Version 2026.7.24 – Binoculars, thermal vision and greenhouse berries 🔭

July 30, 2026

On foot there was no way to look at anything in the distance — you just walked and hoped. Not anymore: there are binoculars now, and their upgrade shows you what is alive out there. On top of that, villages grow real berries, and two people from the community helped build this one. 🚀

Binoculars are a workshop craft — 2 iron plates, 2 glass, 1 cable. Hold them, right-click to raise them to your eye, and every further right-click steps the magnification: 2× · 3.3× · 6×, one more lowers them again. So that 6× doesn't turn into a shaking fit, look sensitivity and head-bob are damped along with the zoom — you can actually hold still and look. And if you switch item, open a menu, hop on a speeder or take off, the optic drops itself. 🔭

The thermal binoculars are the upgrade. The recipe consumes a plain pair (plus titanium, a circuit board and crystal), so you still carry only one optic. Press I while looking through them and the view flips to infrared: the world grades cold and blue, and every energy source glows straight through rock and hills — hostiles hot red-orange, wildlife amber (dimmer asleep, icy in stasis), your tamed companions green, NPCs cyan, other players white, lava deep orange, and settlements, factories, ruins, bases and your ship as magenta columns. Every contact is labelled with what it is and how far away: "Bandit camp · 143 m". 🌡️

For the sake of honesty: it does not let you see further. Terrain only exists as far as the world is streamed around you, and that is exactly where the haze ends — no lens changes that. What the thermal mode buys you is the contacts: they read straight through the fog, so you know what is waiting behind the hill before you walk over it. Stealthed players stay invisible, by the way — the scope cannot defeat a stealth field.

Villages grow berries now. Every village and city keeps a greenhouse you can walk into and harvest: in a village a timber frame with a glass gable, soil beds, a torch and a hinged door; in a city a two-tier hydroponics bay with iron frame, full glass shell, trays on two levels, ceiling grow lights (it glows at night from outside) and a sliding door. Those berries are always safe to eat — wild plants are toxic on roughly every third world, so a village greenhouse would have been farming poison. Harvested plants grow back, which makes it a food source rather than a one-time raid. If you'd rather grow your own, 3 berries make 2 seeds by hand, and a hydro tray from the workshop lets you farm without soil. Space stations carry the same bay on board. New worlds only — settlements are built when a world is created. 🌱

The in-flight system chart finally looks like a star chart. It is centred on the star now, and every planet rides its own orbit as a coloured ring — before, the star was a dot shoved against the edge and the planets read as a random scatter of blobs. A ringed planet wears its rings here too, as an ellipse. And a bug that turned up while playing is gone: a click on the chart didn't land where you clicked it — waypoints ended up somewhere else, and clicking a planet to target it practically never worked. 🧭

And finally, two things that didn't come from us. Alessandro translated all 290 block names and descriptions into Italian — the first community language in the game. It actually loads now, because until today the game simply ignored the file; Italian will appear in the menu once enough of the rest is translated, and anything untranslated stays English until then. And SpaleRuby went through the portal website with a keyboard and a screen reader and wrote down what didn't work: fields without labels, messages nobody gets read out, forms where Enter does nothing. All four fixed. Thank you both! 🇮🇹

Have fun looking around — and if the thermal mode finds you something you'd rather not have found: screenshot, please! ✨