Version 2026.8.11 – Every world gets its own weather 🌦

August 11, 2026

Until now every world in your save had the same weather — at the same time, in the same order, and after a restart it all played again from the top. That's over: weather now has a temper of its own, a direction, and consequences. And the animals calling to you through it finally stopped sounding alike. 🌦

Weather comes in episodes now. It builds, holds and fades instead of simply switching on and off, with its own strength each time, so no two storms are alike. Every world has its own temper: one flips between squalls, another broods under a single sky for minutes on end. On top of that there's a rhythm — thunderstorms pile up through the afternoon, mist gathers around dawn, and a slow wet and dry season rides over all of it. ⛅

And there's far more of it. Drizzle, sleet, ground fog, gales, blizzards, heatwaves — plus the properly alien: acid rain on toxic worlds, ember fall on volcanic ones, spore blooms in jungles and swamps, ion storms and meteor showers. Even airless moons and asteroids have weather for the very first time. And it travels: fronts drift across the world, so you can watch a storm arrive — and while the mountain tops sit in cloud and snow, the valley below stays dry. 🌪️

Weather has consequences now. Corrosive and falling weather eats at your suit out in the open — suddenly a roof is a real answer. Rain waters the beds you planted. Scanners lose range in blown grit and charged air. Animals hunker down. Snow settles on the ground and melts again when it warms up. But it can pay, too: an ion storm charges your suit, a spore bloom fattens the harvest — sometimes walking into the bad weather is exactly the right move. The new weather scanner tells you what's coming before you set out. ⚡

Every animal has its own voice now. Until this release the voice wasn't a rolled trait at all — the game had roughly nine voices per habitat, forever, no matter how many worlds you visited. Now every species gets its own vocal genome: a base call, a second voice layered behind it, a timbre, a phrase of one to seven sounds, a rising or falling melody — and its own rhythm, from a chatterbox every three seconds to a loner that says something once every 55 seconds. 🐾

And you can hear the body. An eyeless cave dweller fires off a rising train of clicks, because it navigates by sound. A titan lets out one deep rumble every 14 to 30 seconds. A medusa is almost silent. A pack hunter barks short and rough. Horns ring, gas sacs muffle, skittish animals sound thin and quick — and the combat cries inherit the same timbre, so a roar belongs to that monster instead of to all of them at once. The scanner even writes the voice down for you: "Calls in rapid clicks", "Calls in slow, deep bellows". 🔊

Painting got more comfortable. The pixel editor gained a fill bucket (with undo!), the eyedropper now sits on Alt+click or the middle mouse button, and the palette grew from 16 to 32 colours — the new half being lighter and darker siblings of the colours you actually shade with. Everything you've painted so far keeps its exact colours. And all the body parts now live in one single "Appearance" screen with a slowly turning figure, instead of nine menu cards. 🎨

The hotbar can do things by itself now. Middle-click the selected slot and a small menu opens: Swap with a backpack slot, Colour (dye it, make it glow, or drop one of your own painted designs onto it) and Form — all 19 shapes drawn as silhouettes of that exact material, plus the ones you designed yourself. The whole stack converts and lands back in the same slot. No trip to the workbench, no menu. And your painted designs now survive mining: place something painted, and it comes back into your backpack still painted. 🎒

Ladders stay on their wall. Until now a placed ladder didn't store which wall it clung to at all — the game guessed again on every redraw. So ladders hugged the wrong wall, free-standing ones quietly turned into poles, and mining the neighbouring wall made the whole ladder column jump around. Now it remembers its wall, and R cycles through: automatic, the four walls, free-standing. On top of that the crafted staircase is finally a staircase — with real steps you walk up, instead of a cube. And when building, the surface you actually clicked now wins. 🪜

And a few annoyances fewer: the Esc pause used to hold only the server — behind the dialog you kept falling, animals kept walking, the sun kept moving. Now the world you can see stands still too. In space flight the cargo readout was printed straight across the hull bar; hull and shield are now proper gauges in the flight HUD, warning included when it gets tight. And dyed or painted stacks show their name again instead of a cryptic key — "Snow · painted" rather than [item.snow#t8fd030.name]. 🐛

Enjoy the storm watching — and put something on over that suit. 🌦✨