Version 2026.8.14 – We went back and checked 🔍

August 14, 2026

The last two updates turned this into a game you play with other people. Then came the question you rarely enjoy asking yourself: do those repairs actually hold — or do we just remember writing them? So we went through every single one again, line by line against the code rather than against our memory. The good news: they all hold. The other news: the walk-through found six places where the new things stopped just short of the finish line. No new features this time — this update makes the last two honest. 🔍

Every pilot fires from their own cockpit. An earlier fix gave each pilot their own flight simulation — but only for collisions and damage. Everything you trigger yourself still measured from whichever ship had last reported its position to the server. With two of you over the same planet that means: a shot at the asteroid right in front of you comes back "out of range", because your wingman happens to be flying far away. And a tractor beam suddenly reaches out from a place you have never been. Firing (range and aim), salvage, tractor, station boarding, building in space and the return spots when docking now all measure from the pilot triggering them. 🛰

The pause really holds now. When everyone pauses the world, the simulation stops — but the server kept accepting whatever players sent it anyway. A normal game sends nothing at all while it sits in the pause menu, which is why nobody noticed. A modified one could have frozen the world for everyone for ten minutes, with hunger switched off and enemies standing still, and quietly kept mining the whole time. Gameplay actions are now turned away at the door while the world is held. Resume, chat, saving and admin commands stay allowed, of course. ⏸️

Watching admins no longer fly into nothing. An observer doesn't block a pause and doesn't count towards one — it's just that the supply of landscape was switched off along with the world. Anyone who kept flying during a pause eventually reached the edge of the loaded world and then the void, for up to ten minutes. Observers keep receiving chunks now. And they no longer take landing pads: an observer landing used to reserve a pad, park a ship and mark the observer as "aboard". 👁

Two things that rarely happen but are unpleasant when they do. On worlds configured without a starter ship, a new player's respawn point could accidentally become the host's healing tank — you'd wake up inside someone else's ship. And if a join failed halfway through, after the ship had already been parked, that ship stayed in the world as an ownerless prop: nobody could fly it, nobody could clear it away. Both sorted. 🧹

And the small stuff: the name tag of a player whose connection stutters now disappears along with them — before, it hung in the air for another three to ten seconds where somebody used to be. The star map no longer claims "pads full" when the last free pad is your own reservation (the landing chooser already had that fix). The number keys when landing take the pad with the number printed on it, rather than the one in that position in the list. And the rate at which the server pushes landscape can no longer outrun the client. ✨

One thing worth knowing: apart from the name tag and the number keys, all of these repairs sit on the server. So for a session at home, the version that matters is the one running on the machine that opened the world. 🖥

Not a spectacular update, this one. But the checking was worth it. 🔍✨