new?" window shows the news in your language – in all 14 game languages. 🌍

The network protocol goes to version 9, so game and server both need to be on 2026.10.4 (the desktop game updates itself on start, and the browser version is always current). Terrain generation stays at 20, so your worlds look the way they did, and your saves carry on. Every new text is available in all 14 languages. Have fun discovering! 🔭