Version 2026.8.13 – Playing together, for real this time 🤝

August 13, 2026

The last update put several people into the same world for the first time. Then came the evenings after that — and with them a whole list of things that were there but didn't work. A trade you could ask for but never accept. A break you were only allowed to take alone. Paintwork nobody but you could see. Your own landing pad refusing to let you land. That's this update: a pile of things that finally do what you've been expecting them to do all along. 🤝

Trading actually works now. Inviting a nearby player to trade with T sent them one line in the chat — and that was it. No window, no key, no way to say yes. There was simply no way a player-to-player trade could ever be opened. Now an invitation opens an Accept / Decline window, exactly like a docking request, and accepting opens the trade on both sides. And the keys now reach as far as the server actually allows trading — before, they stopped one metre short, and that's precisely where pressing them did nothing at all. 🤝

A break is a break for the whole crew. Until now only a player alone in a world could pause it. With two of you, the screen said "Paused" while behind it hunger climbed, animals hunted and night fell. Now the world stops as soon as everyone is sitting in their pause menu — and runs again the moment one of you presses Resume. The dialog tells you what it's waiting for: "Paused 1/2 — waiting for: Severin". In all 14 languages. And if someone's game crashes mid-break, they don't hold the rest of you up forever. ⏸️

Everyone else can see your paintwork now. The face you painted, the painted arms, the helmet — all of it was only ever sent to you when you arrived in a world. Anyone already there never heard about it. So you walked around beautifully painted while everyone else saw a factory-fresh suit. Now appearance is exchanged both ways on every arrival. 🎨

Your own landing pad is yours again. Your pad stays reserved while you're up in space, so nobody parks a second ship on top of yours. Except the chooser showed that reservation to you as taken, with your own name under it, and you could only click free pads. So the one pad your ship was standing on was the only one you couldn't land on. It's cyan now, visibly yours, and selectable like any other. 🛬

And the host finally knows what to read out. Open a world and your own join address now sits right there in the top bar — with a Copy button, while the world is still generating. Before, it only turned up in the chat scrollback after worldgen finished, which is exactly where nobody wanted to go looking for it while everyone was waiting. On top of that, the join dialog now suggests 31550 straight away — the port a world hosted from inside the game actually listens on. 🖥

No more water planes hanging in mid-air. Far out, an ocean was only loaded up to a fixed distance above its floor — and the game drew that cut-off as if it were the water's surface. The result: flat panes floating at odd heights, with thin glowing "waterfalls" down their edges. Distant seas are now loaded up to their real waterline. What you see out there is genuinely the surface. 🌊

The world takes a quarter of the memory. Every visible chunk was kept twice — once on the graphics card and once again in main memory — and every corner of every block carried full-precision numbers it never needed. Both are gone or packed: the terrain around you now costs roughly a quarter of what it did. A long session at the largest view distance used to reach 1.8 GB. It all looks exactly the same. 🧠

The worlds portal now speaks all fourteen languages. play.blocksbeyondthestars.de was German and English only — creating an account, making a world, setting a join password, reading the rules. All of it now runs in every language the game itself speaks, picked from the globe at the top of the page. And a first visit lands you in your own. 🌍

And a few more annoyances gone: admin commands only ever read the first word of a player name — anyone with a space in theirs simply didn't exist as far as /tpp and friends were concerned. Now the rest of the line counts, and capitalisation doesn't matter either. Landing back on the same planet you launched from left you standing thousands of blocks from your ship — the touchdown now takes you with it. And the world rule "keep ship when destroyed" was hidden under the buttons at the bottom of the page, which swallowed every click: the newest rule was the one rule nobody could set. 🐛

Invite someone. Press T. This time something actually happens. 🤝✨